"Freedom"

Yothu Yindi

“Freedom”

By Thabiso wa ga Nkoana

When thinking of world music, it is often the case that people envisage an obscure sound, created on some rudimentary instruments and recorded by an old, bearded, scruffy looking, white, male, music scholar.  A sound that seems not to have a place in this MTV crazed society of ours.  This is not the case with Yothu Yindi’s 1993 offering Freedom.

Yothu Yindi is a band that hails from the Yolngu homelands on the north east coast of Australia’s Northern Territory.  This place has been occupied and protected by the Yolngu for approximately 40 000, give or take a few millennia.  This is the rich heritage from which this modern band draws it’s original sound.

The album is a visionary synthesis of traditional Australian (those who can trace their ancestors back more than 1000 years on that continent, not the descendants of prisoners and prison wardens) and modern sounds of pop and rock.  The combination of a complete western band with guitars, drums, keyboard, etc and Yolngu instruments such as the legendary yidaki and bilma, make for engaging listening. 

The Yolngu, as with most indigenous peoples around the world, are a people that live in harmony with nature.  This truth is exhibited in tracks such as Timeless Land and Baywara.  The album has a feel of consciousness in its lyrics, speaking of war, culture and nature.  This is respectable in a world where album sales seem to mean more than educating, uplifting and sharing. 

The nasal singing of the Yolngu is all over this album, both in their traditional style and language as well as when rendering a typical rock chorus.  It is at one time haunting and transcending and overbearing at another.  There is also too heavy a reliance on the rock genre.  With a rock riff in most the songs.  This is due to the popularity of punk and pop rock in Australia.  Another album for the radio stations to fill space with and not have too many dissenting tweets.

Freedom sounds like the cries of a people trying to resurrect themselves through their ancestors.  The problem is, it is in a language they won’t understand.  Nonetheless, it is an album that one can play in a club, at a party and in the B & O sound system of the most avid and learned of musos.  Check it out, it won’t be an hour wasted.  Unless you have a debilitating allergy towards pop and punk rock, mixed with 80’s electro!