Tinariwen: Mali Rebel Rock and Roll

Said Ag Ayad

As Tinariwen’s reputation grew, the Tuaregs made progress. Rebels in Mali signed a peace accord and ceremonially set their weapons afire in Timbuktu in ‘96. Five years later, Tinariwen recorded their first CD, The Radio Tisdas Sessions (never mind that the band was by now nearly 20 years old), and toured Europe. Westerners took notice.

Last year, Tinariwen opened for the Rolling Stones; last April, Robert Plant invited them onstage to play “Whole Lotta Love.” Tinariwen played the Montreux Jazz Festival alongside Carlos Santana. Bonnie Raitt adores them. I first learned about Tinariwen while reading an article whose lofty subheadline asked, “Is Tinariwen the greatest band on Earth?”

Rebel leaders used Tinariwen’s first albums, recorded on cassette tapes and passed around by fans, as anti-governmental war propaganda.”

National Geographic is filming Tinariwen’s performance in Santa Fe tonight. The show ends with nearly everyone on the bottom floor of this performance hall off their chairs and dancing, to Hell with the fire marshal and venue management. The group blasts into a chugging anthem that sounds remarkably like an Africanized version of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” The audience resembles a fevered Pentecostal congregation, whose members lose themselves and surrender helplessly to the rhythm.
Tinariwen rocks beneath their robes and turbans.

Moving through the crowd after the show, I overhear a woman in the front row say to a sweaty aisle dancer, young enough to be her son, “You know, you assholes really ruined that concert.”

“That’s rock ‘n’ roll, baby,” the kid snaps, barely missing a beat.

Audience members push toward the merchandise table in the lobby, making passage almost impossible. The band’s tour manager, Bastien Gsell, is selling T-shirts and CDs as fast as his hands will move. If Tinariwen’s three albums (The Radio Tisdas Sessions, Amassakoul and Aman Iman) had each cost $50 tonight, they’d still sell out. The fans here border on fanatical.

Past the maze of backstage hallways, downstairs, in an overlit dressing room fit for a troupe of ballerinas, quietly sits acoustic guitarist / singer Abdallah Alhousseyni. Round-faced and moustached, he is exhausted but accommodating. Next to him sits Valerie-Milenka Repnau, a sturdy, blonde Los Angeles resident who drove fourteen hours to be here tonight. Behind them, other band members change from their robes into slacks and buttondown shirts—Western clothes. They carry backpacks. This does not seem incongruous to Alhousseyni, though it’s odd to see his bandmates morph into something different. Offstage, they look like Americans