Moving towards a more familiar rock style can help. But it's always a crap shoot how well foreign bands will handle rock. Often, the enthusiasm is mixed in with many musical cliches. As his albums and 1995 American tour proved, China's Cui Jian is a wondrous exception. Classically trained as a trumpet player with the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, this prodigious musician found his idiom in rock. He was seduced by capitalist running dogs like Bruce Springsteen, the Police and Talking Heads. He took up electric guitar, and in 1986 he wrote his first rock song, "It's Not That I Don't Understand," which advocates free thinking as a response to a world that changes ever faster.What Cui understands is that rock, with its blare and momentum, is an ideal vehicle for those who lack a public voice. One of his concert and album standouts, "The Red Cloth Blinds Me," is a smooth, mid-tempo number with a delicate trumpet part, but the barbed reference to the Communist flag blazes through. Other numbers include delightful sing-along choruses and catchy do-do-do chants, but his flair for tricky yet clear arrangements is what eventually knocks you out. He may not be the future of rock and roll, but he's a strong argument for its present.
Although the album "Dumbshow" (Invisible) by Transmisia is a relative oldie (recorded in Croatia in 1993), it remains the epitome of the Serb-Croat conflict. The trio of Sinisia Simper (vocal, bass, electronic effects), Robert Paus (guitars), and Robert Meznaric (drums and percussion machines) deliver a spare brand of industrial-rock clang at least as serrated and incisive as Ministry's latest. It's not an ideological duty to listen to these guys -- they know hooks, and pop concision. Simper roars in English and his words are usually lost under heaps of clamor in the mix, but a sample of the titles gets the attitude across: "Why This Life?" "Embargo Lady," "Buried Brain," "Crack of Doom," "Skeptical Beast." And when Simper shreds his voice going "Why? This? Life?" just before an electric drill starts up next to the microphone, death-metal seems like more than just a creepy name for a style of noise music.
Like many signals from that sad part of the world, Simper, Paus, and Meznaric's exemplary punk was ignored over here when it came out. A shame, because for Transmisia, punk is not simply a howl of thwarted white-male privilege or even the outrage of a class or gender rubbed raw by dismissal. "Dumbshow" is no less than a final shriek of warning before the fog of war blots out everything.
Epic conflict can provoke optimism as well as despair, or even fluid combinations of both. Enjoyable and ultimately affirmative responses to upheavals in Africa include American jazz saxophonist Billy Harper's "Somalia" (Evidence) and two collections of South African songs mostly made after the end of apartheid: "Only the Poor Man Feel It," (Hemisphere/I.R.S.) and "Jive Nation: the Indestructible Beat of Soweto Vol. 5" (Earthworks/Stern's).
Harper is a hard-bopper who's not allergic to free-jazz notions, and one of the many illustrious graduates of the '60s Art Blakey bands. He's invariably associated with the terms "overlooked" and "under-recorded," so it's always a treat when he breaks his silence and shows off his cunning. The title track of his album (written and recorded in 1993) has no outright commentary as such, but the insistent suggestiveness of the double set of drummers and Harper's exchanges with trumpeter Eddie Henderson delivers as much hope, frustration, fear, calamity and exultation as any activist song. Whether he regards the number as political, Harper has it right in the liner notes when he says, "It has all the components of an art piece, but it sounds easy to hear.'"
The South African collections also enlighten with little outright polemic. Guitarist Condry Ziqubu's "Mayibuye" on "Only the Poor Man Feel It" may be about land distribution, but it's also one irresistible dance track. The most pointed remark on "Jive Nation" comes when folk-traditionalists Tau Ea Linare sing "We are saying Americans have gone to the moon." Performers like the Soul Brothers and Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens are masters of rhythm and spirit with or without oppression. South Africa's let's-get-on-with-it musicians have displayed their splendor before, during and after apartheid.
What does glorious social-crises music sound like? Like glorious music, wherever it plays.
"Live in Addis Ababa" and "Jive Nation" are available from Stern's Music, 598 Broadway, New York, NY 10012. Fax: 212-925-1689. Transmisia's "Dumbshow" can be ordered from Invisible Records, Box 16008 Chicago, IL 60616.
