Chris Smith’s blog

My newest piece for Thought Catalog, a meditation on the legacy of Jimi Hendrix, and his use as a catch-all comparison for all sorts of non-Western music.

I’m not sure exactly when I first heard a musician from some far-flung spot on the globe described as the “Jimi Hendrix of [insert place name here].”

…

It’s only natural to reach for some sort of shorthand to translate the esoteric sounds of distant cultures into a language understandable to anyone with a passing knowledge of western culture. People might not know what a kamelengoni is (for the record, it’s a 12-stringed, harp-like instrument), but when you describe Vieux Kante as the Hendrix of the kamelengoni, everyone gets it: the guy’s a badass.

…

Read the whole thing here.

A couple of weeks ago, the Mail & Guardian ran a story of mine on the 1970s Zamrock scene. Sub-Saharan Africa isn’t much known for its rock’n'roll, but for a brief time in the late 1960s and ’70s every young guy from Lagos to Lusaka wanted to be Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton. Zambia, which makes few headlines in the west, was the cradle of this scene, hence the name. It was a heady time–these guys were full-on rock stars, with platform boots, groupies, and wild parties–but the economy tanked, the AIDS epidemic hit, and the scene was snuffed out.

I profile Jagari Chanda, probably the most famous Zamrock star of his day, who sang for a band named the Witch. He now ekes out a living as a gemstone miner in the bush. He’s looking for another shot in the music business. I hope he gets it.

It is a Saturday night in Kitwe, a rough mining town in Zambia’s Copperbelt, and the bar is growing louder by the minute. The DJ plays American hip-hop, the beer flows and crowds of young miners, grizzled expatriates and working girls shout over the din.

Once upon a time, every head would have turned when Emmanuel “Jagari” Chanda walked through the door. Tonight, nobody realises that the barrel-chested sexagenarian in the leather jacket was once Zambia’s biggest rock star.

(The photo comes from the cover of a self-released compilation Jagari put together. For years, hard-to-find releases like this were the only way to hear the music. Now-Again records, though, has begun reissuing albums by the Witch and other Zamrock greats.)

Today, on Huffington Post San Francisco, I’ve got a piece on the Bay Area’s underground metal scene. Besides being a good excuse to name-check a few of my favorite local bands (Acephalix, for instance), the piece is a paean to underground concerts of all sorts, from punk to metal to bluegrass to hip hop.

I have no idea how the guy managed to sleep through Acephalix, because it was really loud. The San Francisco death metal band emitted a growling, galloping roar, the stuff of bad dreams, and it enveloped the room. The pit, meanwhile, was going off, a hostile ballet of bodies pinging off one another in front of the stage.

But this dude? He was dead to the world, mouth hanging open, slumped against the back wall. Next to him sat an equally incongruous giant stuffed donkey.

It was a Sunday night in early summer, and we were at the Victory warehouse in the Oakland ghostlands, a few blocks from Uptown but worlds away from its hipster sheen.

…

There’s something special about an underground show. I grew up outside Detroit in the late 1980s, as the city went into freefall. Paradoxically, Detroit’s collapse was great for the scene: there was no shortage of empty places to play, and the police were too busy to care about permitting or zoning. At college in North Carolina a few years later, I went to the occasional backyard bluegrass show. At a house in the woods about 20 miles from town, Teva-ed types sipped moonshine as guys with banjos and mandolins played Ralph Stanley tunes. While working in South Africa a few years ago, I found myself at a hip hop show in a weedy lot in Soweto, the country’s largest black township. While a succession of aspiring MCs jumped around on a makeshift stage, people drank beer and smoked weed, flirting with one another. Guys showed off their tricked-out cars, a parade of spinning rims and superfluous DVD screens mounted to the seats.

…

Looking for a way to quickly and easily describe for Western listeners a virtuoso musician from a far-flung part of the world? Just name-check Jimi Hendrix, as commenters did with Vieux Kante, seen here playing the hell out of a kamelengoni.

In some ways, it’s only natural to use some sort of shorthand to translate, say, the esoteric sounds of the sitar into terms that anyone who grew up listening to rock radio can understand. So we get: the Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele. The Jimi Hendrix of Japan. The Jimi Hendrix of South Africa. And, of course, the Jimi Hendrix of Turkey. I’ve done it myself, in discussing Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Toure’s incendiary new live touring act. At his most recent SF show, I tweeted, “He’s entered his Hendrix phase, with a power trio and everything.” And there was a resemblance to Band of Gypsys-era Hendrix, in both his liquid playing and the swing of the rhythm section. (It should be noted that Mali, a particularly guitar-happy country, has numerous contenders for the title. A few years ago, Vanity Fair reported that Baba Salah was known as not just the “Jimi Hendrix of Mali” but the “Jimi Hendrix of Africa.”

Right after I got out of college, I went traveling for a half-year or so, a dirtbag backpacker following my own version of the hippie trail. I ended up in Essaouria, Morocco, where Hendrix himself had spent some time. Local legend has it that he was so inspired by the ruins of an old fort on the beach that he wrote the song “Castles Made of Sand” (or, depending on the source, “Spanish Castle Magic.”). The songwriting claims aren’t true but, judging by all the drug dealers clogging the narrow streets, at least Jimi didn’t lack for hash. I spent a few days chasing his ghost, from restaurants where he ate to places where he stayed and musicians he supposedly played with. I never found a trace of the guy, of course. Little did I know, he was only an Internet search away. Voila: the Jimi Hendrix of Morocco.

The Bay Area has always been a metal hotbed, spawning the likes of Metallica, with its knifepoint riffs and galloping tempos, and Sleep, masters of the sludgy, bong-fueled stomp. (I caught one of Sleep’s reunion shows last week, by the way. Whoa.) These days, we might be better known for our avant-garde metal bands, united less by any particular sound than by a willingness to experiment. San Francisco magazine’s “Best of” issue this month runs a piece of mine on this burgeoning scene. I could have mentioned a ton of bands but chose to go with Ludicra, Grayceon, and Giant Squid. Check it out–and check the bands out when they play.

Last week, Thought Catalog published an essay of mine on growing up punk in suburban Detroit. It’s a personal piece about high school, the 1980s, skating, and, mostly, the shitty hardcore band I was in. We did, however, have a great name: Moral Decay. Anyway, here it is.

Like thousands of other basement bands across the country at the time, we spent our days skateboarding, building launch ramps in our driveways, and working up new ways to express our dissatisfaction with the world. Plenty of stuff pissed us off. This was 1986, after all, the high Reagan era. The U.S. was always invading some country I had never heard of, and the threat of nuclear war seemed very real. I wasn’t happy at home, either: I didn’t get along with my parents, and they didn’t get along with each other. Plus, I lived in the suburbs of Detroit, which even then had a feral, end-of-days feel. That year, there were nearly 400 arsons in a three-day period. I remember sitting in front of the TV on Halloween night, watching the city burn. [ ... ]

This fall, Canteen ran an essay of mine on music criticism, the glories of MP3 blogs, and my discovery of Zam-rock. It’s not online, but here’s a pdf.

I’ve always been obsessed with music. When I was a kid, I eagerly awaited each new Rolling Stone and Creem magazine, even though I didn’t necessarily understand the record-geek Aramaic in which they were written. (What’s an 11-year-old to make of a sentence that name-checks both Camus and Ozzy Osbourne?) It hardly mattered, though. It was a wide new world.
Later, I became a loyal reader of Maximumrocknroll, the Bay Area punk bible. A pulpy, grayscale rag that seemed to smudge your fingers if you even looked at it, MRR ran profiles of bands big and small; dispatches from scenes across the world, from Tacoma to Tokyo; and, this being the 1980s, screeds against Ronald Reagan. I always turned to the reviews first. There were pages upon pages of them, capsule reviews of roughly a million bands I’d never heard of. These listings filled me with awe: People had listened to all of this stuff–and they could place every release within the punk cosmology, each tape (they were mostly tapes) a speck of dust in an expanding universe of sound.

…

Recently, a friend and I traveled to Zambia in search of lost rock stars. Sleepy, mostly unheralded Zambia had a vibrant rock scene in the 1970s, full of bands that cranked out fuzz-drenched tunes drawing from the Stones, Sabbath, and traditional African grooves in more or less equal measure. It was great music, and almost nobody outside of Zambia knows about it. So we decided to go there, looking for this buried treasure.

When we touched down in Lusaka, we didn’t know if we’d find anyone. Decades had passed; lots of these guys were dead. But a few of them are still around, and we found them. I’m writing a story about it so I’ll post the results later. For now, here’s a bit of footage from an appearance I made with one of these Zam rock pioneers, Emanuel Jagari Chanda, singer and songwriter for the WITCH, on Lusaka’s Radio Phoenix one morning.

Note for note, Sudan produces some of the most infectiously happy-sounding music I’ve ever heard. Maybe it’s the country’s position at the fulcrum of Africa, its mixing of North and South, East and West, Arab and sub-Saharan Africa. All of these influences–the pentatonic scales, the brass and strings, the crisp percussion and soaring, crooning vocals–are on display in this clip by the legendary Mohammed Wardi, recorded during a concert he played in Addis Ababa in the 1990s. Wardi, who was a teacher until Sudanese state radio plucked him out of obscurity in the 1950s, has seen more than his share of hardship–he spent years in prison, then went into exile for pissing off the thugs who pass themselves off as Sudan’s legitimate government–but you wouldn’t know it from this clip.

I’ve never seen Wardi play live, but I have seen another Sudanese legend, a guitarist and singer named Sharhabeel Ahmed (naturally, he has a Facebook page), when I was working in Cairo about ten years ago. He played a free show somewhere in Gezira, I think, to an open-air courtyard stuffed front to back with Sudanese. Cairo, of course, has a huge population of Sudanese–workers, refugees, exiles of all sorts–and it seemed like they all came out on this hot July night. Ahmed wore a galabeyah, his guitar slung over his shoulder, something of the wise old man about him. His band was tight, the sound sugary and kind of liquid in the heat. The guys around me were losing their minds. Near the end of the show, he played one of his signature songs (if memory serves, it’s El Leil El Hady) and the place went nuts. After he finished the song, the crowd continued to chant the chorus, a wave rolling across the courtyard.

Then Ahmed did something I’ve never seen a musician do, before or since: He played the song again, note for note. And the crowd went crazy all over again.

So check it out for yourself: This stuff positively buzzes with joy.

In the latest issue of San Francisco magazine, I review the new album by Kowloon Walled City, the city’s best new metal band. These guys combine the aggression of Black Flag (sans Henry Rollins’ petulant moaning) with the sludgy grandeur of the Melvins, producing the aural equivalent of a primal scream. Check it out.

A band’s name is usually a clear indicator of its sound. (Really, could Cannibal Corpse play anything but metal?) This holds true for Kowloon Walled City, though you might not realize it at first. The San Francisco metal band takes its name from a famously dangerous Hong Kong neighborhood run by killers, drug dealers, and pimps–a sort of hell, in other words–and the group sounds satisfyingly like its name. Banging out a symphony of down-tuned guitars and turned-up amps, KWC harks back to similarly heavy forebears, like the Melvins, Helmet, and Oakland legends Neurosis. The band’s brutal debut EP last year earned it a spot at the gene­rally metal averse Noise Pop Festival, and its first long-player only improves on the formula. The opening track, “Annandale,” sets the tone, with front man Scott Evans’ sandpapery croak slicing through the barrage of low-end riffs and hammer-fall drumming. A keen sense of dynamics keeps things interesting all the way through: “Paper Houses” swings like an undertaker on his way to the boneyard, and the cathartic closer, “More Like the Shit Factory,” features a chiming guitar that could almost be called pretty. But the idyll doesn’t last long–these guys have a name to live up to, after all.