...are Radioclit and Esau Mwamwaya. And obviously watched a lot of Lion King growing up.
"Dinosaur On The Ark" is one I'll occasionally skip over when I'm driving and listening to my music, simply because it's a bit of a build-up, and I listen to a lot of my music based on the mood I'm in at the time. This one came on at the perfect moment: I hit a long, flat stretch of highway, the sun was just beginning to go down in the sky (nothing quite as dramatic as the album cover above, but nice nonetheless) and there were virtually no cars compared to my usual rush-hour commute.
It's always different hearing music in my car that I'm so used to coming out from my laptop. There's tradeoffs to each of course; the car has better bass and brings out a lot of elements you wouldn't otherwise notice, but obviously there's the windnoise and sub-par acoustics. My laptop on the other hand I got with an upgraded speaker system, and it picks up a lot better on little hints of treble that would otherwise be lost in the wind-shuffle of my car. Either way, I gained a new appreciation for this Very Best song on my drive home today.
There's the slow, rippling-water-and-jungle-rainforest start to this song, that literally sent a shiver through my body when I heard it today. The echo-y tone to Radioclit's voice provides the perfect intro, as he talks about the wasteland of a post-WWIII (don't lose me here) world, then narrows it down to the microcosm of himself and his lover, hoping "our love ain't a dinosaur, floating on, on the Ark." That line really hit me for the first time today, and I had the adequate time to mull it over, seeing as the majority of the song is dominated by Esau Mwamwaya's singing in Malawi's national language of Chichewa; I have no idea what any of it means outside of "Africaaaa," but damn if it's not uplifting.
That's what this whole song is really: a hymn of victory, swashed in swirling (but not necessarily dreamy) bass lines, chord plucking and tribal drumming, rife with Afro-Pop stylings and Western Pop sensibilities. The war and post-apocolyptic visions mentioned at the start are quickly forgotten by the end of this one, and replaced with a newfound sense of hope. Hate to get all deep like that, but that's really what this song means to me. Even if it all dawned on me on a simple drive home.
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