Heal the World, Sing Songs, Recite Poems, Celebrate Obama: Michael Franti, Sampa Mapangala, KengeKenge, poets

As I’ve enjoyed the joyful infectious rhythms of  various “Obama Songs”  on KCRW, I am offering a selection of them here.  Above is Michael Franti’s “Obama Song.” Below is Sampa Mapangala and the Occidentals; there’s another song of theirs I think I prefer “The Obama Song” but haven’t found it on YouTube yet. I did find this:

According to Peter Margasak in the Chicago Reader.

While in town a couple of weeks ago for World Music Festival Chicago the great African singer and bandleader Samba Mapangala (a native of the Congo who achieved his greatest fame after relocating to Kenya) went into Delmark’s house studio, Riverside, to cut “Obama Ubari Kiwe (Obama Be Blessed),” a song he also performed during at least one of his festival sets. In the studio he was joined by members of his own group, Virunga, as well as guitarist Nathaniel Braddock and saxophonist Greg Ward of Chicago’s Occidental Brothers Dance Band International. The tune is a lovely, lilting slice of benga, with luminescent guitar lines snaking around the infectious but easygoing groove. There are some introductory English-language rhymes from Fanaka Ngede, a Kenyan rapper based in Minneapolis, but for most of the song Mapangala’s effortlessly fluid cry takes center stage; in part, his Swahili lyrics say, “Obama, leadership is a gift from God, and you have it / Please help to bring peace, change, and hope to all Americans, and all the world / We love you!”

Peter Margasak continues about the band above:

The other song, called “Obama for Change,” is by the Kenyan group Kenge Kenge, who play a sort of raw, pre-electric strain of benga. I wrote about them here last summer. Their song, which is available on emusic.com, opens with a bit of English: “American people, citizens of the world! Here are sounds and

memories from Africa, drumming support for Barack Obama!” It’s hardly news that support for Obama outside the U.S. is overwhelming, nowhere more than in Africa, and musicians from Africa should be especially fond of Obama–his office’s assistance in cutting through immigration red tape has allowed both Extra Golden (who subsequently recorded their own praise song, “Obama”) and Seun Kuti to tour in the U.S. in the past couple of years.

Lots of ways to honor the occasion. You could watch the HBO televised “We are the One” event here.  My family will be wearing red, blue and gray versions of this shirt:

Barack Obama t-shirt from 4 hour world

Inauguration Speeches and Poetry offers activities for reflection for classroom students as well as students of poetry.

Read selected excerpts from past speeches and all of the poems commissioned to be read at the inauguration of U.S. presidents. The poetry section of the module includes poems written in honor of Obama’s presidency by a number of U.S. writers including former U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, like this one from Bob Holman:

Bob Holman

In Bamako, the koras can’t stop singing praises

Of the African king named Barack Obama.

You can talk all you want

in the courtyard

under the mango tree,

But these harps know their stories, revel

In contradiction’s harmony.

A song that consumes history.

Meanwhile, in Timbuktu

The shirt off my back

Spirited off in high-fived exuberance

Barack Obama’s face

Lifted in 2008 Sahara sandstorm

Lifting off from Dakar, Leopold

Senghor – they name their airports

After Poet-Presidents here —

An “I Made it to Timbuktu

And Back!” t-shirt on my back

Back to Union Square, 14th Street,

New York City, flying Middle Passage

Route of Bones Fair Trade Agreement

Here’s one from Derek Walcott:

Forty Acres

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving –
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked
cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is
a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field’s
receding rim –
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado’s
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

And why are people everywhere wanting  to sing songs of Obama praises? To explain, here’s Keith Olberman on 8 Minutes on 8 Years of George W. Bush: