I always have a fun time playing “spot the sample,” but I typically only play that game with hip-hop. Indie samples are rarer and normally so obscure I don’t even recognize them as such. Case in point: El Guincho and his song “Antillas.” However while dancing around to the Spaniard’s track the other night at the street cart Potato Champion, I was given the recommendation to check out the rad blog Awesome Tapes from Africa which coincidentally enough specializes in awesome African mixtapes. Lo and behold the hook in “Antillas” is borrowed from the song “Pelina” by Oriango & Kipchamba. Is everyone commandering African guitar riffs these days? Note to Paul Simon: I’m pinning this trend on you and holding you accountable for Vampire Weekend. Someone has to take the blame…
whoa, nice find. this is great.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:40 pm@Chris
January 17th, 2009 at 9:47 amThanks for the props man but all the credit for this gem goes to Nilina Mason-Campbell, one of our contributors…
I know this post was mostly in jest, but I’d like to point out something. Vampire Weekend maybe the most well-known new band that appropriates African music, but they aren’t the only ones. The band that you covered in your last post, Dirty Projectors, do the same, and David Byrne is as much to blame for this trend as Paul Simon. Remember “I Zimbra”? Besides, Graceland is an awesome album. Only a dour acedemic could consider it colonialist.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:27 pmWell, I disagree Matthew. I think Paul Simon’s Graceland has had a much bigger impact on popular culture than any of David Byrne’s deviations and therefore has been more influential. One, it’s a sound that’s so uniformly associated with Simon, whereas when you talk to people about Byrne’s non-Talking Heads output, you get a variety of genres being tacked to him. But more obviously, it’s how public Simon’s foray into African music has been… the concerts, the apartheid, the subsequent Ladysmith Black Mambazo Lifesavers ads… He really ushered in a lot of exposure for foreign audiences to Africa and its music…
January 18th, 2009 at 6:13 pm