Burundi beat
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The appropriation of the so-called Burundi beat by Bow Wow Wow, Adam and the Ants, and several other British bands poses yet another moral conundrum. The original source of this tribal rhythm is a recording of 25 drummers, made in a village in the east African nation of Burundi by a team of French anthropologists. The recording was included in an album, Musique du Burundi, issued by the French Ocora label in 1968. It is impressively kinetic, but the rhythm patterns are not as complex as most African drumming; they are a relatively easy mark for pop pirates in search of plunder. During the early 70's, a British pop musician named Mike Steiphenson grafted an arrangement for guitars and keyboards onto the original recording from Burundi, and the result was Burundi Black, an album that sold more than 125,000 copies and made the British best-seller charts.
Ten years later, Britain's foppish, acutely fashion-conscious new romantics and their tribalist cohorts rediscovered Burundi Black. They found it rhythmically compelling, but Mike Steiphenson's pop arrangement was out of date. So Rusty Egan, drummer with the new romantic band Visage, and a French record producer named Jean-Philippe Iliesco recorded a new pop arrangement over the hapless Burundian drummers. Their revised Burundi Black was released in Britain this year and rapidly became a dance-floor hit. Now a New York label, Cachalot records (55 Mercer Street, New York, N.Y. 10013), has issued the Egan-Iliesco Burundi Black in this country.
This latest Burundi Black is glitzy pop-schlock, a throwaway with a beat. But its perpetrators are making money with it, and so is Mike Steiphenson, who has held onto the Burundi Black copyright. Adam and the Ants, Bow Wow Wow, and several other bands have notched up an impressive string of British hits using the Burundi beat as a rhythmic foundation. But the Burundian drummers who made the original recording are not sharing in the profits. Nobody told them to copyright their traditional music, and trying to obtain copyright for a rhythm would be a difficult proposition in any case. -- Robert Palmer, 1981 via Nytimes [Sept 2006]
