“Sahara”, a collaboration between Iggy Pop and “desert blues” guitar quarter Songhoy Blues, aims to correct global prejudices towards Africa in an indirect manner. When lead vocalist Aliou Touré explained the inspirations for “Bamako”, the lead track from their sophomore album Résistance (2017), to Rolling Stone last June, he lamented that "So much of what people hear about Africa is negative; bad news stories about war and famine just dominate the common image of Africa".
There’s a heavily political irony at play here, since the band’s hometown, Timbuktu, is mostly used “to emphasize how isolated, inaccessible, far away or in the middle of nowhere a place is” (thanks to Disney’s The Lady and the Tramp). Songhoy Blues are now based in Mali’s capital city of Bamako, having been exiled from northern Mali due to a jihadi excursion and the imposition of Sharia law by the Islamist group Ansar Dine, which prohibits cigarettes, alcohol, and music.
The biographical subjects of war, exile and political strife are elided on the song, which articulates a contrast between foreign perceptions of the vast desert and its place in the hearts and minds of the locals. Iggy Pop spouts ironic sung-spoken descriptors that painfully state the obvious while revealing a stance akin to sympathetic Orientalism: ‘It’s got a bad reputation/ In the developed nations/ ‘Cause its big and empty/ And it seems unfriendly/ There ain’t no condos/ There ain’t no pizza/ It’s got a genuine culture/ No Kentucky Fried Chicken/ No’. The music video for the song plays up this dynamic by featuring stereotypical African images (leopards, tribal dancing, coal-black human figures) in a wash of psychedelic hues.
But the song’s indirect didacticism is inevitably overshadowed by Songhoy Blues’ typically irrepressible joie de vivre. In a context of lives filled with fear, violence, uncertainty, and hyper-aridity, the kind of transcendent joy they evoke fashions a welcoming oasis for the mind.
