global shoop shoop

The sheer volume of thrilling global music that shows up monthly on eMusic is enough to make me want to skip sleeping for good and just stay up all night with headphones on. While it’s always a thrill to see titles from old favorites like Asha Bhosle, Fela Kuti or Thomas Mapfumo, I’m more intrigued by the albums that show up on trusted labels with no context or backstory. A few months ago we got the compilation The Guitar & the Gun on the unbeatable Earthworks label (we got it again a few months later on the much smaller Africagram), and it took roughly ten seconds of the first track to completely peel back the top of my skull.

I know nothing about the Genesis Gospel Singers, except that their contribution to Guitar, “Momma Mo Akoma Ntutu,” is four solid minutes of amazing. It’s got the sway and shoop of the Shangri-La’s or the The Shirelles, all upswinging harmonies, loping bass, and shuffling percussion. Its title means “Let My Heart Be Cool,” which is perfect given the levels of ‘cool’ that this thing radiates. It’s designed to be looped — when you get to the end, all you want to do is start back over at the beginning again. Someone I passed the track along to claims to have listened to it for two hours straight one night — it’s that kind of song.

It took me until today to realize we had a whole album of GGG classics. It never even occurred to me to look because I just assumed that they were a forgotten footnote in Afropop. Then I found this BBC piece, which describes them as Africa’s “most popular band of the [80's].” In other words, I’m an idiot.

The full-length is warm and charming, and it has its strong points (”Okwambi,” with its squelching organ and chatta-chatta vocal runs, is one), but none of them quite match the bright-eyed, springtime beauty of “Momma Mo Akoma Ntutu.” I’ve listened to it ten times in a row just writing this.