New releases from China, Croatia, South Africa and the Sudan prove that good music is irrepressible







Americans have it easy when it comes to political pop music.
Ever since Bob Dylan made the implicit social protest of rock and
roll explicit, fans here have had their pick of activist singers, 
ranging from Lee Greenwood to Ice-T, few of whom have had to worry about their own political safety. Despite periodic eruptions, ours is a relatively relaxed and uncommon situation in the world.


Other areas, like the Caribbean, have  music with an established tradition of
political commentary, such as calypso, and more recently, reggae.
Then  there are countries where  performers separate politics and music as a matter of
self-preservation. Get too uppity about the fearless leader

[Elsewhere in SALON: Ian Shoales: My mother the gangsta]

during a concert and the secret police in the back row won't let
you stay around for the encore. In some African nations, where singers are regarded as a  special class  of beggar (and most people don't have the money to buy albums), 
 musicians rely on songs that flatter rich patrons.  


In other cases, songs about turmoil have to be very carefully disguised -- so much so that they may not translate well. One would hardly know from his music that the venerated singer
and bandleader Mohammed Wardi left his native Sudan under death
threats in 1991 because he was perceived as taking sides in the
vicious Muslim-Christian civil war. His one album released in the West, "Live in
Addis Ababa - 1994"  (Rags), brims with swinging, surging
arrangements. Wardi's lyrics merely affirm patriotism at one
point and long for haughty, faithless lovers the rest of the
time. But just who are those icy women, behind the veil of the
lyrics? Somebody in authority thought they knew. It's easy to thrill at
Wardi's music, hard to feel the struggle it indirectly reflects. 







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