EVERY GENRE PROJECT - August 7 - Wassoulou

Genre of the Day - Wassoulou 🇲🇱

Album of the Day - Worotan by Oumou Sangaré (1995)

One of the only disheartening things about maintaining this column is the paltry number of women at the summit of the genre featured each day. I work on an objective methodology; after having randomized a daily genre, I choose the top-rated album or a consensus-pick, definitional album near the top as told by RateYourMusic. What’s amazing about RateYourMusic is the thousands of albums and genres it offers for boundless sonic journeys; what’s depressing is that given a 65% male user base heavily skews favor towards male artists, the blame lying on the biased skew of music criticism until the last decade and the lack of opportunity in key roles in the music industry. Given that the majority of the top-rated albums for each genre feature male acts, it’s important to be able to call this endemic misogyny across the entire scope of music to attention to have any hope of alleviating the gender gaps it causes.

It’s a breath of fresh air when a genre’s most-acclaimed album is the work of a female act. Today’s genre exceeds breath; it’s a gust of renewing perspective, focused on some of the most pressing constants of women’s lives across the world from a transnational slice of west Africa. The Wassoulou Empire was a short-lived state stretching over Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali in the late 19th century, but its cultural and musical influence would extend long past its brief, colonially-interrupted reign. The Wassoulou region is home to lineages of artists called jeli who carried on and transcribed oral history through music and stories, and a new crop of women jeli known as kono, or songbirds, began to assert new stories through song. They explored fertility, children, and other social and women’s issues as a vivid and assertive mode of self-representation for female artists. In recent decades, wassoulou artists have stood as a loud voice for the advancement of women by objecting to misogynistic practices like polygamy and exploitation.

The region of Wassoulou also helps trace a direct line from the traditional melodies and rhythms of west Africa to American blues and the massive scores of rock’n’roll, country, and R&B it subsequently spawned. Wassoulou’s Bambara-language verses are typically sung over the n’goni harp also known as the hunter’s harp, dating back from the times of medieval magnate Mansa Musa. Though its sound is akin to a harp, its shape is like that of a banjo. That’s not a coincidence; enslaved West Africans in the US reappropriated the n’goni with greater portability as the banjo. The n’goni’s playing style commanded an outsized influence on Black American banjo and guitar blues players. The similarities between the n’goni timbre and playing style on today’s album cuts like the jouncing plucks of “Sabu” and that of, say, Piedmont blues are crystal-clear even after centuries of separation. Additional accompaniment to wassoulou’s insightful vignettes of women’s stories appears in the djembe drum, the karignan scraper, and drums made from calabash on the percussive side, and the small, fiddle-esque soku for high-melody depth.

Oumou Sangaré has become one of the defining faces of wassoulou internationally since commencing output in the ‘90s, and her 1996 “Worotan” is one of its finest examples in album form. She sings in her native Bambara to convey her message best to her homeland, though she extends her soaring contralto vocals to cut across any language barrier. Over wandering bass and the jigsaw puzzle of plucked instruments, her voice swoops in with a power that could fill any room to the brim as she declares on “Kun Fe Ko” to reassure those too hung up on a child’s upbringing or whether or not a wife will bear a child that we must at times surrender to life’s unpredictability: “Everything in life is uncertain / Uncertainty is a part of human existence.” Though the breadth of instrumentation weaves a complex result, there’s still a gentleness to the album’s strong grooves like “Denw” and the immense percussive layers of “N’diya Ni,” reflecting wassoulou’s nature as a lyrically-centric yet musically robust tradition. Translations for songs beyond “Kun Fe Ko” are as inaccessible as an n’goni at the local guitar center—I truly wish there were more expos where you could try playing different instruments—but the lifts of the call-and-response communal vocals as on the lilting “N’gautu” between Sangaré’s verbose verses paint an intricate picture of the genre’s shared, female-led visions. It’s a tradition that reminds us to emphasize women’s visions in our day-to-day thought, careers, and in the art we consume so that the powerful musical craftswomen at the forefront of all genres get their due praise.