Entertaining to read Simon fessing up to not getting Kid Creole etc back in the day. One of the persistent curiosities of anglo-critical response to non-anglo music is the eternal threshold problem of the erm ‘Latin Tinge‘: Brit jazzbos always shy away from jazzers drawn to Cuban or Brazilian (or ANY South-of-the-Border) elements; A Certain Ratio’s later forays might as well have been inaudible; in Brit versions of the History of HipHop, Freestyle is simply NOT THERE. Even in the World Music Community – never slow to glom onto something worthily rebarbative – there’s been a distinct tendency to favour left-behind hardcore thirdworld-tourist-purism (cf Buena Vista) over anything crossborder popular and chartbound…. The Blissed-Out dancer dances solo, deep inside his own head: meanwhile, an endless series of courtly public steps-for-two – the tango, the rhumba, the_______, the ______the ______ – marks the overlooked history of the modern sexual body in music. (I blame Sir Francis Drake…)
(Of course the REAL Creole deal is Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band…)
[update: also i just noticed this, ‘Sonixly/ridmaticly, the melange is Dubfunk + AfroPop + French-artpop. A pentangle of territory whose five sides are Tom Tom Club, My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, Nightclubbing, Your Cassette Pet, and Les Ritas Mistoukos’ = ie a pentangle whose five sides admit no actual AfroPop, let alone a vector for um the mambo!!!]