Tinariwen has one of the most unlikely stories in all of pop music.
The Malian guitarists are all former Toureg rebels who once took up
arms against their government. In the 1980s, while living in refugee and
military training camps in Algeria and Libya, they came into contact
with Western pop music for the first time.
Inspired by the music of Santana, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, and
others, they picked up electric guitars to express their own reality.
Eventually, when peace was established in the mid-1990s, the rebels laid
down their arms, and Tinariwen traded in their guns for guitars once
and for all, becoming an international sensation in the process.
The Toureg, or Tamashek as they prefer to be known, have lived as
nomads in the Sahara for millennia. But when independence arrived in
their corner of Africa in the early 1960s, the newly created nation
states of Mali, Niger, Mauritania and Chad didn’t quite know how to
handle this transnational group who showed little respect for national
borders.
In 1963 Malian Touregs rose in rebellion against harsh new
restrictions on their lifestyle, but the Malian government crushed their
uprising. In the 1970s, severe drought forced many Toureg to seek
refuge on the other side of the Sahara, in Algeria and Libya. Here they
became increasingly radicalized. The rebellion simmered for years, and a
whole generation of Toureg was raised in camps without access to the
traditional ways. These young men became known as ishumar (or
“unemployed”) and Tinariwen would become their musical spokesmen. In
fact, all the current members of Tinariwen were born in nomad camps in
the far northeast of Mali.
Their stark musical style, with its bony, whiplash guitar, its
rolling, loping momentum, skeletal handclaps and cracked sandpaper
vocals, its lyrical explorations of longing, homesickness, brooding
anger mixed with melancholia, their feelings about their own stateless
disenfranchised people, is what endears them to fans around the world.
Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, the bands leader and one of the few undisputed
leaders of Tuareg guitar music, was a young, jobless, Tuareg migrant
scratching a living in Algeria and Libya in the 80s. His family had been
hounded out of his homeland in northeastern Mali in the early 1960s.
His father, a mason, was arrested in 1964 for aiding a Tuareg rebellion
against the newly independent government of Mali and executed by firing
squad.
Ibrahim carried the anger on his shoulders throughout his childhood
and adolescence. In 1979, he picked up a guitar and adapted traditional
Tuareg rhythms and melodies, mixing them with the pop sounds of North
Africa and beyond; Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Dire Straits
were seminal influences to this alien instrument.
