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I really enjoy this music. The loping, sometimes irregular rhythms, the constant, pulsating vocal drones, and of course the singing of Fadimoutou Wallet Inamoud. It is beautiful and it's hypnotic, just as the blurb on Bandcamp says. I would recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone with the slightest interest in minimal, repetitive music, and some kinds of "world music" fans.

- So it’s good, isn’t it?

- Yes, it's great.

and

- I don't know.

I mean, I don't know how it compares to any other music of this kind. This is the one and only "isswat" music (the meaning of "isswat” is "music") I've ever heard. It's not just that I don't know how is it compared to any other music of this kind, I don't even know the appropriate terms of that comparison. Is, say, "originality" an appropriate measurement here? I'm not even sure that when I say it's "hypnotic", I'm not applying a term that is totally mistaken, alien to its original intent.

But of course it's great. I listened to it many times, so Bandcamp gently reminded me to buy it, which I did.

Everyone who had spent enough time with music witnessed some of his/her beloved underground genre to “cross over” to the mainstream, and probably thought something like: "Hey, this is not good. People just think it is. What they deem to be good about it is only a bad, watered-down replica of the original. They enjoy it only because they don't know what I know."

If you've ever thought something like that, you know that there's a gap between "I like it" and "it's good". (Or there should be a gap. Or there is, but some people just don't acknowledge that. (Or they acknowledge that in certain fields, say, in "high art", but not in others, say, in "popular music".)) I don’t say there's any kind of "objective value" in music, just that there's a difference between immediate reaction and an informed judgement.

Furthermore, it's not just a question of knowledge, but also of trust. I may dare to call this music "good" based on the trust I have in the Sahel Sounds label, trusting them not to sell me an average product as great just because I can't tell the difference. And this trust is basically earned by their "brand": I find their mission of presenting "real" music of the Sahel region (as opposed to the "world music for Western ears") really important and appealing. With all of their other releases, I have no way of fact-checking, say, that how much this most famous release of theirs is a "real" representation from Saharan cellphones.

You may not notice, but some kind of trust is essential to any of your judgements. You may think that EDM is shit compared to "real dance music", and if asked "how do you know real dance music", you will cite the important parties you've been to, the important records you heard etc. But "important" here is a very loaded word. Importance is conferred on a thing (party, record etc.) by a network of different institutions, from music mags to "cool" people (= people with lots of cultural capital) etc.

Have you read anything along the lines of "white upper-class males decide what is Rock, excluding anything that could be really dangerous to the status quo"? Yes, you have, and even if you don’t agree, it's surely not the wildest conspiracy theory out there. So this network of institutions we implicitly rely upon when making a judgement are far from infallible. But we don't have any other way.

We may decide which institutions we will trust from the competing networks, or we may try to establish new ones, but some kind of a blind trust in received knowledge will always be in play when you say: "yes, I know this is good."

#Fadimoutou Wallet Inamoud #sahel sounds #isswat #trust #world music