Consumer Guide Album

Etoile de Dakar: Once Upon a Time in Senegal: The Birth of Mbalax [Sterns Africa, 2010]
"If I say this, you will think I'm crazy, but Étoile was like the Beatles," Finland-based guitarist Badou N'Diaye tells annotator-compiler Mark Hudson about Youssou N'Dour's first band, which Hudson believes belonged almost as much to El Hadji Faye's John Lennon as to N'Dour's McCartney. Those crude analogies are mine, not Hudson's, and they're vocal only, plus maybe McCartney/N'Dour's head for business. But Beatles is right: As Hudson puts it, these 23 1979-1981 recordings document an "uncouth, uneducated racket" of "nobodies from the other side of the tracks" who jump-started the Senegalese music industry and launched the career of a mechanic's son who decades later would be name-dropped as a presidential possibility. Duplicating only four tracks from Rough Guide's coruscating best-of and unearthing seven worthy songs left off Sterns' four long-unobtainable '90s reissues, this collection generates a rough excitement elided by N'Dour on mature albums that compensate with focus and scope. But he still hits it live sometime, because he knows how sweet it is. A