Listen To 'Aman Iman: Water Is Life'
Even if you do not know the story of Tinariwen, the Tuareg nomads-turned- rock-performers, you can sense their rebel souls in their latest recording Aman Iman: Water is Life. The band made waves throughout the Sahara Desert playing what became the soundtrack for Tuareg independence and reconciliation. And now they are making waves in the American and European rock scenes. The latest buzz echoes their D.I.Y. origins in their barren homeland.
“It was a cassette-to-cassette ghetto-blaster grapevine,” explains Andy Morgan, a U.K. journalist who was so taken with Tinariwen that he became their full-time manager, describing their role in Mali long before Westerners heard their licks. “The audio quality was as atrocious as the message was powerful. It was an electrified sound and thus appealed to a youth that was wrestling with modernity. It was rock’n’roll.”
Tinariwen’s edgy, bluesy sound has earned them fans like Robert Plant and Carlos Santana, whose music inspired Tinariwen’s members when they first picked up guitars. While Plant has dedicated his career to exploring and exploiting the bent blues note he recognizes as African, Tinariwen listened to Led Zeppelin while in military training camps in Algeria. Plant’s guitarist Justin Adams produced the band's latest recording, three years after the two joined Tinariwen and several other bands on the stage of the Festival in the Desert, an annual musical gathering based on a Tuareg tradition in which desert dwellers gather for camel races, sword-fighting displays, and campfire music. Meanwhile, last July, Santana invited Tinariwen to play as part of his “My Blues Is Deep” night at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
“Santana rehearsed the two songs with Tinariwen and it was obvious he knew the album well,” says Morgan. “On stage he was grooving and added some great guitar to it. Then he came to us in the dressing room and said, ‘You came all the way from Africa, it’s a shame to play only two songs. Can you play three more?’”
The lyrics on Aman Iman tell of exile, struggle, and division. The fierce nomadic Tuareg people faced significant limitations and subjugation, first at the hands of French colonizers, and then by the Malian government in the post-colonial era. A resistance movement emerged and the conflicts that ensued led to much bloodshed. Surviving Tuaregs faced displacement, exile, and unemployment, creating a ripe musical crossroads of tradition and rebellion. Tinariwen band members transposed tradition and problems of the day onto electric guitars, singing of their plight as well as of the need to adapt to their changing world.
On “Matadjem Yinmixan,” Ibrahim, who wrote the majority of the songs on the album, sings “Why all this hate between you, which you teach your children? The world looks at you and surpasses your understanding. You who resemble neither a westerner nor an Arab. Your faith in the tribes blinds you to the truth.” The lyrics of “Imidiwan Winakalin” say, “Friends of my country, I live in exile. I fight against my thoughts. I’m losing my grip on the world.”
“Tinariwen has been fighting a battle on two fronts,” explains Morgan. “One is the battle fighting against the Malian government and the political and social oppression and exclusion. The other is the battle within Tuareg society, against a kind of short-sightedness, an ‘inward-lookingness,’ of old traditional society. It’s clear the Tuaregs lost out so badly from independence, because they weren’t hooked into the modern world at all in the ’60s. They didn’t know what was happening to them. Tinariwen is raising awareness about modern life.” On “Mano Dayak,” band member Abdallah clearly credits Dayak, an influential freedom fighter, as one of the people who opened Tuareg society to modern influences.
Tinariwen would like to dedicate 'Aman Iman' to "Peace, tolerance and development in the Sahara and in the world of the oppressed."
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