The dancing can continue. Only last summer, Jo Tongo’s 1980 album Sa Discossa resurfaced as a reissue; now Those Flowers follows, the record with which he pursued the course set two years earlier. Afrobeat meets refined reggae in the work of the Cameroonian musician, who spent most of his career in Europe, primarily in France and Germany. The album is neatly structured into a funk side, a disco side and a roots side.
The title track, along with »People Need Peace« and »Funky Feeling«, fuses politically conscious lyrics with elements such as slap bass and disco strings, combining an explicit sense of mission with direct appeals to the body to move freely. The same applies to the reggae tracks, only that the groove, true to the genre, transmits much slower vibrations to the motor centre. This may have something to do with prejudice or projection, but somehow the riddims on Those Flowers sound slightly like appropriation; the slogans, too, feel more bluntly stated, especially on the closing track »We, Human Beings«. That Jo Tongo may have damaged his own career through his political stance, as the press text suggests, is a bitter twist to the story.
Those Flowers
