TDLR:
I love the BM music threads, and I found this band through a poster (you might be able to guess who) mentioning them a couple of years back. It’s not traditional rock music as we generally understand it, but I like it because it grooves and subtly rocks at the same time. It superficially appears to highlight our differences but when you get down into it, to me, it exposes our common humanity.
Tinariwen – Aman Iman
This nomination is in effect a love letter to the Blue Moon music threads, so it’s appropriate that this morning’s discussion between Belfry and Coatigan turned out to be quite prescient. This nomination is by a band who I would not have encountered or be playing were it not for this forum and the discourse that takes place.
A long time ago I used to seek out music all sorts of music including what is rather cringingly referred to as ‘world music’ and I would often be the person who suggested we went to see the obscure Angolan duo in a small venue for a tenner. Maybe I was being a pretentious twat or maybe I just liked new things. Either way, at some point life pivoted as it does and I was more likely to find myself singing ‘Can we fix it?’ as I was to be phonetically mangling some lyrics from an African Portuguese dialect. I already had a decent and varied collection of music so what’s the problem with just listening to what I’ve got? Well, the problem was missing out on discovering new things which to me is one of the joys of music and life in general. Nonetheless I got stuck in my musical rut.
But then, after years of simply lurking I got an account on BM, and I found myself gravitating to the music threads as much as I did the football ones. I’d never stopped listening to music, but it’s fair to say this forum reignited my love of music and specifically my curiosity.
This pick is a case in point. I’m not very versed in rock beyond the basics and beyond liking a bit of Queens of The Stone Age I had little view on stoner/desert rock let alone the bands in and around the scene but my interest was piqued by one of the threads and particularly I liked that though the whole sub-genre was pleasingly vague more often than not bands had some elements of the groove that I like in music outside of rock. So, I started having a bit of a nose about and then one day in the playlist thread there was a tangential comment about desert rock vs. desert blues and Coatigan suggested the band Tinariwen as one to look at, further endorsed by OOB6.
Before we get to the album, this is far from the only band this forum has introduced or reintroduced me to. Beyond a smaller core of posters, whose contributions on music I look out for because I know they will point me at something I find interesting, I can honestly say hand on heart that every single regular nominator on this album thread has put up music that I have enjoyed and got some real pleasure from. I know this because I’ve looked at the index and there isn’t a poster who I haven’t enjoyed at least one of their nominations. Whether it was prodding me into realising I’d previously underestimated Tindersticks; convincing me that Huey Lewis had some music worth listening to; just reminding me that Mark Hollis was brilliant or introducing me to the horizontally laid-back delights of JJ Cale or one of a multitude of other gems I thank you one and all.
Anyway, why this band and album? Well apart from the obvious that I really enjoy the music, I think it fits very well with this thread primarily because there’s lots to discuss!
Most obviously, the lyrics aren’t English so there’s that old question of how much and in which contexts do they matter? Just this morning Belfry mentioned being unable to understand the phrasing in some Islamic music he heard, well here we broadly are again! Atypically for me, I quite like it in this pick (and similar) for two reasons:
- When you delve into the lyrics they are often about the struggle and oppression of the Tuareg people which is a double-edged sword because Tuareg history and its caste system and aspects of slavery show things are a bit more complicated than the romanticised image we might initially see of some guitar welding Berbers. Helpfully, despite the general themes, Tinariwen themselves steer clear of anything controversial and are more sinned against. Nonetheless I’m quite happy to mumble along with approximations to the words without too much understanding because it’s not a rathole I want to go down.
- But much more importantly this leaves more of my brain free to concentrate/tune in on the music, this is good because musically this is not wholly what my western brain is used to!
Some of the musical conventions we take for granted don’t exist on this record and that to me is a very enjoyable thing about it. I like a nice chord progression as much as the next person, but not everything needs to be going somewhere definitive or resolve the way we are used to. This is mostly modal music so there’s not the harmonic story we’re used to hearing but equally that then gives it a real sense of mood, a proper vibe. Sometimes it’s good to move through the flower beds, other times it’s just satisfying to dig a deeper and deeper hole in the same spot.
Similarly, though I enjoy our traditional formats like discrete lead and rhythm guitars, on this album I really like the interplay call and response approach used in the music. Especially when the call and response guitars ultimately resolve themselves into a kind of interlocking groove. I also like the mix of conventional bass with a kind of droning approach that underpins everything with a kind of hypnotic quality.
Yet despite being different in several ways it still shares traits and goals with what we normally listen to. After I’d listened to them initially via the playlist thread, I never did get round to expressing my view that it has more in common with desert rock than might meet they eye. Greenleaf might have throbbed whereas this pulses but to me they both create a similar state of mind, they just get their hooks into our brains via different routes.
Circling back to the lyrics, despite their alien nature there’s still comparables in the western music I listen to. I tend to think of the voices on here as ‘just’ another instrument, which is exactly what I do on the New Order tracks where Barney’s lyric writing approach consists of spouting sonically appropriate gibberish.
Tinariwen themselves are more of a collective than a band and to me, though it’s obviously commercialised, it still invokes ideas of music in its purer form – as a form of communal creativity that brings people together. It has a spontaneous feeling and especially when the chanting and bits of ululating kick in there’s a feeling of immediacy that I really like. At the risk of sounding like Max Bygraves, the handclaps remind me that West and Central Africa is probably the wellspring of the syncopation we love in other forms of music and similarly the use of polyrhythms remind me that they have been around long before the likes of Miles Davis or King Crimson. It reminds me that music is just a reflection of humanity, a single tree and that to focus on ‘our’ branch is to sometimes forget that we all come from the same root.
One of the other Tinariwen albums I could have nominated was made in the Joshua Tree national park after the band had fled unrest in Mali and it would have sounded a bit more familiar to rock fans. Similarly, one of the other artists on my shortlist were Mdou Moctar which is basically a fusion of desert rock and blues. But I decide to stick with this album because it was the first I listened to that got me into this particular area and it remains a favourite. As someone who is more inclined to wiggle his bum than nod or bang his head, I like that it I can actually do both to this. We are so used to listening to stuff written to specific formulas that we sometimes miss the alternatives; though this is a break from some of those formulas, I hope it’s not so alien that it alienates.
So again, thanks one and all for reinvigorating my love of music. I hope you find this an interesting pick and if the answer turns out to be no “it’s just droning shite as opposed to the normal shite” then that’s still in keeping with thread tradition too!
