In these days of über-spin, it’s unwise to trust a politician’s reported music taste unless, like Ann Widdecombe’s (Cliff’s ‘Millennium Prayer’, since you ask), it’s so dreadful that they must be telling the truth. But what of Barack Obama’s? Well, the chap has a good ear if Extra Golden are anything to go by. In 2006, the presidential candidate-cum-superfan even furnished these Kenyan benga rockers with tour visas.
Though it won’t be quite as useful to Obama as D:Ream’s anthem was to Tony Blair, Extra Golden recorded a thankyou to the man on their 2007 album ‘Hera Ma Nono’. ‘Obama’s’ lilting benga (which closely resembles a guitar-heavy Congolese rumba) breaks into a maxi-fuzzed, twisted funk encouraged by Extra Golden’s two US indie veteran members, Weird War’s Alex Minoff and Ian Eagleson. These two, who play in Washington DC band Golden, joined the Extras – Onyango Wuod Omari, Opiyo Bilongo and Onyago Jagwasi – after Eagleson studied benga in Nairobi with original EG member Otieno Jagwasi, who died in 2005 from liver disease. The band’s first album was 2006’s ‘Ok-Oyot System’, translated as ‘not easy’, which is apt given that the drums were rehearsed with pencils and the whole thing was recorded in a restaurant. Since then, there’s been death, near civil war, visa trouble, Minoff and Eagleson caught with – or had planted on them, they say – a bag of mbange… We wonder if Vampire Weekend would go through all that for their sound?
