Desert Blues

You know how you can tell you're getting old? You like world music, all of a sudden! (This is not to say that people -- Ruxzs, cough -- who've liked world music all along are old, or wrong. Maybe they were right, actually, or at least, better than me.) It's funny how my patience for some things has increased (guys singing in languages I don't understand, or in the case of jazz not singing at all) while others have decreased (I can't imagine lasting through all the bands at SXSW anymore; hell, two bands is a struggle now).

Well, last night April and I went to the Tinariwen show at the Palace of Fine Arts. Dang, that was some hot shit. How hot? Sahara hot. Okay, so the band's from Mali, so that was an easy reference. But what a blazing hot story: They were nomads forced from their land by a despotic regime, only to meet up in a training camp for rebels in Libya and then fight in Mali's 1990s revolution (which, sadly, is sort of still going on, even though thousands of rebels turned in their guns at one point, leading to a artillery bonfire; can you see that happening in the states?). Having seen them, it's kind of hard envisioning them as fighters -- they were just so nice and sweet. And, according to this article in the Observer Music Monthly, they're very unmacho when it comes to marital rights: in the case of divorce, the women get to keep the tent.

Anyway, they ruled. So much so that the 60-year-old ladies stood up in their seats and began to dance. It was hard not to. Check this live video out and see if it doesn’t move you.

April wanted to get up and join the hippie dancers and old ladies, especially after she saw the tall dude doing the Snoop Dogg moves, but there was no way I was going to do it, which made her feel self-conscious. Maybe in 20 years it'll be different. Or if Peter Coyote, who was two rows in front of us, did it first.

And just to show I still love the twee stuff, here's a new video by the Slow Club.