Desert Blues

I started following world news in high school so I could get better at quiz bowl. Early (around 2011) I read about rebels fighting in the Western Sahara Desert representing a group called the “Tuareg”. Soon after, conservative Islamic forces co-opted the rebellion, the fight stalled, and the region faded from my regular awareness.

Until recently some of the most incredible music I’ve ever heard entered my life, the Desert Blues.

——

The blues was born in large part from the music of Africans enslaved in the Southern US and their descendants, then turned into a world phenomenon as electric guitars brought a distinctive new sound with roar and wail. The blues captured the globe, and then merged with older Saharan musical traditions. The result is the Desert Blues.

The Desert Blues has evolved through musicians of every Saharan ethnicity. And the stuff I gravitated towards most became that made by Tuareg rockers. 

The “Tuareg” are not one group, rather a large collection of historically nomadic tribes. Used to crossing an unforgiving desert, they now navigate a much deadlier problem - a dozen country borders drawn up by their former colonizers. Within each, the Tuareg share citizenship alongside other ethnic groups.

These people and the Tuareg sometimes share centuries of difficult history, soaked with humanity’s usual weaknesses - race, slavery, gender inequality, and religious prejudice, which Western meddling through colonialism and the subsequent “liberation” has lit ablaze into decades-long conflicts. All of this is essential to the Tuareg’s take on Desert Blues.

Tinariwen was the first band that captured my ears. Their first members met in mercenary work, a result of desperate circumstances at home. Like other Tuareg artists, they play guitar with a style known as assouf, a word from their language Tamashek, whose definition, like the Danish hygge, can’t easily be captured in English:

“Longing, loneliness, nostalgia-- in the liner notes of Tinariwen's Aman Iman album, an unnamed nomad is paraphrased saying that assouf is everything that lies in the darkness beyond the light of the campfire.”

Tinariwen’s music gripped me, creating a feeling that somewhere, beyond the light of the campfire of my own senses, something, or someone, was watching me, or reaching out to me. Tinariwen’s album Elwan is the closest I’ve come to truly sensing a fourth dimension. I was hooked on Desert Blues.

With the door opened, eventually another artist, Mdou Moctar axed his way through a couple months ago. Playing with a pick-less style that leads his middle and ring fingers to carve a little heart into the finish of his electric guitar, Mahamadou Souleymane (shortened to Mdou, with Moctar meaning “The Chosen”) might be the greatest guitarist in Africa, and the world, today.

You couldn’t make up Mdou Moctar’s story if you gave a dozen label execs a pound of hash and a lifetime of literary sensibility. Mdou’s conservative family forbade his playing rock music. He had to create his first guitar, with 5 strings, using a small box and the brake line of a bicycle.

The rare and unique skill that grew out of his unique origin was so recognizable that a label exec flew to Niger and tooled around for days on a motorcycle with a left-handed guitar strapped to his back as a gift.

Mdou’s personal gravity and artistic mind carried him into a leading role in the first-ever Tuareg language feature film, Rain the Color of Blue With A Little Red In It, which reimagines then transplants the plot of Prince’s Purple Rain to the streets of Agadez, Niger. Why that title? Apparently Tamashek has no word for purple.

Mdou’s mind is as critical as it is creative. The West mostly follows a “set it and forget it” Saharan policy. These days, the major Western powers mostly get involved when they decide that lethal aid is needed to quell local violence that threatens key exports (or if the US sniffs anyone related to al-Qaeda in the region). Moctar reflects:

“It’s modern slavery, racism, and colonialism combined.…We don’t have the technology here in Niger to manufacture weapons, so how are they entering the country? Why are other nations storing tools of war on our land?”

In the same interview, he calls out local inter-group conflict, racism within the Tuareg between tribes of different skin colors, as well as the lack of equal opportunity for women. During the pandemic, he’s tried to build wells in rural communities who have had water shut off or otherwise restricted by their governments.

There is nothing on this planet that Mdou Moctar cannot do, and he’s just getting started.

I recently discovered that Mdou would be playing a concert in Detroit, Michigan on my birthday of all days. So I hit up his show with my childhood friend Simon (who introduced me to Tinariwen). The show did not disappoint.

During one of the very sparse lulls in his set, someone shouted “Vive le Tuareg”. Mdou heard this and cracked a smile.

Listening to the Desert Blues and diving into learning about the events and the people who created it has educated me about this part of the world in a way that my little “current events” emails in high school never could.

And while weaponized drones patrol the skies above the Sahara, hopelessly firing away at the symptoms of a human tragedy, Mdou Moctar patrols the airwaves. Every day he claims more ears, hearts, and minds, with guitar solos that have enough firepower to melt your face.

I know which campaign will be more successful.