26. Miriam Makeba - Miriam Makeba (1960)

1. The Retreat Song*

2. Suliram 

3. The Click Song*

4. Umhome

5. Olilili

6. Lakutshn, Llanga

7. Mbube*

8. The Naughty Little Flea

9. Where Does It Lead

10. Nomeva

11. House of the Rising Sun

12. Saduva

13. One More Dance

14. Iya Guduza

B

So before I started this project I knew nothing at all about Miriam Makeba. Upon reading her Wikipedia page I discovered that she was actually quite an interesting and important woman. She introduced African music to the West, was a tireless civil rights activist, and became the Queen of Afropop, known simply as "Mama Afrika". All of which is pretty impressive. What isn't impressive is this album. 

Now I knew starting this that there would be albums I didn't like for purely personal reasons. You can't expect a person to like every kind of music. And this couldn't be further from the sort of music that I habitually listen to. In fact it would be fair to say that I dislike South African music in general. I can't stand Soweto, for example, and I have never made it all the way through Paul Simon's Graceland. So that's on me I suppose. Can't be helped.

Ironically, the African songs on this album are the ones I liked the best. "The Click Song" and "Mbube" are big, rhythmic numbers and tremendous fun. And I liked "Umhome", which is an unaccompanied vocal piece which really shows off the awesome power of Makeba's voice. No, I may have reservations about African pop music, but what really lets this album down are the songs in English. "Where Does It Lead", a sort of folk ballad with bass and guitar accompaniment, is nice enough at first but doesn't really go anywhere. "The Naughty Little Flea" is a calypso number but basically just a stupid novelty song. Makeba's version of "House of the Rising Sun" is completely bloodless, and drops several verses, and is really just a poorly conceived attempt from start to finish. But the song that really pissed me off was "One More Dance", which is one of the most annoying things I've ever heard. It's a stupid song to begin with, but it's made worse by being a duet with a man who can't stop laughing. It's fucking terrible.

So I would recommend this album, but warn people that it is kind of a mixed bag. The range of styles Makeba attempts - traditional African, South African pop, calypso, folk, jazz, Indonesian lullaby, and Western pop - is pretty damned impressive, but unfortunately not all the experiments succeed. I guess there's also the problem of the non-English numbers often being most interesting for their novelty. I mean, I don't speak the language, and as a consequence have no idea what they're about, and so can only judge them as interesting and exotic pieces of music. So I don't know.

I wanted to like this more, and I did really enjoy many of the songs, but it's really just not my thing.