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Music Videos and the Effeminate Vices of Urban Culture in Mali

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2011

Dorothea E. Schulz
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Abstract

This article focuses on a number of highly successful female pop singers in Mali whose video music clips and music shows make up a major share of urban people's daily broadcast consumption. The article explores the reasons for the astonishing success of the singers by locating the consumption and interpretation of their songs in Malian popular and scholarly discourses on cultural authenticity and moral decline. Some Malian scholars emphasise that women's pop songs reflect the corruption and mixing of traditional oral genres characterised by historical knowledge, textual complexity and regional specificity. Their criticism is echoed by a number of older people in town and countryside. It is reminiscent of a tendency among urban consumers to express their fascination with and fears of life in town in the icon of the seductive, dangerous and immoral town woman. To many women of the urban middle classes, in contrast, the pop singers embody a desirable solution of women's daily dilemma: a Malian morality dressed up in the fashionable outfit of a ‘modern’ urban woman. Middle-class women respond enthusiastically to this art form because it praises them for upholding ‘traditional’ values in the face of adversity while absolving them of complicity in undermining such values.

Résumé

Cet article s'intéresse à plusieurs chanteuses pop qui connaissent un succès important au Mali et dont les vidéoclips et les spectacles musicaux constituent une part importante de la consommation radiophonique et télévisuelle quotidienne de la population urbaine. Il examine les raisons de l'extraordinaire succès de ces chanteuses en situant la consommation et l'interprétation de leurs chansons dans les discours populaires et intellectuels maliens sur l'authenticité culturelle et le déclin moral. Certains intellectuels maliens soulignent que les chansons de ces femmes reflètent la corruption et le mélange des genres oraux traditionnels caractérisés par la connaissance historique, la complexité du texte et la spécificité régionale. Leur critique est reprise par une partie de la population âgée, dans les villes et à la campagne. Cette situation rappelle une tendance chez les consommateurs urbains d'exprimer la fascination et les craintes qu'ils ont à l'égard de la vie urbaine à travers l'image de la citadine séductrice, dangereuse et immorale. Pour beaucoup de femmes issues des classes moyennes urbaines, en revanche, ces chanteuses pop incarnent une solution souhaitable au dilemme quotidien des femmes: une moralité malienne vêtue d'une tenue à la mode de citadine ‘moderne’. Les femmes des classes moyennes accueillent avec enthousiasme cette forme d'art car elle les félicite de soutenir les valeurs traditionnelles contre l'adversité tout en les disculpant de toute complicité de fragilisation de ces valeurs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , August 2001 , pp. 345 - 372
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2001

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