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ShareThe puppy dogs of America have aged seven or eight years since the exhaustingly long Democratic primary opened for business, and in that time a niche artform has blossomed in the black diaspora: the Barack Obama Praise Song. The rhythms and melodies range from Jamaican Reggae to Kenyan Benga, but that pulse of a people’s collective hopes racing into the ether is unmistakably familiar: “Yes, We Can” sounds the same in Luo as it does in English. By the time Puerto Rico puts a wrap to this extended season of American Political Theater with its June 3rd primary, some globe-trotting multi-cultural record label—say, Putumayo or Mango—should have the goods for a compilation titled “Obama-mania: World Music Edition.”
Track one could be the latest endorsement ringing out of the Black diaspora: “Barack Obama”, a hastily assembled hard-steppin’ reggae chune by the aging yet ever-irie crooner Coco Tea. The 48-year-old’s grizzled lilt is a voice from a lost generation of digitized mid-80s pop, a period in reggae history that rarely gets its dues outside the island. In an upside-down, more imaginative world—a world where Nancy Pelosi spends her afternoons holding bull sessions in a sweltering tenement yard while Jamaican artists draft legislation—Coco Tea’s single would have been a campaign shake-up on the level of a Kennedy endorsement. Heretofore, the closest the singer ever hot-stepped towards politics was his seminal satire, “New Immigration Law”, an enduring acknowledgment of what every ex-pat Rasta knows: “The government you just can’t depend on.” Documenting offense after offense, the song’s ultimate message is less apolitical than anti-political—the singer is in line with a long Rastafarian tradition that views the Western political system as irredeemably corrupt.
So to hear this chap waving hosannas for the “next president of the United States” is a bit of a shocker. Watching the video, there’s something blasphemous and confounding about Coco Tea’s turbaned bobo dread sidekick exclaiming the name of a plausible president of America. On a religious level, it feels like stumbling upon a late night “What Happens in Vegas” commercial starring Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger winking over a craps table. And as far the song goes… well, you’ll dig it exactly as much as you dig the junior senator from Illinois. The riddim bobs along like a casio “reggae” preset, and the musical euphoria flows from Coco Tea’s zealous repetition of the words “Barack Obama, Barack Obama, Barack Obama”. It’s a few clichés shy of a Saturday Night Live skit, but more importantly, it’s a testament to the pervasive, border-leaping intensity of Obama’s message—and sign that the rock-hard forces of reggae cynicism and disillusionment can indeed brought low.
Sail southward to the cheerier shores of Trinidad and you get swamped with “Barack the Magnificent”, a dazzling calypso-fest in which trumpeting synthesizers emote the kind of love for Barack Obama that you’d be hard pressed to squeeze out of even his most fervent supporters. When it comes to grassroots enthusiasm, you can’t compete with a synthesizer, and nobody knows that better than the musicians of Trinidad and Tobago, including the soca legend in question, Mighty Sparrow. Over something like five decades, Mighty Sparrow has made a livelihood critiquing American imperialism in the key of schmaltz. Much more than the happiness junky Coco Tea, he’s an informed voter with a command of political fine print reflected in amazingly well-researched lyrics like “The Foreign Relations Committee can attest to his tenacity”. Not the kind of prose that’s easy to squeeze into a Calypso meter. Another great line: “On the Senate Veteran’s Affairs Committee, he’s a giant”. It’s entirely possible that two or three of those proper nouns have never before been mentioned in a Calypso song. Plus, it’s hard to top this as a health care platform: “Providers must give a heck”.
Steer your browser towards the Kenyan Serengeti, and the ardor hits a fevered pitch. Of all the Kenyan contributions to Obama-mania, the most thrilling might be the dream-like “Obama”, by Tony Nyadundo, a middle-aged bandleader seeking to revive traditional-esque Ohangla music with pattering drum synths and topical storytelling. On “Obama”—title track from his sixth record—he weaves quite a tale, which according to East African Standard reporter Caroline Nyanga, translates as such: On his first trip to Kenya, the future senator and the humble musician chanced into one another, and, so impressed by the singer’s immaculate English, Obama decided to give the guy 100,000 Kenyan shillings (U.S. $1,600, roughly) to buy a guitar and spread his message. It’s a demonstrably false account, and a disturbing example of Obama’s expectations being set impossibly high, and in specific dollar amounts to boot. All the same, here’s how Nyanga characterizes the anthem’s reception: “Revellers in Kenyan dancehalls usually go into a frenzy and dance with abandon as soon as Obama’s song rends the air.” Yes, they can.
Yet the best song in the Obama catalogue may well have been the first. On their “Obama”, the half-American/half-Kenyan foursome Extra Golden sing their praise for the senator, but mostly their thanks. During his 2006 tour of East Africa, Obama helped the band’s Kenyan members get a visa to tour America, thereby routing them around that prickly New Immigration Law that Coco Tea was harping about. (If Obama wants to earn the support of his African followers indefinitely, may this writer humbly suggest some comprehensive immigration reform aimed not only at the Mexican border, but at the African continent as well, where getting a visa seems to be some byzantine art of secret-society-system-working.)
The Extra Golden tune is a refreshing contribution to the Obama cannon—unlike the rest, it’s penned in thoughtful appreciation for the politician, dealing in results already delivered, rather than change anticipated. That momentous, nervous glee is tampered down, and the instrumental counterpoint and tricky snare flutters steal the show. The raging rock solo at the end is a pleasant surprise, and a pan-cultural nod to the type of world everybody’s looking at the Obama campaign to deliver. Musically, you could slip it past the most wrinkled blue-collar Hillary curmudgeon in the Appalachian slopes: By any political standard, it rocks.
There are other picks, too. Ghana’s Blakk Rasta has an ominous Crunk-Dancehall raver for the candidate, mostly warning Obama to mind his safety, because there are racists out there. Fojeba, a Cameroonian ex-pat souping-up Central African rhythms in Toronto, made his own Black Eyed Peas move, splicing excerpts from a speech over a Makossa rhythm with a minimal hook, “Ready to Go”. And, to strut out on a limb, expect more. America occupies a central, thorny place in African history, as both the opponent of colonialism and the bringer of neo-colonialism; a country whose high wages finance home after home on the continent, but a country that is believed, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, to have instigated more than a dozen devastating coups in the sub-Saharan region.
The gap between America’s high-minded rhetoric and its historical, breathtaking insensitivity towards Africans and African-Americans has been a source of disenchantment for millions, and, well, maybe this closing paragraph has drawn on a sentence or three too long. Suffice it to say that John Kerry never had a beer named after him, whereas Obama is exalted in every hop and grain in Senator, a frothy and occasionally lethal substance sold cheaply in the slums of Nairobi. And John McCain, Hillary Clinton be damned. They’re already calling it President.
