My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere by Orlean Susan

Author:Orlean, Susan [Orlean, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588364326
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-09-27T23:00:00+00:00

The Congo Sound

Hervé Halfon, a French person who hates French people, owns a record store on the rue des Plantes in Montparnasse, just a few Métro stops from the Eiffel Tower but spiritually closer to avenue Gambela in Congo or to the Mokolo district in Yaoundé, Cameroon. The store is called Afric’ Music. It has a small sign and an unremarkable window display, and it’s about the size and shape of a Parisian parking space. Inside, Hervé has spared all expense on the décor. Besides the floor and ceiling and one long counter, the store is nothing but rows and rows of CDs in racks and on shelves and in piles, all of them devoted to African music, except for a section reserved for the music of the Caribbean. A sound system sits somewhere behind the counter, out of view and, more important, out of reach of any customer who might want to, perhaps, switch the new N’Dombolo recording for something by M’Pongo Love. The sound system is on, loud, all the time. If you walk down the rue des Plantes, you will at first hear just the usual rumbling and tootling and clattering sounds of a Paris street, and then, as you pass the open door of Afric’ Music, you will be blasted by a few bars of a Congolese ballad, and as soon as you step past the door, the ballad will suddenly be out of earshot and the Paris street sounds will resume, as if you had walked through a harmonic cloudburst.

As is the custom in record stores all over the world, a song rarely gets played in its entirety at Afric’ Music. What happens is that Hervé and a customer will be listening to a song—let’s say, something by Wenge Tonya Tonya—and a certain guitar line will make Hervé think of a cut on an old Franco and O.K. Jazz album, which he will put on, and then the Franco song will remind the customer of a song by Les Youles that he heard the other day on the world music show on Radio Nova, so Hervé will turn off the Franco and put on Les Youles, and then another customer will wander in and suggest that the Les Youles song is a pitiful imitation of a much better song recorded twenty years ago by Tabu Ley Rochereau. Hervé will have that recording, too, so he will play it, and then the two customers will start arguing about it, and then Hervé, in his role as a peacekeeping force, will take off the Tabu Ley record and put on something uncontroversial, like the new album Bang Bang, by Carimi, whose members are Haitian but grew up in Miami.

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