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Although Tinariwen’s recordings are often relegated to the global music section, there’s nothing world beat-y about their raging Touareg rebel music, which is actually closer in spirit to raw Mississippi hill country blues or first generation rock ‘n’ roll than anything you’d find in a store that sells fair trade coffee alongside hemp clothes. The band members are war-toughened north Malian desert nomads who grew up fighting political and social oppression and finally concluded that using guitars instead of guns might be a better way of finding modern solutions to the ancient problems connected with life in exile. Naturally, their songs deal with the issues of displacement, unemployment and harassment, but nevertheless, there’s a spiritually uplifting quality to the music of Aman Iman. It goes beyond the raucously uptempo drones of their past work to reveal a more tender, introspective side of Tinariwen typically only heard underneath the stars in the Saharan sand.
