Overview
I am an anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Montreal in Canada. I have conducted fieldwork in the D.R. Congo, Senegal, and the Comoros Islands and have published on various themes, including popular music, popular culture, globalization, cultural policy, collaborative research, intercultural relations, and theories of intersubjectivity.
What is “atalaku”?
“Atalaku” is a Kikongo word that means “Look at me over here”, but it is also the word used to describe the musician in Congolese popular music who creates and strings together the seemingly random series of short percussive phrases known as ‘shouts’ that drive the fast-paced dance sequences of contemporary Congolese popular music. Of the scattered sentences written about the atalaku, they all in one way or another capture the contradictory nature of his persona. The atalaku rarely appears in music videos, and despite the fact that most people are familiar with his ‘song’, he is not classified as a singer. He shares the spotlight with some of the biggest names in the Kinshasa music scene but he is stigmatized relative to his fellow bandmembers. People criticize him for his crass behavior on stage and for his uglification of the fluid sentimentality of old-school rumba, but he has somehow become the necessary ingredient to every Kinshasa dance sequence.
Spraycan maracas
Pictured above is Nono, one of the three original atalaku to join the group Zaiko Langa Langa in 1986 (the second of the three, Manjeku, is pictured in the background). The instrument he is holding in his hand is a maracas, the same type of instrument that is featured in the banner on the home page of this website. Below is a picture of the maracas that was fabricated by Bébé Atalaku (the third of original atalaku) in Kinshasa in 1996.
