Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): ***

The Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour is a giant of world music, already a superstar in Africa and Europe, and with a growing following in North America, and the director of Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I love, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, introduces us to him with a clip that makes for a pretty good summary of his career to date: he's onstage, mesmerizing an enormous crowd with beautiful but didactic singing about pan-African unity, hard work, and self-sufficiency, exactly the kind of messages rooted in secular social activism that N'Dour has been bringing to audiences for decades.

The accompaniment to this particular message, however, is not the kind of music that made him famous, a blend of pop rock and dance sounds with traditional elements, which is referred to as mbalax music. In this clip the backing is soft and droning, and his singing has almost a liturgical sound, as if he were a muezzin reciting a prayer.

This juxtaposition is entirely appropriate, because one of the main themes of this film is the tension between popular music and religious music in Senegal, which it explores by way of telling the dramatic story of the difficulties and eventual triumphs that befall N'Dour when he creates and releases an album with religious themes. That album, Egypt, was a hit worldwide -- it earned N'Dour his first, overdue Grammy -- but it was received at home with lukewarm sales and critical hostility for the first time in his career. The main criticism N'Dour faced there was that he was a worldly pop singer, and it was unseemly for him to sing the praises of Allah!

N'Dour doesn't buy this argument, of course. Senegal is 94% Muslim, and the flavor of Islam dominant there is a form of Sufism, a tolerant, mystical and relatively undogmatic version of the religion that admits of many forms of worship, including poetry, song, and dance. N'Dour, a devout Sufi Muslim, feels that song is an appropriate form of worship, no matter who the singer. But beyond that, he's not a product of Sufism alone. N'Dour comes from a long line of singers known as griot, who were and are the bards of West Africa, those who preserved and passed on the memories and accumulated wisdom of their communities in the form of song. N'Dour sees himself as the inheritor of this tradition as well.

The biggest weakness of this film, apart from the scattershot way it crams background into the flow, is the fact that it lacks much in the way of dramatic tension. Most of the sequences are based around (highly enjoyable) performance and behind-the-scenes footage from the Egypt tour, which is supplemented by candid footage of the singer's family life and a handful of talking-heads interviews for background. But this is no expose: we're meant to conclude that everybody who works with Youssou N'Dour respects him highly, and that each member of his huge family loves him to death, and
nobody breathes even a hint of a bad word about him.

As for Youssou's own insights, when he is interviewed, it's safe to say that he gets his message across in music far more effectively than he gets it across in words: some of his statements are so absurdly vague they provoke laughter, the best being "if we save the planet, everybody benefits." Hard to argue with that zinger.

But even with all this in mind, the film is worth a look for all the details you'll learn about Senegal, Sufism, the griot tradition, and the life of this particular superstar. Besides that, the photography and sound design are really top-notch, and if you enjoy the music you'll really enjoy all the concert footage. As to the journalistic weakness described above, it should be said that Youssou N'Dour does actually seem to be a positive force in the world. He uses his tremendous fame and popularity to promote good causes, like malaria abatement, the message of his music is uplifting and positive whether he is singing about the necessity of working hard and working together, or metaphysical glories, and his generous spirit is a useful moral example for all of us.