Customer Reviews

Rough Guide to Congolese Soukous

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Explaining Soukous is hard. Soukous are a style of African music, based off Rumba, that originated in the Congo and spread out across the rest of the continent. After hearing this CD, a wonderful compilation from the Rough Guides, you will definately understand why Soukous were popular enough to spread across Africa! This CD gives a great overview of Soukous, focusing on selections from the Congo.
All the music on this CD is dancey and upbeat, like Soukous should be. Several big names, including Franco, Sam Mangwana, Koffi Olomide and Papa Wemba appear on this CD, giving classical performances. Indeed, I'd say that "Cooperation" is easily one of the most popular Soukous of all time. Old and new appear side by side on this CD. If you are unfamilar with Soukous, or even the music of the Congo in general, you should consider buying this CD. Its a magnificent introduction to Soukous. And even if you don't speak Lingala, you will find yourself addicted to this music.

I love soukous and this is one of my favorite soukous albums. It has great songs from all the best-known soukous artists. Soukous shares the same shuffling, stacato backbeat as Cuban rhumba, but also features glittering, cascading guitars that are very impressive. In addition to this, the horns and the vibrant vocals (which are usually sung in Portuguese, French, Lingala, English or all of the above!), make soukous irresistable! This album not only has great songs, from great artist, but the sound quality is great and the liner notes are very informative! Truly beautiful music! Worth every penny; Buy it!

This stupendous collection of current soukous/rumba music is filled with the complex cascading electric guitar riffs, jazzy saxophones, soulful singing, and pounding, complex rhythms which makes this music popular all over the African continent. A society so filled with political and economic chaos is bound to generate joyful music to alleviate the pain and give hope to life: boy, these songs do so with a vengeance! Such buoyant, danceable, listenable, energetic rhythms will cure the blues even on the darkest of days. Rejoice with this CD!

The music on this CD is great selection of Congo Soukous Music. There are songs of the older stars (Franco and Tabu Ley) and current stars (Papa Wemba, Yondo Sister and Koffi Olomide) too. My preference is for the older stars.

Cooperation by Franco and Sam Mangwana is one my top 10 Soukous or Rumba songs of all time. This is classic Rumba at its best. Franco and Sam always seem to work so well together, I hope the record companies re-release all the CDs they made together.

Sai by sweet singing and trend setting Kando Bongo Man is another one of the great Soukous tunes of all time.

I also really liked Marie Jose by RY-CO Jazz. I really liked the raw sound of reverb guitar work and power sax on this cut. A great dance tune.

The only reason I took a star off was the problem I had with the ECD (Enhanced CD). The CD wouldn't work with Winamp. This is the only CD I have that doesn't work with Winamp. The CD does work with every other player.

Our world of music can be so homoginized in the USA. It seems that the FM radio stations push on us all this stuff that comes mainly from very few locations around the globe. We hear the music basically that the major record promoters want us to buy on the commercial FM dial. There is great music all over the world and we can get to hear and experience only a small fraction of it, unless we make the effort to look elsewhere.

I got exposed to the music of Africa and Soukous through a public (listener sponsored) FM radio staion here in the San Francisco Bay Area. And have experienced some of this wonderful music live tool. That radio staion is KKUP. The music of Africa, in particular Soukous is a joyous and rich musical form. Currently I have a small collection of this music. This CD, Rough Guide to Congolese Soukous, is a great starting point. This music should put a smile on your face if you are open to multi-cultural music, and music that comes from places elsewhere around the world.

I was looking particularly for this music and this CD is a bulls-eye.

This cd definately offers a very nice variaty of songs of the Democratic Republic Congo, the former Zaïre. All artists are well known and very succesful for years. Some of them performed in Africa, Europe, U.S. and even Japan.

There is only one little downside though: half the songs kan be found on other cd's with various artists. So .... check before you buy!

As anyone up on the wars going on in the Congo that the West ignores while it chases Osama Bin Laden and WMDs, this area of the world is hell of Earth for so many.

The music that comes out of here is quite the opposite--heavenly. Most of it is that jangly African guitar we all expect but this is stuff you can really dance to. Of the lot I'd say Kanda Bongo Man's "Sai" is the best but I could have done without the two songs over 10 minutes long on here.

Typical Rough Guide with great liner note booklet on the genre and the artists.

If you are looking for an introduction to Soukous music this may be a good first album for you. There are selections from several of the innovators of this musical genre including Kanda Bongo Man and Pepe Kalle. The CD also comes with a booklet that gives you a bit of background information on the various artists included in this compilation.