MOVIES

MOVIES / VIDEOS Rumba Kings tells the story of Congolese rumba

by Steve Newton

In 2008, Peruvian director Alan Brain took a job as a full-time filmmaker for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). While there, he worked on news shows and short-length documentaries for the UN, and he also filmed documentaries about urgent issues in the DRC such as human rights, internally displaced persons, women’s rights, and child abuse.

But it wasn’t all work during Brain’s five-year sojourn in the Congo. An avid vocalist, he also started up a salsa band, and at one point one of the other singers in the group suggested that he check out some original Congolese music. He loaned Brain a CD of Congolese rumba music, and the filmmaker became an instant fan.

“I grew up in Lima listening to Cuban music,” he explains through a thick Spanish accent on the phone from Morocco, “all these Afro-Cuban stars my mother used to love. She used to dance in the living room when I was a baby, and the Congolese rumba music had a bit of that Cuban music DNA in it, so it was like coming home.”

Brain’s newly acquired love of Congolese rumba led him to eventually direct, coproduce, and edit The Rumba Kings, which had its world premiere at DOXA on May 6. The film portrays the rise to prominence of various rumba bands from Kinshasa (formerly Léopoldville), the capital and largest city of the DRC, a country that has suffered from decades of political instability, war, and corruption, as well as centuries of colonial exploitation.

The Rumba Kings shows how groups like Le Grand Kallé et l’African Jazz and TPOK Jazz formed in the 1950s before gaining immense popularity and spawning their own national guitar heroes in players like “Docteur” Nico Kasanda and Franco Luambo, respectively.

Using concert footage, interviews, and archival images, Brain’s film depicts how the development of Congolese rumba—basically a mixture of Cuban son and traditional Congolese music, with a big accent on electric guitar—became something like a call to freedom for the long-oppressed region, culminating in 1960’s “Indépendance Cha Cha”, a song that celebrated Congo’s independence and became an anthem for similar movements across the continent. The filmmaker says that it took him a while before he realized that that was the story he wanted to tell.

“I didn’t want to just make a film about the development of the music,” he says, “‘cause that was too technical, too niche just for music lovers, music fans. I wanted to find a narrative, and I knew there was one there, but it took me a long time to see it, because sometimes we don’t see what we have in front of our eyes.”

Brain says that one of his personal favourite documentaries, the one that inspired him the most, is Playing for Change, Mark Johnson’s 2003 film that celebrates the freedom and lives of street musicians in America. He’s hoping that The Rumba Kings has a similarly galvanizing effect on viewers.

“What I hope they take away is the power of music, right, the power of music in creating hope, in giving hope, in providing a space of resistance against oppression. And maybe, hopefully, also it could help people see that the world is vast, you know, that the music of the world is vast.

“I can tell you something amazing,” he adds. “Many times in Congo I have been with friends who are musicians who didn’t even know the Beatles! They didn’t know Neil Young! And I love Neil Young! I am a big fan of the Guess Who, Neil Young. I love rock.

“And so I travelled there with all my CDs, and I have introduced some of my musicians there to Neil Young, and to the Beatles. They love it, but it didn’t get to them because the world is vast. A lot of the great cultural expressions from Africa are not easy to be found outside, and that goes the other way also.” g

Director Alan Brain’s work with a UN peacekeeping mission led him to appreciate Congoloese rumba music and its identification with freedom movements in the colonially exploited region.

The Rumba Kings, in French and Lingala with English subtitles, streams until May 16 as part of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival.

Devours gets mondo trippy with “Yoshi’s Revenge”

by Mike Usinger

Ever find yourself sitting there asking “What the hell did I just see?”

Like that time you watched Blue Velvet for the first time after dropping three tabs of Orange Sunshine.

Or drank in the video for Starcrawler’s “Bet My Brains” after going down a postBlue Velvet YouTube rabbit hole that, following three horse tranquilizers, started with revisiting Frank Booth’s “Love letter” soliloquy in the workyard.

Or took another hit on the bong while having your mind warped by “harold snepsts at dave schultz kings”, which, for some entirely unfathomable reason, is set to what sounds like a ’50s jazz 45 that’s been left in the sun for three days and then played on 33 through a 1920s phonograph.

Add “Yoshi’s Revenge” by Devours to the above blue-ribbon list. (Check it out on YouTube.)

The last time we heard from Vancouver-via-Nanaimo artist Jeff Cancade in his Devours guise, he was tackling big issues—everything from sexuality to selfesteem—with 2019’s Iconoclast.

Since then, he’s been nothing if not ambitious, including releasing a side project record last year under the name of Golden Age of Wrestling. Somewhere along the line he began using his COVID-19 downtime to write and record a double album called Escape From Planet Devours, which heads our way in mid-May.

From Pink Floyd’s The Wall to Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade, there’s a reason artists make double albums: they’ve got a story to tell and need a sprawling canvas on which to do so. That’s seemingly the case with Escape from Planet Devours, which will be released on Cancade’s own surviving the game imprint.

In announcing the record, the artist sets things up with: “The double album is heavily inspired by mid-’90s action blockbusters, such as Speed, True Lies, and Die Hard with a Vengeance. I didn’t have any gay action stars to look up to when I was young, so I transformed into one for this album cycle. Thematically, the albums are both about escaping - from mainstream culture, impossible beauty standards, depression, isolation, aging, and masculinity. It’s also about feeling hopeless as a musician in Vancouver and battling to stay afloat.”

But back to the reason that we’re here today: the video for “Yoshi’s Revenge” off Escape From Planet Devours.

After a bit of misleading advertising (unless Universal truly did bankroll things), we get a hint Cancade might once again be using songwriting as a form of therapy. Hence the song’s opening lines: “It’s official/We need to break up/I gave you head, I gave you space/ But I’ll never replace your true love”.

And then things get mondo, mondo trippy. As Cancade sits there chugging energy drinks and hoisting mini-barbells, the screen behind him is a channel-surfers’ fever dream.

Buckle in for a tribute to Speed, seemingly reimagined by the Doodlebops via Troma Studios. The midday parking lot raves located somewhere south of Gothville, U.S.A. Eighties sitcom footage where the only thing that’s missing is the Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” blaring on the vintage Pioneer stereo. Grainy “Just Say No” cartoon action that, in the same way as the immortal Sarah T.—Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, makes you want to say “Fuck yes!!”

And, well, you should get the idea by now. Watch in wonder, knowing there’s really no way to answer the question “What did I just see?” g

Devours eventually accepted that going to Second Beach sans sunscreen was foolhardy.