Mdou Moctar at First Ave (10-14-2024)

Downtown Minneapolis was filled with groups of young girls dressed in pastel colors, platform boots, baby doll dresses and short skirts as they made their way to the Target Center to see their idol, Sabrina Carpenter, who I’ve been told had the song of summer “Espresso”.

Such was not the case for those seeing Mdou Moctar at First Ave, because flowing cotton robes, turbans and sandals are not the best attire for a 30-degree evening. Then again neither are baby doll dresses, but weather will not stop most teenage girls when it comes to fashion.

FACS opened the evening with an other-worldly sound of modern art rock layered with post-punk vibes of repeated lyrics sung over a droning, dubbed guitar. They are from Chicago, IL with Brian Case on guitar and vocals, Noah Leger on drums and Jonathan Van Herik on bass. They have a new album out Still Life in Decay but drew from prior albums as well with an Eurythmics cover “Take Me to Your Heart” thrown in.

Mdou Moctar next took the stage with fellow band members of Ahmoudou Madassane on rhythm guitar, Michael Coltun on bass and Souleymane Ibrahim on drums.

Moctar is from Niger and his brand of music is Tuareg Rock aka Desert Blues, a sound that we have seen before in musicians like Bombino, the great Vieux Farka Touré and even Moctar at First Ave in Mar 2022.

There is not much similarity with the blues coming out of the Mississippi Delta and the Saharan Desert. Moctar has been compared to Jimi Hendrix, but his guitar sounds more feral. There is a beat that runs through his songs, like the train rhythm created by Johnny Cash. But instead of a lonely engine plugging along in the middle of the night, Moctar’s is a runaway train going at full speed across an endless desert with no horizon in sight.

If you have never heard the Desert Blues, Moctar’s guitar is a great introduction. He plays loud, fast with little structure and sends a direct charge into the crowd. By the second song one guy kept hollering as if in a state of ecstasy. Another kept shouting “LEGEND”.

Moctar has a new album, Funeral for Justice, which is a plea for the world to pay attention to what is happening in his home country, especially to the Tuareg people with terrorist violence, persistent slavery and government coups forming a modernized version of colonialism. As he told the New York Times:

“I’m coming from very far in a country in which people today are being killed every day with all this suffering, and I come to the U.S. to make people smile and dance. And it is a big effort. So what I would like is for people to then also want to help improve the lives of where I come from.”