Word: listened
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...jacaranda-shaded streets tucked amid the granite outcrops of the country's lush Eastern Highlands. In Queen's Hall, the revelers dance across a floor sticky with spilled lager, lost in the thump of the drums, the brassy blare of the horns and the hypnotic spell of the lyrics. Listen. What you hear isn't just Mapfumo's rasp through an amplifier. Mapfumo is the amplifier. "He is the voice of the people," says Ephraim, a businessman. Despite the police, who watch, arms folded, the onlookers sing - no, shout - things they wouldn't dare say. The biggest singalong moment comes...
...Thompson Tsodzo, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture, admits the strategies are futile. "The government can't control music," he says. Artists like Mapfumo will be heard - on tapes copied until they're frayed, on short-wave radio, in bars and beerhalls. "Ministers had better listen," says Tsodzo. "Musicians are voicing what the people are saying." Mapfumo's latest album, Toi Toi, was released three weeks ago in Zimbabwe. The sounds are familiar - melodic mbira, twangy guitars, Big Band brass. The name comes from a type of protest music, but Mapfumo's manager, Cuthbert Chiromo, says...
...really differentiate between a violin, or percussion, or emceeing…I just see them as different sounds all in a sort of hot pot,” Vadim says. “There’s elements of all kinds of stuff in my music, because I listen to everything, from reggae, to rap, to hip hop, to soul, to funk, to jazz, to ethnic music...
...look at music as something that is timeless, something beautiful,” he says. “I want to be one of those artists that people will listen to in 30 years’ time…just like people listen back to Jimi Hendrix, or Miles Davis or Black Sabbath. They still live on. You got groups coming out now, like Ronan Keating, S Club 7, Spice Girls…that everybody’s going to forget about in six months’ time...
...Envy—not an album with just 12 beats and 12 collaborative emcees that people will just forget,” he says. “I’m not trying to make beats; I’m trying to make songs, stuff that you can listen to not once or twice, but hopefully many times, each time discovering new things, new sounds within the structure...