Last week, between snow shovelling, I posted a little blog with a video of an interesting cover of Outcast's Hey Ya, by Obidiah Parker. While shuffling around youtube for the link, I happened upon some African pop videos, and got arrested by Nneka Lucia Egbuna. According to her Wikipedia biography, Nneka was raised in Warri, a petroleum ("resource curse") pothole turned "cosmopolitan city" of 312,000 in the delta of Southern Nigeria.
Nneka grew up in Nigeria, but went to university in Hamburg at 18... a big cultural gulf. In the theme of gangstagrass / cultural melting pots and urban music, I listened to several of the songs on her "Soul is Heavy" album last night and this morning.
I'm posting more about Nneka for two reasons. First, I like a couple of her songs a lot, especially the title track of Soul is Heavy (which I posted below the Outcast cover). It was only when I listened/watched the video a second time that I realized the background of the chorus "teach me lies" is adorned with old African television sets.
I don't pretend to know Nneka's position on the Interpol crackdown vs. the "geeks of color" whose cause I've embraced, but in a second video, "My Home", she poses as two things - a conflict metal gold mining worker (the place Western mercury from recycling programs gets sold, for alleuvial gold mining) and then a city trash worker (I presume in Lagos, wearing .A.W.M.A- LAGOS STATE WASTE MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY, on an orange PPE - personal protective equipment uniform). Damn. Must watch.
Below... at least watch through the coltan mining and public solid waste worker shots.
That's a pretty good snapshot of what's going on in Africa. Junk televisions rank about as high on Africa's priority list as they did in the USA and Europe in 1990. The "e-waste export crisis" makes as much sense as the Radiator-Aid humorous videos. Recycling stereotype after stereotype.
(*Much more to come, in a future blog, about the RustyRadiator.com project). RustyRadiator project is another northern-Europe / African collaboration, like Nneka, whose moniker reminds me of the #1 hit 30 years ago, when I boarded the flight to Africa to start my Peace Corps career (give up? Nena - of Germany - 99 Luftballoons but that is a "punctuation level digression", or "third level digression" sorry... I've lost a lot of readers on those turns.... end digression*).
Nneka grew up in Nigeria, but went to university in Hamburg at 18... a big cultural gulf. In the theme of gangstagrass / cultural melting pots and urban music, I listened to several of the songs on her "Soul is Heavy" album last night and this morning.
I'm posting more about Nneka for two reasons. First, I like a couple of her songs a lot, especially the title track of Soul is Heavy (which I posted below the Outcast cover). It was only when I listened/watched the video a second time that I realized the background of the chorus "teach me lies" is adorned with old African television sets.
I don't pretend to know Nneka's position on the Interpol crackdown vs. the "geeks of color" whose cause I've embraced, but in a second video, "My Home", she poses as two things - a conflict metal gold mining worker (the place Western mercury from recycling programs gets sold, for alleuvial gold mining) and then a city trash worker (I presume in Lagos, wearing .A.W.M.A- LAGOS STATE WASTE MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY, on an orange PPE - personal protective equipment uniform). Damn. Must watch.
Below... at least watch through the coltan mining and public solid waste worker shots.
That's a pretty good snapshot of what's going on in Africa. Junk televisions rank about as high on Africa's priority list as they did in the USA and Europe in 1990. The "e-waste export crisis" makes as much sense as the Radiator-Aid humorous videos. Recycling stereotype after stereotype.
(*Much more to come, in a future blog, about the RustyRadiator.com project). RustyRadiator project is another northern-Europe / African collaboration, like Nneka, whose moniker reminds me of the #1 hit 30 years ago, when I boarded the flight to Africa to start my Peace Corps career (give up? Nena - of Germany - 99 Luftballoons but that is a "punctuation level digression", or "third level digression" sorry... I've lost a lot of readers on those turns.... end digression*).
