Wegue Wegue

First, apologies to my loyal readers for missing a post yesterday. It was my first day since April 5 when I started this blog of not writing a post. I have a good excuse: we went to see Demi Lovato on Monday night! But we’re back on schedule with Worldwide Wednesdays!

In 2008, the world had just experienced the cultural phenomenon that was Daft Punk’s “Alive 2007” tour (yes, I was at the Berkeley show), Diplo was exploring street music from Brazil, and Crystal Castles explored electronic noise. Dance music was at its most diverse and interesting. Enter: something completely different.

Buraka Som Sistema hails primarily from Lisbon, Portugal, but takes their influence from Kuduro music from Angola, a former Portuguese colony in Southwest Africa, and the Angolan diaspora in Portugal, where the band formed. Their first album, Black Diamond, intentionally took an internationalist approach to the album, making it sound genuinely African but also quite unlike any then-modern music that was actually produced in Africa, leaning into the production frequent in the west.

The first song I heard on Black Diamond was “Kalemba (Wegue Wegue)” and it is still my favorite on the album. However, don’t skip the rest of the album! “Sound Of Kuduro,” “Aqui Para Vocês,” and “Yah!” are particularly great. But “Kalemba” feels like a revolution on the dance floor. It’s almost jerky in its beat, like you can’t help but to whip your head around. The incredible vocal performance by Pongo (then known as Pongolove) doesn’t perfectly match with the music, leading to a slight offset between the vocal rhythm and the musical rhythm during the verses, which they fix by switching up the instrumentation. She calls your attention with the battlecry “Wegue Wegue,” before the beat and all of the instruments that go along with it just go off. There is this filthy bass line that, when there’s no singing, borders “Kalemba” on Drum ’n’ Bass. But I don’t usually like DnB, and “Kalemba” is just a party in a can. 

Clear the room, because this one is going to make you break the furniture otherwise. I’ve never been to Angola, but I’ve listened to Black Diamond enough that a little piece of it lives inside me.