Soweto Gospel Choir, "Pride (In the Name of Love)"
Just listening to iTunes in "Shuffle" mode and drinking coffee this morning, when this popped up:
This is the title track from In the Name of Love: Africa Celebrates U2, which works both as a tribute album and as a nice introduction to contemporary African performers, most of whom aren't well known in this country. I've had this for a while in my collection via the largess of a friend on Last.fm; I'll be honest: it's a hit-and-miss album, as these sorts of things are: everyone performs well, but the goal here is to sell records to a Western audience and, as a result, the arrangements are pretty safe. For many of these singers, English isn't even their second language; so, in the case of Vieux Farka Touré's version of "Bullet the Blue Sky," he sings the verses in one of Mali's several languages (Vieux Farka Touré is the son of the late, great Ali Farka Touré, about whom I recently wrote) and only the title phrase in English. Still, there are more hits than misses here, and having this excellent a capella gospel choir singing a glorious, no-muss-no-fuss arrangement of U2's greatest song may make the album worth hunting down for some of you.
Happy Saturday. I hope you enjoy this.
4 comments:
I know you said "Happy Saturday," but is it OK, if I enjoyed this Sunday afternoon in my office preparing for a jury trial this week?
Seriously, thanks for putting this up.
Cheers.
You're most welcome, Randall. I've always been partial to gospel harmonies anyway, but there's something about their appearing in this particular song, along with this version's slower tempo, that reveal the lyrics' elegiac quality.
I think I'll give it another listen, too.
Correction: It's the same tempo as the original; it just feels slower.
This is gospel Music at its best.Soweto gospel choir.Am always blessed listerning to their music.
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