85: Nyboma // Doublé doublé
Doublé doublé Nyboma 1981, Maikano
One of my local record shops has a bin of African LPs labelled “Our supplier in Benin,” which is a wonderfully specific attribution. I would love to have a Man in Belize, a Backer in Brunei. (I’d even take a Woman in Longueuil.) The owner was contacted by a record store clerk who offered an interesting proposal: the Montreal shop would send along its common-as-dirt western pop records (your Eltons, your Streisands, your James Taylors), and their Beninese counterpart would send their own equivalent local basics. A win-win, especially for slavering Afro-pop simps like myself, who get trembly at the very sight of sleeves with school picture day-quality photos of people in killer leisure suits over bright solid-coloured backgrounds with a load of text in a foreign language.
Nyboma is one of the bigger soukous stars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a songwriter and tenor singer who has been performing for over half a century. Unlike a few of the African singers in my collection, he’s easy to find info on, and even a few lyrics—in fact, 1981’s “‘Doublé doublé’” is enough of a classic that there’s a video from this decade with over 6.4 million views of cats dancing to it at a wedding like it’s “The Electric Slide”:
When I reviewed an Empire Bakuba record a few months back, the group led by Nyboma’s frequent collaborator Pepe Kalle (that’s him introing the video above), I wrote a summary of the soukous genre for the unfamiliar that I’ll recycle here:
“A Congolese form, marked by giddy rhythms and sugarcane guitar improvisation, usually led by a charismatic vocalist who doubles as a hype man. With roots in American R&B and Cuban rumba, it’s a kind of pan-Black form of music—and yet, the guitar style is also faintly reminiscent of bluegrass, a genre whose Black roots are a bit further removed.”
Nyboma’s tenor is high enough it could easily be taken as a woman’s voice and he has a smoother touch in general than Kalle does—he’s not calling out dance moves or doing crowd work. He’s cut from the same angelic stuff as that super-clean soukous guitar tone, the part of “‘Doublé doublé’” that would give a no-dancing township pause despite the obviously [dogwhistle adjective] rhythms. The rumba roots show through pretty strongly in Nyboma’s music, too, which verges on calypso at times. The highlight of the LP is “Papy Sodolo,” a floating down the river sort of number with a languid guitar lead that makes me think of Les Paul wearing water wings.
85/365
