7 Seconds: The Best Of Youssou N'Dour

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Total Tracks: 16   Total Length: 75:34

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eMusic Features

Icon: Youssou N'Dour
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Icon: Youssou N’Dour

By Keith Harris, eMusic Contributor

Your first exposure to Youssou N'Dour's soaring tenor keen likely came on the coda to Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes." In the late '80s, with the assistance and encouragement of Gabriel and other respectable liberal rockers, N'Dour sought to cross over to Western audiences by adapting Senegalese mbalax to contemporary synth-rock settings. Unfortunately, that short period of N'Dour's career still defines Senegal's greatest musician to the ears of many Western listeners. But prior to his crossover… more »

The Youthful Youssou N'Dour
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The Youthful Youssou N’Dour

By Richard Gehr, eMusic Contributor

Scholars in the field of Youssology - i.e., the study of all things pertaining to the life and music of mbalax star Youssou N'dour, the most widely embraced and critically acclaimed African artist of the past two decades - have lately been focusing their collective attention on the singer's earliest performances, recorded while he was still a teenager. Despite his age, there's very little juvenilia in the music N'dour made during the late 1970s, prior to… more »

Francophilia
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Francophilia

By Richard Gehr, eMusic Contributor

One figure stands off to the side and slightly obscured amid the pantheon of African bandleaders. The Congolese superstar Franco - christened François Luambo Makiadi in 1938, dead of AIDS in 1989 - is the least internationally-acclaimed among afropop giants such as Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, and Youssou N'Dour. With a biography at least as tragically complex as Fela's, Franco lived large, died sadly, and left hundreds of hours of some of the world's… more »

They Say All Music Guide

This 16-track compilation covers Senegalese singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Youssou N’Dour’s Columbia Records period, from 1991 to 1996. Perhaps the most popular pop culture figure in Senegal’s history, N’Dour created a music of his own from various sources, which he called “mbalax” and which incorporates everything from jazz, soul, hard R&B styles, hip-hop, and even Cuban samba, and juxtaposes them with the folk melodies and polyrhythms of his native land. The cuts here, particularly “Old Man,” “New Africa,” “Yo le Le, (Fulani Rhythm),” and the covers of Smokey Robinson’s “Don’t Look Back,” and Lennon and McCartney’s “Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da,” reveal N’Dour’s idiosyncratic, yet very accessible grasp and integration of Western and African pop styles. – Thom Jurek

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