Guilty Pleasure

The only reason I feel I can post this confession is that I'm pretty sure nobody ever reads this. I have developed a guilty addiction. I'm not proud of this and I can barely admit it to myself, let alone anyone else. Last night I steeled myself, summoned courage I didn't know I had, and I confessed to my wife. It went better than I had feared.

Let me explain how I got here. I discovered a brilliant Dominican composer/performer, Juan Luis Guerra,

on the radio, well into his career, that is, well after he was really, really popular. This was in 1997. The song was Burbujas de Amor and I was blown away. It was quite popular on the Spanish Musica Romantica station in Houston where I was working on a temporary assignment. I heard it several times and once I was sure I understood all the words I realized the lyrics were surreally fanciful and, well, great. Then there was all the percussion and the subtle blending of instruments. It was fantastic. I became an avid fan and collected all of his music. I even studied some of his influences. This isn't so strange when you think about it. A serious Rolling Stones fan might be led to Howlin' Wolf and then to Mississippi John Hurt and then to Blind Willie McTell and so find himself an aficionado of delta blues in short order. Anyway on one of JLG's tracks, El Costo de la Vida, a dance-able protest song, if you can dance, which I can't, the composer credit was shared with Diblo Dibala. It turns out Google knows Diblo Dibala.

That led me quite naturally to an exploration and appreciation of (primarily Congolese) Soukous. As an aside, I feel disappointed in myself (nothing like the guilty pleasure admission but I had always thought of myself as cooler than it turns out I am) that I missed the whole Soukous scene in the 1980's. I mean, I was even in Africa!. Anyway, here's where Google, and especially through their YouTube avatar, comes in. I searched for various examples of Diblo Dibala, then his seminal group, Loketo. YouTube has suggestions on the side and one of those was another Soukous group, Soukous Super Stars, doing a song called Sina Makosa. That, in turn led me to the original group, Les Wanyika, doing the same song. That moved me across the continent and got me going on East African (mostly Kenyan and Tanzanian) music. I discovered a Tanzanian remix of Sina Makosa by James Dandu.

YouTube thought if I liked that, maybe I'd like another Tanzanian group, FM Academia. I did. Well, they said, if you like that, maybe you'd like this. I think maybe it was the dancers in the videos. Who knows?

Now here's where it gets a little dicey. I was raised with no religion. Well, if you think communism is a religion then I was raised with that. But the closest I ever got to religious indoctrination was daily prayer in the 1st and 2nd grades before it was outlawed. My exposure to the religion of my ancestors was almost entirely through The Pictorial History of the Jewish People.  That meant that I knew as much about Hebrew Mythology as I did about Greek Mythology. All I knew about Christianity was pogroms, crusades, and, as I said, school prayer.

So, it is a matter of some personal shame that I find myself fascinated with and a little addicted to Tanzanian gospel music. Not all of it, of course, and it certainly helps that I don't understand any Swahili. But still, I do get the idea and I'm not proud of myself. It's my guilty pleasure.