This year’s Coachella lineup is the most culturally diverse ever, with musicians traveling from other countries and continents to be at the Empire Polo Club—and one very special group is trekking from one desert to another.
Mdou Moctar, aka Mahamadou Souleymane, is a musician from Agadez, Niger, and his music adds hard-rock stylings to guitar sounds stemming from the Tuareg people of the Sahara Desert. This blend of Tuareg music with rock effects has been described as “desert blues.” All of his music is sung in Tamasheq, one of the main languages of Tuareg culture, and his band’s music mixes African rhythms and styles with electrifying rock power. Songs like “Chismiten” provide a psychedelic trip through sonic worlds, and Mdou’s guitar work—which channels both the rock-guitar gods of America and the United Kingdom, and the takamba and assouf styles of Africa—is the reason why he’s widely known as “the Hendrix of the Sahara.”
You can catch Mdou Moctar perform at Coachella on Sunday, April 14 and 21.
During a recent phone interview with Mdou’s longtime bassist Mikey Coltun, the only American member of the band, he explained how the Coachella invitation was received differently among the members of the group.
“When we got the call, it was like an, ‘Oh, we made it,’ situation of playing the biggest festival we’ve ever played, and probably the biggest show we’ve ever played,” Coltun said. “I know Coachella from years of stuff—but the guys didn’t, and still quite don’t. I’m trying to explain it to them. I think they’re just really stoked that it’s in the desert.”
Even as the band becomes influenced by other music and grows in popularity outside of Niger, the roots of Africa remain apparent in the music.
“Even just, like, the drum groove—that’s supposed to mimic the camels trotting, bouncing up and down as it walks through the desert, so it is desert music,” Coltun said. “Through years of touring and stuff, it’s important for us to maintain the roots of the music and where it comes from. Tuareg music is, at its core, political music. Pre-guitar, it was tendé music, with women chanting and drumming while men danced. … As we kept touring, it was important for us to keep the roots of what Tuareg music was, and to not really stylize it and be like, ‘OK, we need to go in the rock world’ or whatever.”
In Agadez, weddings are a celebration of life, with memorable and energetic musical performances. Mdou Moctar cut his teeth as a wedding musician, and a special emphasis is placed on maintaining the wedding vibe.
“Take the drums again, which I think are the most important part of this music, and you can dissect it and be like, ‘OK, it’s that beat,’” Coltun said. “We’ve played with different Western, American or European drummers before in the past, and it just doesn’t quite feel the same. Technically it is the same groove, but the essence of this raw rock—this trancey desert music that is very much wedding music—is so specific to the players over there that we just want to maintain that.”
Coltun’s dedication to spreading awareness of the culture of his bandmates stems from a career of performing with creatives from all around the globe.
“I grew up playing a lot of punk music in D.C., and then also playing Malian music, like traditional bambara music from Mali … and then I got super-deep into West African music,” Coltun said. “Playing with this guy, Cheick Hamala Diabate from Mali, was this amazing experience … and then I started playing with Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang, and his music is old witchcraft music from Sierra Leone. It’s super-fast-paced, hyper dance music, often with drum machines or electronic drums. Then hearing the first Sublime Frequencies’ Group Inerane record really kind of changed me. Hearing these West African grooves that I love so much mixed with this super-raw, energetic, punk-like energy, it was such a beautiful thing. When I first heard Mdou, I was like, ‘This is all my worlds colliding—in a good way.’”
One of the ways in which Mdou Moctar’s band shares Tuareg culture with audiences is by putting on a show just like one you would see in Niger.
“It’s important to show that this is a living, breathing culture—and Tuareg people, especially, are oppressed people,” Coltun said. “Sharing that with people who might not know that is important for everybody in the band. If you go to a Mdou Moctar wedding in Niger, it’s not going to be any different than a show in New York or something, or L.A.—the music is the same. On our new record (Funeral for Justice), the songs are super-political, and oftentimes, people … don’t understand the lyrics, but trying to convey that intensity through the actual music is how we’re trying to get people to understand what we’re talking about.”
Mdou Moctar has performed all over the globe, with audiences as large as thousands—and as few as five.
“Personally, those shows in front of five people are some of my favorites,” Coltun said. “These people are there, and they care. … We did an entire Canadian tour from east to west over six weeks, which bands don’t normally do. We had a specific Canadian booking agent at that time, and we played all these small towns and hit these small bars for 50 people who have never heard this music before. That’s, like, some of my favorite shit.”
Coltun said he’s learned that when you take away barriers like language and culture, all humans are alike.
“There’s similar negative shit going on everywhere, and there are similar ways that people live, just maybe in different sorts of ways,” he said. “… I think the thing that I’ve taken from traveling all around the world is that it’s the same people, same problems, same ideologies and all that stuff, but just different languages and different cultures.
“The response from playing different places around the world, it’s amazing, because we could play a rock club in New York or in Portugal, or play a wedding in Asia or in Mali, or wherever, and you get a similar response and a similar energy from the crowd—no matter who the people are, and what culture they come from.”
The musicians in Mdou Moctar hope that their unique rock inspires audiences to learn.
“If people get something from the music and the concert, and they feel compelled to research a bit about what Mdou is singing about and what the songs are about, that’s the biggest takeaway for us,” Coltun said. “This music is super-intense and super-trancey, but what we are singing about, oftentimes, is about colonization and shit happening around Africa, but it translates around the world as well.”
Since Mdou Moctar is from a place besides America, his music is often generalized as “world music.” An article in The Guardian discussing the dangers of this label includes the quote: “At its best, it’s bad culture, dialed-down and made safe for a generic, mostly Western consumer as imagined by a marketing department. At worst, the term is out-and-out racist.”
Said Coltun: “The music is what it is, and pushing it into this term ‘world music’ is not the way to go. This music is a living, breathing culture, like I said, and our music specifically is rock music. It’s no different than punk music or rock music. I think that grouping a bunch of artists from outside of North America and Europe into a ‘world music’ category is wrong, and it’s cool to see that at festivals like Coachella, there are international artists being shown as they should in any sort of festival, and it’s not being called a ‘world music’ festival. That’s pretty beautiful.”
“More people should hear this stuff—and what better way to do it than at Coachella?”
