One of Kenya’s biggest acts big up their home continent…
[Video][Website]
[5.62]
Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Guitars are the heart of African pop. The highlife riffs and figures here not only adorn the track, they breathe life into it, and the bass lines in the chorus are superb. However, when the guitar goes from rhythm to that distorted lead, the songs loses focus, and that makes the last third of the track seem a bit too long, even with that badass percussion.
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: A crowdpleasing slice of continental pride that updates Kenyan benga (distinct from West African highlife) for the Afropop era. Although it’s a little too easy to imagine it playing over the credits of an inspirational movie about an exceptional athlete from a picturesque village, Savara Mudigi’s lead vocal is worth quite a large amount of cheesiness.
[7]
Alfred Soto: The guitar and benga overtones offer the only hint of grit to universalist lyrics that I’d expect to hear in the lobby of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge.
[4]
Madeleine Lee: Truly an anthem: broad lyrics, endless uplift, an unfettered sense of pride in one’s location, and melodies that go where you’d want them to go. A little repetitive, but the conviction with which they sing never flags.
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: “I want to be rich/I want to be famous/I want to have lots and lots of money” is a sentiment I can get behind, and Sauti Sol neatly threads the individuated aspiration behind these opening lines into a broader communal one. His dreams remain his own though: although “Live and Die in Afrika” extends its hope to a pan-nationalistic contingent, its purview remains personal. The lyric’s naked and unadorned longing for success is of a particular one that can only be realized within a society that can attain the same. The harmonies suggest it might be within reach, but the deoxygenated guitar solo is only stultifying.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Always nice to see a song match the statement: the guys want to be famous, and the track’s got its head tossed back to the sky. Lyrically, they cover everything from Egypt to South Africa, and if the synths don’t provide the sweep, the backing vocals do.
[6]
Cassy Gress: The female backing vocals and the fingerstyle guitar are great, but there’s not enough of it, and it has that stupid “vwerp stop the track” effect that has no place in pretty much anything anymore. The video for this shows Nairobi with a sort of overcast sky, and that’s how the song sounds too, a little overcast; speeding it up just a smidge would help with that, cause I really didn’t want to be bored by this.
[4]
Gaya Sundaram: I’m always here for some hometown pride, especially when travelling to the West is seen as the best path for finding success. Sauti Sol wants to do all the things that you could call the American dream, but they’re perfectly happy to achieve them at home. I am also always here for the way the electric guitar and percussion push the final chorus to an emotional high that drives home the importance of the message behind the pride.
[7]