Interpol video Lights, Directed by Charlie White

Golden Sounds’ 1986 hit Zamina (Waka Waka, time for Africa)

From the first 2010 World Cup broadcasts on ESPN, my fellow tweeters cracked jokes about The Lion King. We imagined Rafiki calling the matches, or James Earl Jones (who provided the voice for Mufasa), and half expected the referees to raise the Jabulani aloft to announce the arrival of the New Ball. Most folks simply observed, “I feel like I am watching The Lion King.”

There is a good reason for this. The score used by ESPN to frame its broadcasts was written by Lisle Moore, a Utah composer who had worked with the network in the past. Moore gave us muscular music for a sporting event, upbeat music for a media event organized around putting us all in the mood to buy a shirt, a ball, or a Coke. Layered over the orchestral swells are the oddly familiar sounds of African voices, or, I should say, African-sounding voices. Africa is scored here as a noble landscape, peopled by a unified chorus, singing together in a harmonic convergence of tribal cultures.

“With the exception of the African choir,” reports the Salt Lake Tribune, “all of the music is performed by Utah musicians.” (”ESPN Turns to Utah for World Cup Music”) That African choir, lending this score a sense of location, is actually made up with members of The Lion King’s Broadway cast. The African-sounding choir from New York City was hired to sonically channel an idea of African authenticity keyed to ESPN’s American audience. This is of course true of all scores produced by the World Cup broadcasting networks as they reach for music their imagined audience will understand. Without a doubt, we are hearing not African music but (to invoke philosopher Valentin Mudimbe) a musical “Idea of Africa.”

In the mix of the music draped over the 2010 World Cup, are more specific strains - signals clearly audible to the listener of African music, the sound of a continent being ripped off. This is nowhere more obvious than “The Official 2010 FIFA World Cup ™ Song”, “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”, sung by Shakira and Freshlyground, a South African Afro-fusion bad. The global pop hit has a clear relationship to a Cameroonian military song, Zangaléwa, popularized by Golden Sounds in 1986. “Waka Waka” doesn’t just borrow from “Zangaléwa” - listen to the two and you see that “Waka Waka” is, very nearly, an illegal cover (the chorus is a direct use of “Zangaléwa).

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I had a feeling that James Cameron was rocking out to Yes’ prog rock masterpiece, Fragile, when he dreamt up the idea for Avatar, and there is more than a little circumstantial evidence that the film’s look owes a substantial debt to master cover artist Roger Dean.