Spirits to bite our ears. The singles collection 1977-1986

Zimbabwe's Thomas Mapfumo started out with a fairly simple musical idea of taking traditional mbira tunes and updating them for electric guitars, bass, and drums, but the extraordinary times in which he did this, which just happened to be when the people of what was then called Rhodesia were engaged in a war to throw off the strictures of colonialism, made his songs, full of Shona folk sayings and proverbs, reverberate with even more powerful meanings, and Mapfumo played a tangible role through his music in the eventual creation of an independent Zimbabwe. He didn't rest on his laurels, though, and continued to comment through his music on the injustice, negligence, and political corruption he saw all around him in Zimbabwe, a cultural role that has made him a figure of Bob Marley-like proportions in his homeland. This collection of his key singles from the late '70s through the 1980s essentially reproduces 1996's Singles Collection from Zimbob Records, but with a different track sequence and an additional song inserted. The music itself mixes in mbira elements with strains of reggae, township jazz, American soul, and East African rhumba to make a bright, joyous hybrid that manages to sound both modern and traditional at the same time.