Consumer Guide Album

Youssou N'Dour: The Lion [Virgin, 1989]
Produced by Peter Gabriel henchman George Acogny, this is no more a rhythm album than whatever Gabriel opus you care to recall. It's just a very good Peter Gabriel record. Gabriel's m.o. is to pump up rock and "third-world" sonorities with grandiose settings and structures, then put them across with a big beat; N'Dour's arrangements are less forced, his beats indigenous enough, and his lyrics better. Sure there are old saws ("Truth will always win against deceit," "You should help those with less than you"), and "Macoy," a compassionate vignette of lost virginity concealed, is overwhelmed by its portentous synth-wash-and-percussion accompaniment. But when N'Dour, who's put down as a "ladies" singer by some Senegalese (men, presumably), advises his four-year-old daughter to follow her "destiny," or collaborates with Gabriel on a feminist anthem you can believe in, I think his quest for fame could be as humanitarian as corporate one-worlders claim. And when he's inspired to write a song about a slavery museum in Africa, the NASA museum in Washington, and his favorite, "the museum town of Old Tucson," his ambition--to grasp the past, change the future, and master the very media to which he's been subject by accident of national origin for most of his young life--suddenly seems heroic. B+