SOUNDTRACK: MALAWI MOUSE BOYS-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #42 (July 1, 2020).
This Tiny Desk (Home) Concert is from Malawi in Southeastern Africa. The performer is Nelson Mulligo of the Malawi Mouse Boys.
He only plays one song, but it’s really cool. Bob Boilen tells us some very important details about the song, the singer and the band.
We see his two-room home in the opening shot where he and his family live without plumbing or electricity. Then we see Nelson, standing below the power lines, holding his homemade guitar singing, “I’m So Tired of You.” It’s a song that sings out the evils of poverty, a life of hard physical work, of making money scavenging for mice amongst boars and snakes so they can sell them as roasted mice shish kabobs along the roadside. We only get one song, and even that cuts off abruptly, but I was deeply moved when producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, The Good Ones) sent it my way. He and his wife Marilena Umuhoza Delli met and recorded the Malawi Mouse Boys in 2011. You can hear Ian Brennan tell his story on NPR’s Weekend Edition. If you fall in love with what you hear, give a listen to the entire band harmonize. You can find their music on Bandcamp here. Even though the group played Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD festival in 2015, they still live in poverty. Support what you love.
The song is simple and very catchy with Mulligo’s voice sounding strong and really lovely and his homemade guitar sounding great.
[READ: July 2, 2020] Nichijou 1
This book was recommended to me based on some other manga that I had read. I didn’t know Keiichi Arawi [あらゐけいいち] or anything about Nichijou, but the cover picture of a classroom full of kids with a deer on one of the desks looked promisingly funny. As did the comments about the series being delightfully surreal.
It is very surreal. So much so that I finished the book with a massive question mark hanging over my head. I literally had no idea what was going on.
When I looked up some information about the series (there are dozens of books and a TV show), I learned some details about what I was reading. When I re-read it, it made a lot more sense, but was still really bizarre and not easy to follow. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 