Tinariwen's Rock Of Ages
Source: By David Dacks
Posted: 11/19/07 5:19PM
Filed Under: Music
Anyone who has seen a picture of the Sarahan blues rock band can’t help but marvel at his impressive locks, so reminiscent of Bob Marley circa 1975. Coupled with the vivid attire of the rest of the band—complete with electric guitars heroically slung across bodies, bandolier-style, and archetypal long-focus gazes—Tinariwen have the stone cold rock star stance down pat.
Their music is just as intense as their image with arena rock guitar hooks powered by chugging mid-tempo grooves that go down easy. This is truly rebel music made by actual rebels, with an accessible but hard-driving classic rock sound. On the strength of the music alone, this should be an arena-filling juggernaut in North America—but it’s never just about the music alone.
Tinariwen has hit the glass ceiling of the world music market, where cultural backstories are marketed as much as the music itself, while still largely shut out of mass media as too exotic. Their undeniably exotic appeal has overshadowed the timeless blues rock of their sound, but word is spreading that they’re one of the great bands of the world, period.
Of course, it is difficult, and wrong, to ignore the band’s cultural background and amazing history. They are cultural representatives of the Touareg both by choice and by default. The Touareg are nomads of the Sahara desert who migrate through Mali, Libya, Niger and Algeria. The band’s origins date to the early 80s when unemployed Touareg men, their economy destroyed by fifteen years of drought, were encouraged by Muammar al-Gaddafi to train in Libyan military camps in the hopes of turning them into his mercenaries.
Ibrahim formed a small musical group called Taghreft Tinariwen to entertain the members of the camps. Throughout the 80s, they entertained and informed Touareg populations around the desert, their reputation spread by countless duplicated cassettes. Several members of the band were active participants in the early 90s rebellions against the Malian government until the conflict was finally put to rest in 1996. At that point they turned their attention full time to music.
Since the release of their debut ‘Radio Tisdas Sessions’ in 2001, Tinariwen have toured heavily, but within a very well defined milieu.
They’ve met great resistance from rock radio and press unable to embrace a non-English speaking act, but have forged a career playing world music festivals. They’ve sold 80,000 copies world wide of their third album Aman Iman, which barely registers in terms of pop sales. Naturally, it’s a slow and steady process, but there is also “a comfort zone with people we’ve been working with since 2001” says Andy Morgan, the band’s manager.
“They’re either reluctant, or don’t have the knowledge, or don’t have the spirit of adventure to break out. I’m talking about people in whom we have quite a lot of faith but who work quite happily within this…ghetto, if that’s not too dramatic a term, which has grown up around ‘world music.’ In a way, world music has been fantastically successful as an initiative. In the UK and in many countries there is a very reasonable and adequate circuit of live venues, groups of journalists and one or two radio outlets. That is the comfort zone, but with the collapse of record sales I think everyone is feeling the need to take the blinkers off.”
‘Aman Iman,’ their third effort, is their most rock-oriented record yet with the profound musical influences of Led Zeppelin, Johnny Cash and Santana, which reached them on bootlegged cassettes, in full flight. “That was the general direction we wanted to adopt on this album,” explains veteran member Abdallah Ag-Alhousseyni. “[Producer Justin Adams] managed to strike the right balance between getting a 'big' sound while keeping its soul intact.”
While Morgan works to reach a wider audience, he also makes sure the band knows what it’s up against. “I’ve had conversations with them to explain that they’re considered to be world music and world music is considered to be a minority interest category, this is why they’re not earning hundreds of thousands of bucks yet,” he says. “For every date they do four interviews and TV, so I can understand why they think they should be a hell of a lot richer by now. I have to explain that they’re singing in Tamashek and they’re popular, but in a cultish sort of way.
“For them it’s bizarre to categorized in the same way as Buena Vista Social Club. They don’t feel any affinity with that music.”
But new media sources offer potential to break out of established business patterns. MP3 blogs, social networking, and customer-generated “Recommended If You Like” algorithms in online shopping experiences have produced lateral shifts in taste. These cast a wider net into the music of the world and find new fans for an ever-increasing variety of music. Tinariwen may turn a sparse fan base into a sizable community which, in turn, influences word of mouth. Japanese noise rock and indecipherable Scandinavian black metal are two examples of non-Western rock music gaining traction with rock audiences as a result of new media exposure. Other bands, like gypsy punks Gogol Bordello, have successfully circumvented world music channels while celebrating cultural mashups in their music.
Morgan admits that neither he nor the world music industry has exploited these new tools as much as possible. “The problem with the world music scene, and I count myself among this, is that they’re not really media savvy about Web 2.0. Most of the delegates at (annual World Music Expo) WOMEX use the new media to a certain extent but I don’t think any of us are masters of it, in terms of social networking.”
Nevertheless, alliances with savvy publicists and a network of forward-thinking labels around the world are making headway. In Toronto, where the band is playing November 20, the situation is a compromise—Small World Music, the city’s leading world music promoter, are in charge of putting on the show, but they’ve secured a rock-oriented venue in which to kick out their jams.
Tinariwen are seeing modest results from their heavy workload over the past six years—but is it all worth it? Why bend over backwards to make it in the West when album sales are declining and touring is a long and costly grind? Why not stay closer to home and play lucrative gigs for Trans-Saharan cigarette traffickers, as one ex-member has done?
Abdallah is sanguine about the whirlwind of financial, artistic and cultural concerns that surrounds the band, and strives to maintain his desert-bred implacability. “Our job is to play music and to hold a mirror up to our lives and those of our brothers and sisters. Our definition of success is to remain true to what we are, what we feel, and what we think, whilst at the same time working regularly throughout the world, and selling albums.
“It's strange because when you're in the middle of it all, you never really feel like you've achieved success. You have to stop, and take some distance to realize that.”
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