Two months ago Skin Deep attended an Alsarah & The Nubatones concert at Rich Mix that was sponsored by MARSM, an event company dedicated to promoting Arab music and culture in the UK. The concert was part of a series called Music from Egypt and the Sudan.

May 6, 2000 - In a few weeks, barring miracles, the children will begin to die - if not from hunger, then from disease. The skin on their upper arms is already. It is not only on paper that tactile codes may be imprinted and read, but on the skin itself. Among the Nuba of Sudan, a woman's back is traditionally covered with.

In a lot of ways, the event title is an ideal introduction to anyone who is unfamiliar with the music of Alsarah & The Nubatones. At its heart, the band’s project is a transnational one that attempts to resist the classification and disruption that modernity has inflicted on indigenous music. During the concert Alsarah kept reminding her audience – whether through political statements made in between songs or through the songs themselves – that while the Nubians are often spoken about as a dead people and civilization, the reality is that they are very much alive and thriving, as is their culture. Their disappearance and dislocation are really a product of modernizing processes like the drawing up of borders and building of dams.

The band was a part of Aswan, a live concert album by the Nile Project, which pays tribute to that history — Aswan being a border city between Sudan and Egypt in which a dam was built in the mid 20th century, leading to the mass relocation of Nubians to cities in Northern Sudan and Southern Egypt. But the band’s music is not strictly Nubian, or Egyptian, or Sudanese for that matter. Alsarah & The Nubatones draws on a wide array of musical influences from the broader East African coast. Their music, as they’ve often stated, is best described as ‘ East-African Retro-Pop’, drawing heavily on the musical trends of Ethiopia and Zanzibar in the 1960s and 70s. We had a chance to speak to Alsarah, though unfortunately not her band, after the concert at Rich Mix.

Here’s our interview: * SD: A lot of people have sought to define your music as Sudanese, but you’ve actively sought for it to be defined as ‘ East-African Retro-Pop.’ Can you speak a little about what that distinction means to you and for your music? AS: Yeah, if you actually listened to that type of music, you’d hear the influence. There’s a track on the album [Silt] which is a cover of a song from Zanzibar.

‘Wad al-Nuba’ is based on a Zanzibari beat and rhythm, I just changed the words into Arabic from Swahili. The original recording is from the 1960s by an artist called Sharmila, accompanied by the Black Star Orchestra. There is a good quality compilation of some of her recordings called The Zanzibari Golden Age: 1901 -1965. Need for speed most wanted modi na mashini policii. The series has four parts and it is definitely worth buying the CD for the inserts, because it gives you a lot of photos and information. For me, Zanzibar is a really important case as to why I actually came back to falling completely and madly in love with Sudanese music. I’ve always identified as African and black, but there has always been a conflict about that in my head. Because in Sudan there is a need to identify particularly as Arab.

But we’re actually not Arab. Not even by a long shot. There are some people that have Arabic bloodlines, but that percentage is so small. SD: There were a couple of moments last night where you made some really good political statements during your performance. In a way you could compare what you said about the Nubian experience to that of Native Americans, in that people appropriate their culture and assume that they are dead despite their culture being very much alive. You see this a lot in the use of Afrocentric references to ancient African civilizations, like people will often call an attractive darker woman something like “My Nubian Queen” in a film or in popular culture without knowing what a Nubian person actually looks like or that Nubians did not come from West Africa. AS: The number of times I’ve been called that in real life is insane!

Someone has to throw it at me almost on a weekly basis. I’m just like, I don’t know where you are coming from with that.

It’s always presented as a positive thing, too. They think it is a compliment. Whenever people say that to me, I say thank you, but just so you know there are about 40 million of me, and we’re not that exotic. At this age in my life, I don’t want to pick fights with people who have good intentions.