It's another sunny Friday, this one a little colder, ominously, but I'm still high on highlife (previously 1 ,2 MP3s still uppp!) - check out this fuckin awesome guest-posted Nigerian jam from Benn Loxo earlier in the month, put it on repeat for like an hour or two -
Bob Fred - Okolobie Special (link to post)
This is 1970s Ukwani highlife, courtesy of the Ukwuanis of the Niger River Delta - an area that comes up frequently in the news as the key oil and gas-producing region in Nigeria (itself Africa's largest oil producer), where militants largely drawn from the Ijaw ethnic group have successfully hamstrung resource extraction for much of the past year with a campaign of sabotage and kidnappings -
- but the much more chill Ukwuani are known largely for their rad musicality, which is known throughout Nigeria and has heavily influenced the music of its neighbors. From the Wikipedia entry on the Ukwuani:
The word Ụkwụànì is a concatenation of the words Ukwu, meaning the waist, or the leg (literally the ankle), and Anì, meaning the ground; below; beneath.
It probably has its roots in their culture of dancing with waists down, as a symbol of Ụkwụànì dancing expertise. Anyone who dances with their waists stiff or rigid is considered a non-expert and an inexperienced fellow in dance, according to the Ụkwụànì culture.
The other song in the linked-to post, by Prince A. E. Amgabaduba, is also great and also from Nigeria, though I wasn't able to find any more info about where in the country he's from -