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Album review
Massilia Sound System
Troubadour folklore from Marseilles, Africa and Brazil.
Marseilles
31/10/2002 -
The five crazy members of Marseilles's Massilia Sound System are back in the music news with a vibrant eleventh album, Occitanista. Cooking up a festive 'bouillabaisse' melting pot of catchy samples, hot reggae beats and humorous street improvisations, the modern folk fivesome explore the cultural connections between Kingston, Marseilles, Toulouse, Guinea and Brazil!
As the five members of Massilia have never found an adequate French translation for "sound system", they continue to classify their original brand of Occitan "ragga baletti" under the Jamaican heading. But while they continue to explore the links between reggae rhythms and their Provençal roots, the group's new album broadens the concept of Occitanista, opening the fivesome's catchy folk/dub sound to traditional troubadour music from Africa and Brazil (courtesy of guest contributions from La Talvera, Dupain, Raspigaous, Lénine, Naçao Zumbi and the Repentistas, as local street "improvisers" are known in Brazil).Occitanista also features a healthy dose of electronic beats mixed with the sound of traditional instruments such as tambourins, mandolines and berimbaus – not to mention the African kora played by Senegalese Soriba Kouyaté and some superb vocals from Guinean Hadja Kouyaté (who, after having collaborated with French electro wizard Frédéric Galliano, lays her vocals over some snappy ragga beats). Meanwhile, the Massilia Sound System retain their collective verve and militant vision, citing F.M. Castan's philosophy that "People are not the product of a given region, but the product of the actions they perform there." And it's this regional commitment that has motivated Massilia for the past thirteen years, engendering almost a dozen albums to date!
Massilia Sound System seem to spend a lot of time on the road. There's barely a week that goes by without one of you picking up a mike to perform with a sound system or local group. How do you find the time to put out so many albums?
I don't know really… Basically, I think it's because we feel we have to work on a daily basis. The fact that what we're trying to attain in our career is the status of modern 'folk' singers means we have to put a lot of work into creating a 'folk' reality, because that's something that no longer exists these days… And I guess that's what drives us forward and means there's rarely a day without a break. Staring at a blank page is not the Massilia way of life, you know... There's always something lying around half-written. The thing is, maybe our grandchildren won't ever know the folklore we're trying to put across in our work. So we feel if we want to transmit it to the next generation our work's never over, there's always something new to get down. We never function on the basis of 'OK, now let's sit down and rack our brains so we can come up with a new album!' But there are moments when we take a break and relax, yes.
The way we see things, an album is something which bears witness to a state of mind, the way things are at a given moment, but it's not all that important because for us an album is just another stepping-stone on our journey. Every now and then we might pause for a rest and see that we've gone X kilometres, but we never have those big existential crises where we sit down and go 'Oh God, what are we going to sing about next?'
But you do get together to work on the texts and the music, don't you?
You know, this notion of working on the basis of a 'text' or without a 'text' just doesn't exist for us, you know. We don't write; we sing! OK, so sometimes you have to sit back and think about how a song will work, whether it's gonna go down well with your mother or son, for instance. Those are the kind of questions we ask ourselves. And that means that every now and then you have to read back over the lyrics to decide what's ephemeral and what can strike a chord with everyone…
The thing is, we work all year round. We're in the studio every day from 10 in the morning, so it's pretty hard to say what 'method' we use to write our songs! I honestly don't think we have a method as such. It's often the vocals themselves which point us in a certain direction. One of us will turn up in the studio in the morning with a couple of lines and they happen to fit in with something someone else has done. But sometimes it can be the other way round – the DJ might turn up with one hell of a rhythm and we'll listen to that and just get carried away! We're not the sort of group who lock ourselves away in the studio for three weeks and go 'OK, now we've got to make an album!' Our general orientation was decided twenty years ago, so we don't have to rack our brains over that any more!
You know, this notion of working on the basis of a 'text' or without a 'text' just doesn't exist for us, you know. We don't write; we sing! OK, so sometimes you have to sit back and think about how a song will work, whether it's gonna go down well with your mother or son, for instance. Those are the kind of questions we ask ourselves. And that means that every now and then you have to read back over the lyrics to decide what's ephemeral and what can strike a chord with everyone…
The thing is, we work all year round. We're in the studio every day from 10 in the morning, so it's pretty hard to say what 'method' we use to write our songs! I honestly don't think we have a method as such. It's often the vocals themselves which point us in a certain direction. One of us will turn up in the studio in the morning with a couple of lines and they happen to fit in with something someone else has done. But sometimes it can be the other way round – the DJ might turn up with one hell of a rhythm and we'll listen to that and just get carried away! We're not the sort of group who lock ourselves away in the studio for three weeks and go 'OK, now we've got to make an album!' Our general orientation was decided twenty years ago, so we don't have to rack our brains over that any more!
So what is your general orientation?
I'd say it's to become real 'folk' singers, you know, and adopt the Jamaican approach. There's nothing that particularly links what we do to Jamaican music, apart from the fact that Jamaican music is folklore. It fills a hole, something that's been missing from our lives for a long time. It's basically a popular functional music that's totally integrated in everyday life. You know, it helps you get up and go to work in the morning and go out partying and pick up girls at night...
Some people would consider that deciding to play one particular genre of music like folk means you're always working within certain constraints. Do you feel you're breaking free from these constraints by branching out and using other sounds in your work these days?
No, we work with a lot of constraints, but I think that's what freedom's all about really! Form is always very important, because it's form that nearly always dictates the meaning of the music. I mean, you're made in your own particular mould and there are codes and rules to respect – and that's important! But whatever you say, it's your 'genre' that saves you, that's what carries your music and make it universal. I mean, I don't understand a word of English, but that doesn't stop me understanding the message of Bob Marley's songs because Marley was a man who was 100% in tune with his local reality and that's what makes him my brother.
The thing is, French pop and 'chanson' and stuff is basically the personal expression of an individual singer, but with Massilia you're not singing about yourself and your own concerns, you're singing for other people, for society as a whole. We haven't invented anything in our songs, you know, it's all about recycling stuff and using tools that are already there!
But on your new album you do mix two different forms of folk music, fusing the music of the Repentistas from Brazil – who you actually went out to meet – with that of the Occitan Troubadours. Is that because you felt the Repentistas's improvisations were similar to those practised by Jamaican MCs?
I think it's a case of having similar attitudes… I mean, I don't have to dress up and 'disguise' myself when I sing a bourrée with Repentistas or MCs, because basically we've all got the same function. What's more, there's an actual relation between the language in Brazil and Occitanie. The Troubadours influenced the whole of European culture in the Middle Ages and that includes the Portuguese who went out to live in Brazil. Funnily enough, the last surviving Troubadours in the world today are in Brazil.
For musicians like us who live in a country where folklore has died out it's really interesting to go to Brazil and experience it as a living culture. We ended up realising that there were a lot more similarities between our two cultures than we'd imagined, particularly with what's going on in new Brazilian music right now. Take someone like Lénine for instance. He's got the same ideas about using traditional folklore and street sounds from his local region, but at the same time making his music accessible to a universal audience.
I think it's a case of having similar attitudes… I mean, I don't have to dress up and 'disguise' myself when I sing a bourrée with Repentistas or MCs, because basically we've all got the same function. What's more, there's an actual relation between the language in Brazil and Occitanie. The Troubadours influenced the whole of European culture in the Middle Ages and that includes the Portuguese who went out to live in Brazil. Funnily enough, the last surviving Troubadours in the world today are in Brazil.
For musicians like us who live in a country where folklore has died out it's really interesting to go to Brazil and experience it as a living culture. We ended up realising that there were a lot more similarities between our two cultures than we'd imagined, particularly with what's going on in new Brazilian music right now. Take someone like Lénine for instance. He's got the same ideas about using traditional folklore and street sounds from his local region, but at the same time making his music accessible to a universal audience.
You've never actually been out to Jamaica. So why did you turn to Africa this time round, inviting Hadja Kouyaté, a female griot from Guinea, to sing on your new album over a Jamaican boggle beat?
Well, we put ourselves in the shoes of a Martian beamed down to Planet Earth and imagined what would give him the best vision of the 'folk' music Earthlings listen to! And what we came up with was a song fusing three different traditional folk cultures – us, the Brazilian singer from Naçao Zumbi and Hadja Kouyaté! That way Martians will understand that the role of the sound system MC, the griot, the troubadour and the Repentista are exactly the same! After that, it's obviously a question of chance meetings between individual musicians…
Well, we put ourselves in the shoes of a Martian beamed down to Planet Earth and imagined what would give him the best vision of the 'folk' music Earthlings listen to! And what we came up with was a song fusing three different traditional folk cultures – us, the Brazilian singer from Naçao Zumbi and Hadja Kouyaté! That way Martians will understand that the role of the sound system MC, the griot, the troubadour and the Repentista are exactly the same! After that, it's obviously a question of chance meetings between individual musicians…
So would you say all the guests on your new album are "Occitaniste" in their soul?
We chose to call our new album Occitanista because we're lucky enough to belong to a culture without frontiers or national ambition. "Occitanistes" sing in regional dialects so that means they could equally well sing in Italian or Portuguese… For me, being "Occitaniste" means being whole, feeling comfortable in my own street and thus comfortable anywhere else in the world! A sound system can't come from nowhere, you know, because it revolves around a sort of 'verbal jousting' that's always coloured by something, not necessarily by a particular town or region, but it's got its own special ambience and that's what people tune in to!
Massilia Sound System Occitanista (Wagram)
Patrick Labesse
Translation : Julie Street
