The Master Tonnerre of Kinshasa delivers an implacable lesson of truth in Hierarchyhis new EP available on February 3 via Blue Line Records and PIAS.
In the streets of Bandalungwa, commune of Kinshasa, Wilfried Luzele cries out the misery of a forgotten youth. Kin La Belle is sometimes misnamed, the city is the scene of many tragedies, and the one now called Lova Lova knows the dark side. Armed with his hoarse voice, carried by sonorities at the antipodes of the rumba which rocks the country, he transforms the misery from which he emerged into a saving force. ” The power of my music is to transform past moods from negative to positive, to involve my ancestors and also to transmit the truth, in contradiction with the lies, to make discover immaterial things to the living” explains the singer. A sometimes convoluted and truly original philosopher, he uses sounds and words to bring to light destinies of a dark banality. It’s his power, or Hierarchyfrom the title of his new EP.
In this project, preceded by the revealing 6-track Head of Danger (“The man who appears in dreams”), Lova Lova becomes “the instrument of music and the guardian of languages that[‘il] persists in using to preserve them from oblivion”. He expresses his ideas and his pain in Lingala, Tshiluba, Kikongo and French, in a “mixture of traditional music, rock, soukous (style of rumba which preceded ndombolo, editor’s note), hip-hop and afro-punk”. The fact is that his creativity saved him during the troubled times when he fled his home to join the faceless crowd of street children, the “shégués”. He finds in the undermining and the clan of “Japanese sappers” a new way and even a way out. “Sapping is the activity I chose when I went out into the streets to live there. It’s even the only door I was able to use to learn the movements, body expressions and art from the public. With my costumes, in another way, I remain a sapper and the sap is in me as an art”.
Today, undermining is one of the key elements of his stunning visuals, as exemplified in the music video for the single “Mambu”. Stylish, subversive and unleashed, sappers stroll through the streets of Bandal and contrast with the disarray and misery of young people left to their own devices and to drugs. Lova Lova challenges the audience: “ you see the children who sleep in the streets, who don’t go to school… and those who go to school but don’t eat, damn it! “. Middle messenger, he is also undermined, but the outfit is of another ilk. The armor he wears is made of electrical wires, calculators, hard drives, and other junk. He almost looks like a superhero. Like other Congolese artists and collectives such as Fulu Miziki, Lova Lova leads a “trash revolution”. Used as instruments or as outfits, the waste that pollutes the streets of the city finds a second life in the learned spirit of this protesting artist.
L’opus Hierarchy is a cry from the heart and anger. Lova Lova no longer wants this life, neither for himself nor for others, and the journey towards a better future begins by looking reality in the face, and denouncing the evils that are eating away at Kinshasa. The title “Bana Mabe” makes the diagnosis: it is not a matter of fate but of a social problem, which Lova Lova had to deal with. “I consider myself the voice of all these people who are who I was at the time. It’s a way for me to help them and to denounce the hypocrisy of those who point the finger at them. Because they are either worse, but behind the scenes. Or it is these same people who create the atmospheres conducive to it continuing, who benefit from it in one way or another. So with my non-Catholic words, I present the facts. » Lova Lova is the storyteller of the misery of its streets, and herald of their dignity. You will soon be able to discover this striking testimony, since the EP Bokonzi will be available on February 3, via Blue Line Records and PIAS.
Listen to “Mambu” in our afro + club playlist
