I was skeptical about that: kids? Really? But a substantial part of the crowd that gathered really was actual kids.
The introductory screen text for the performance explained that what had been intended to be a single performance ended up being three on consecutive nights, and that kids came from all around, attracted by the noise. If you were looking for a comparison from the rock world, I’d offer you Peter Buck in the early days of REM or Johnny Marr with the Smiths. He was unmistakably playing lead guitar - Ahmoudou Madassane, on rhythm, often had little more to do than to repeat a chord in the background - but his playing was about supplying the melody, not the flash, and those melodies were intricate and precise. Moctar, while a hypnotically virtuoso player, did not engage in their histrionics: no gurning, no posing, and no pointless solos. There was one substantial difference from the guitar heroes of rock’n’roll, though.
It’s easy for ears attuned to alternative rock to get a handle on. It’s easy to see why: the Western Saharan ‘desert blues’ tradition of which he is part - electric guitar music, played with the attack of rock bands, and swirling and droning in a way that is very familiar to those with paisley in their wardrobes - has a lot in common with music that declares itself psychedelic. But that hasn’t stopped him being compared to Eddie Van Halen and, inevitably, to Jimi Hendrix, and the adjective ‘psychedelic’ is frequently applied to his music. Moctar has spoken of how he knows little of the Anglophone rock tradition. And Moctar’s guitar playing - blurrily deft repeating patterns - was deeply reminiscent of the banjo playing in the YouTube clip. Watching the stream of the Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar was an unnervingly similar experience: he and his three-piece backing band were set up in the dust outside a friend’s house, watched by whoever came along.
It showed a bunch of long-haired people on a makeshift stage in the New Mexico desert and a handful of people dancing around in the dust to the music, which was a weird, trippy, hyper-freaky form of electrified banjo music: ‘psychedelic bluegrass’, apparently. The other week someone posted on Twitter a link to a YouTube clip titled ‘Family Lotus and D.J.
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