In record producer Joe Boyd’s magisterial book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, a history of World Music as an industry and Boyd’s own not-inconsiderable part in it, he recalls one of Youssou N’Dour’s band members telling him that “7 Seconds” — N’Dour’s hit duet with Neneh Cherry — was “the worst catastrophe ever to happen to Senegalese music”. His reasoning was that its success pushed the Dakar superstar into pursuing a shinier, more westernised sound.
Boyd, who once proposed a back-to-the-roots live recording of N’Dour’s mbalax, only to be angrily rebuffed, had his own reasons to be sceptical about the musician’s glossy production. But it remains true that N’Dour’s early promise, with his 1984 breakthrough album Immigrés and his work as bandleader of Super Étoile de Dakar, has only fitfully been manifested throughout his recording career, where collaborations (with Cherry, with Peter Gabriel) outshine some very watered-down albums. The backwards-looking History, from 2019, felt at the time like a magician’s farewell to his art.
Éclairer Le Monde (Light The World) is not a perfect album, but it deploys its singer better than many of its predecessors. The most recent recording from N’Dour’s only real Senegalese rival, Baaba Maal, saw Swedish producer Johan Karlsberg double down on percussion, both real and artificial, and N’Dour’s producers, Michael League and Weedie Braimah, do the same here.
The flourish of talking drum and percussion at the start of the opener “Tout Pour Briller” has the punchiness of N’Dour’s early songs that poured out of the radios of Paris taxis in the mid-1980s, which makes up for generic lyrics about self-improvement. There are feminist turns on “Sa Ma Habiibi”, with a nagging lope to its condemnation of forced marriage, and “Say Thank You”, a tribute to mothers.
The singer’s son Nelson choruses in behind Rema Diop on the jaunty football anthem “On L’a Fait”, with terrace chanting. Another, less boisterous highlight comes on “Sam Fall”, a tribute to the Baye Fall, an Islamic sect, with League locking acoustic guitar with N’Dour’s longtime guitarist Tapha Gaye. Whether or not Éclairer Le Monde lights up the charts, it is a shining return to form.
★★★★☆
‘Éclairer Le Monde (Light The World)’ is released by The Orchard
