Back in the ’60s, the template for a protest singer was set as an earnest fingerstyle folkie, regaling a cross-legged audience in a Greenwich Village coffee house. 5,000 miles away, and a half-century later, Mdou Moctar didn’t get the memo (in fact, as the African guitarist tells us today, almost no Western media whatsoever made it to his childhood city of Arlit, Niger).
As such, seventh album, Funeral For Justice, finds him chronicling the travails of his devastated nation with a fiery, feedback-soaked Stratocaster, revving up the musical traditions of his Tuareg ancestry and, critically, making audiences dance like there’s no tomorrow…
