Angelique
Kidjo – Remain in Light (Kravenworks)
“And you may find
yourself in another part of the world … and you may say to yourself, ‘Well, how
did I get here?’”
The Talking Heads’ 1980 album Remain in Light marked the time when
they dove in deep to their West African influences, particularly that of Fela
Kuti. It was far removed from the punk and new wave scenes from which they were
spawned. There was only one minor hit single from it: “Once in a Lifetime,” an
oddball pop song with spoken verses, its success propelled largely by the
then-innovative video. It was that song that Angelique Kidjo heard in Paris, in
1983, after she escaped a censorious dictatorship in her home of Benin. She
immediately recognized its West African influence, though people at the party
she was attending told her that there was no way that could be true, because
African music wasn’t as sophisticated as Talking Heads.
Despite his fans’ ignorance, Talking Heads’
David Byrne was very clear about what was influencing him at the time. He
became a major advocate of Fela Kuti in every interview he did. There were
questions raised then, as now, as to whether he had a right to borrow from a
culture supposedly alien to his own. But Kidjo never saw it that way. As an
African who herself has often been told that her music is not “African” enough,
Kidjo reveled in the way that Byrne and his band blurred lines and borrowed
from her culture without claiming it as their own but instead creating
something new. “I’m walking a line / divide and dissolve,” sings Byrne in
“Houses in Motion.”
All of which leads up to this reimagining of Remain in Light as a whole, in which
Kidjo covers the entire album. She does so by placing percussion and vocals at
the forefront, and her commanding vocal delivery is, at the very least, an
intriguing contrast to Byrne’s, which sounds meek in comparison. That doesn’t
mean Kidjo strips the material down, however: her Remain in Light sounds very much like it was made in 2018, neither
a throwback to the time the original was created nor to a period of ’70s
African funk to which many Western “purists” insist on clinging. And just to
give the cultural appropriation police even more to chew on, she employs the
horn section from Brooklyn Afrobeat revivalists Antibalas as well as Vampire
Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, with Fela Kuti’s drummer Tony Allen—who deserves as much
credit as Fela does for pioneering the genre—doing what he does best.
Hearing a modern African woman sing Byrne’s
lyrics is also revelatory. “Seen and Not Seen” is about someone who does not
see faces like his in the culture around him, who fantasizes about changing the
shape of his face in order to fit in. The haunting “Listening Wind” is about an
African villager who plants a bomb to drive away the Americans who are
colonizing his country. “Born Under Punches” makes perfect sense when talking
about any country brutalized by both colonialism and corrupt governments. The
line ““Changing my shape, I feel like an accident,” found in “Crosseyed and
Painless,” could refer to any traveller or immigrant who must “code-switch” to
fit into the dominant culture. Then, of course, there is “Once in a Lifetime,”
in which life doesn’t always go as planned, in which the water underground
connects us all. A common theme in much of Byrne’s early work is anxiety—this
is the man who wrote “Life During Wartime,” after all (from Fear of Music)—and the world has never
been more anxious than it is right now, no matter where you live.
What’s also striking about Kidjo’s work in
2018 is how much stock she places in Remain
in Light as an album. She could easily have cherry-picked
various Talking Heads songs from throughout their discography, but she chose
these eight songs that are rooted in a particular period of transformation and
discovery on the part of its composers, eight songs that form a cohesive whole.
In a week when Drake has released yet another exhaustive and exhausting epic
work that was consciously designed to spike his record-setting streaming
numbers, Remain in Light is a
reminder that concision and cohesion goes a long, long way. Decades, in fact,
of illumination.
Stream: “Born Under Punches,” “The Great
Curve,” “Listening Wind”