![ethiopian old music video ethiopian old music video](http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/articles/2015/2/19/amharic-rap-finding-a-voice-in-ethiopia/jcr:content/headlineImage.adapt.1460.high.ethiopia_rap_woah.1424359341020.jpg)
"Until recently I couldn't start an article or interview without first trying to put things right. Sitting in a hotel room in Camden Town hours before receiving a 2008 BBC Award for World Music for Ethiopiques, his epic CD reissue series, the Frenchman explains his motives while chain-smoking. The tragic discrepancy between these two images of Ethiopia, and the urge to re-establish a just equilibrium between them, is at the heart of Falceto's 20-year-old devotion to the country and its music. The old order was dying, and those who could either afford or blag their way into the party were dancing like tomorrow would never come. The old guard fumed against youthful decadence and the unwelcome "foreign" influences that seemed to be invading the nation's cerebral cortex. Plush hotels resounded to patent-leather-clad feet dancing to the sounds of resident "soul" combos like the Ras Band, All Star Band, Zula Band, Venus Band, Wabe Shebele Band, Roha Band and Dahlak Band. The first is from 1968, when Emperor Haile Selassie I ruled over the proudest and most eccentric nation in Africa, with its Christian Coptic church (that was already well established when the British still worshipped pagan gods), its feudal menagerie of princes, barons and serfs, its vast and verdant central plateau, and its pulsating capital city Addis Ababa, which was then one of the pre-eminent cultural, social and diplomatic hot-spots of independent Africa.Īt this time, down in the Wube Bereha, the red-light district of central Addis, royalty rubbed its haughty shoulders with generals and gigolos, bar-room philosophers and peace-corps workers, diplomats and prostitutes, in an intoxicatingly illicit celebration of youth and freedom. Let's compare two snapshots of recent Ethiopian history.