“I want to make everyone happy,” Nigerian guitarist, singer and songwriter Mdou Moctar (whose given name is Mahamadou Souleymane) said in a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone about the reason he makes music. “I want to give a smile for the world.” If the success (creatively and in terms of increased attention) of Moctar’s most recent album, 2024’s Funeral for Justice, is any indication, his initial mission is closer to completion. Yet, as the album’s title might suggest, a smile is not necessarily the goal this time out; the new songs tackle the various injustices happening in Moctar’s native Africa, delivered through lyrics sung in a Tamasheq language foreign to most western listeners. The music is also more feral than anything in Moctar’s previous output — which encompasses various recordings over the last decade, including 2021’s Afrique Victime, his debut for Matador Records — conjuring Santana on amphetamines.
“The album is really different for me,” Moctar said in the press notes upon its release. “Now the problems of terrorist violence are more serious in Africa. When the U.S. and Europe came here, they said they’re going to help us, but what we see is really different. They never help us to find a solution.”
Moctar’s parents discouraged his interest in rock music for religious reasons, leading him to make his first guitar from various parts he found in his Nigerian village, which included using bicycle cables as strings. That kind of persistence and ingenuity couldn’t help but influence his psychedelic guitar playing, an effortlessly fluid style that somehow seems both improvisational and precise. Moctar’s current tour is in support of Tears of Injustice, a rerecorded and rearranged version of Funeral for Justice using acoustic and other traditional instruments, which will drop Feb. 28.
“We wanted to make a separate version of Funeral for people to hear,” Mikey Coltun, who plays bass in Moctar’s band and produced both albums, said in a press release announcing the tour. “We’re always playing around with arrangements at shows. We wanted to prove that we could do it on a record, too. And there’s a whole other side of the band that comes out when we play a stripped-down set. It becomes something new.”
Mdou Moctar plays Woodward Theater on Feb. 13 at 8 p.m. More info: woodwardtheater.com.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Feb. 5 print edition.
This article appears in Feb 5-18, 2025.