Word: mariam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pulled off a bus at the checkpoint while their luggage continued on to Gaza. Last year, the couple said they had tried to enter the territory through Erez. They made it into Israel, but were denied entry to Gaza. "I don't want to move back to Gaza," says Mariam Khalil El Frani, 62, who has lived in Spain for 26 years. "But my family is there. My mother is 85 years old. I just want to see them...
...blind thing is certainly played for effect--just not the effect you might anticipate. Almost since their first meeting, in 1976 as students at Bamako's Institute for Young Blind People, Amadou and Mariam have billed themselves as the Blind Couple of Mali, and if the lack of an exclamation point reads as restraint, factor in that they often perform in diamond-studded sunglasses. Faced with a world that tends to view blindness and African-ness in tragic terms, Amadou Bagayoko (he plays a killer guitar) and Mariam Doumbia (she sings like an adoring aunt) go out of their...
...understand just how great, listen to the pair's fifth album, Welcome to Mali, out March 24. Following up on their 2005 breakthrough, Dimanche à Bamako, which was produced by France-raised Spaniard Manu Chao and topped critics' lists worldwide, Amadou and Mariam recruited another international rock star, Brit Damon Albarn, for a cameo. What Albarn brings is an opener, "Sabali," so light and giddy that no translation is required to get that Mariam is whisper-singing about love. The swirling keyboards and gradually rising dance beat are pure '80s pop, sweeter than cheap champagne--but with soul...
From there, Welcome to Mali becomes a more standard Amadou and Mariam affair, which is to say it's a joyous, hook-filled guitar album with impressive range. Amadou grew up as the biggest Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple fan in Bamako, and while he knows how to mimic the sounds of a kora and slip into high-stepping township jive, he's most at home using African styles to flavor rock melodies. "Ce N'Est Pas Bon" is stomping garage rock, while "Bozos" could be a particularly happy Neil Young song. Everything has a familiar pop structure, but there...
Amadou and Mariam's lyrics tend toward uncontroversial declarations like "Hypocrisy in politics, it's not good/ We don't want any." (It's possible the lyric sheet was simplified in the translation from Bambara and French; it's also possible they're just casual lyricists.) The exception, linguistically, is "I Follow You," sung by Amadou to his wife in tender, halting English: "Under the sun, baby, I follow you/ Under the ground, baby, I follow you." As Amadou told a British music magazine, "We would like English-speaking people to understand us. It's not a large vocabulary...