Word: rocks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...west African country of Senegal, many of whom - like Cheihk Lo, Baaba Maal and the peerless N'Dour - have become staples for any self-respecting world music fan in the West. But Kane is different. Less traditional but not quite "Western," he mixes soul and Malian blues with rock tunes on a Moroccan three-stringed guitar known as the guimbri. One London-based music critic described Kane's eclectic sound as "evocative of a kind of pan-Saharan Velvet Underground...
...When Kane sings his tune "Goree," he switches from traditional Senegalese rock n' roll, called mbalax, to Deep South blues, replete with throaty intonations in the style of B.B. King. Goree is an island off the coast of Dakar where slaves were kept before being shipped off to the New World. Nowadays it survives as a popular tourist attraction, particularly for African-Americans looking to retrace their heritage. A contrarian by nature, Kane makes the point that the blues originated in west Africa before crossing the Middle Passage to America...
...past ten years, Beirut has been home to a small but artistically significant rock scene, where a handful of bands with names like Soap Kills, the New Government and, of course, Scrambled Eggs, have tried to put this tiny country on the musical map for something other than sexy Arab pop divas. As such, they've been part of a creative subculture of artists, architects, and designers who've tried to reconcile Eastern and Western cultural forms, as well as tradition with modernity...
...foreign visitor might find it strange to find a rock subculture in the Middle East, but Haber, a former Catholic schoolboy, sees a similarity between rock's golden age during the 1950s and 1960s in America, and the Middle East today - sexually repressed conservative societies dominated by religion and an ideological cold war. Interviewed last week at the band's studio in Gemmayze, a formerly working-class neighborhood of garages and crumbling townhouses that's become ground zero for Beirut's young and restless, Haber places the Beirut rock scene in a wider Mideast cultural context...
...Rock and freedom - if not necessarily sex and drugs - got a big boost in Lebanon in 2005, during what outsiders called the Cedar Revolution, when huge crowds gathered in central Beirut to demand an end to the Syrian occupation and an end to the country's sectarian divisions. But the creative and intellectual frenzy that accompanied the Syrian withdrawal was cut short after the country's ruling sectarian political class co-opted the Cedar Revolution, and turned Lebanon into battlefield between regional superpowers. Spurred by last summer's war with Israel and by the current struggle between Iran...