MUSIC (DRC): La Verite De Franco by Vicky+Franco & L’OK Jazz (1968)

 

Play La verite {Audio}

      I have suggested elsewhere, in general terms, that Franco (Luambo Luanzo Makiadi) and his band had such a huge array of talent and technical capabilities that, led by him, they were able to sustain the capacity to stay competitive at the very top of the musical pecking-order in their country (once Congo Leopoldville, and then Zaire, and... now DRC) – in their time. What I didn’t quite touch on was the long-term survival or adaptability of their music – or more specifically their tunes and beats and the dance-styles which they spawned or fed into – in a world in which tastes and ideas about dance were inevitably going to evolve and perhaps drastically change, even beyond easy recognition, and probably with time selectively ‘reincarnate’.  

      What I want to worry briefly about here is how they could overcome – not just stand – the test of time and thus be in perpetuity current; even if, periodically, as throwbacks.

       If leisure-seekers in succeeding generations were conceivably going to acquire, and perhaps return to, different ideas about sound and dance-floor body texts, the intriguing (or perhaps rhetorical) question must, for present purposes, be: Did any of Franco’s songs have a built-in potential for adaptation or re-imagining by properly-licensed artists and producers in the generations after him; and, if so, which particular ones? This may appear to be a non-question, but great works (or the works of great artists) are supposed to be perennial or cyclical in their appeal to succeeding generations. They’re not supposed to suffer the fate of ‘mere’ mortals – that is, permanent death after some duration!

       One song which has recently struck me as carrying within it the ‘genes’ for even longer-term survival than usual is La Verite de Franco (all the 4:57 minutes of it!). I find that it has an aural form and content that’s wonderfully ‘modernist’ in the same vein as today’s pop hits – and, by definition, perhaps more evergreen than most. It has an uncannily self-contained sound system, so to speak, that’s nevertheless open to infusion and nourishment from the more expansive galaxy of now – and vice-versa... [More later] 

#LingalaPop #Rumba #CongoleseMusic