Radio Freetown CD Library

Frank

Hi all!I just got back from another trip to Freetown in Sierra Leone where I had a meeting with the guys at Radio SLBS. I'm doing a Radio show for this station, basicaly two, one with African records, the other one with US Funk/Soul. The station had lost its entire record library (a whole house filled with records) during the war when the rebels burned it down in 1998. Now they have to rely on the mostly horrible cheap pop music that local record labels give them for broadcasting. Most of this music is supercheap desktop computer generated electro pop that would make every western boy or girl group appear as the peak of sophistication... naturaly, the people at SLBS are very happy to have something else to send on the air every now and then.Now I had this idea about asking you all to provide CDs for this station.Original ones that you can spare or just homeburned copies with printout of the cover/titel and tracklist. I spoke to the stations manager about this and he was thrilled. Now this is just a raw idea at this point and I don't want anybody to jump the gun and start burning away. We should figure out a way to do this in an orderly fashion to make the whole process as smooth and easy as possible.I was thinking about doing the following Genres:Afrobeat / African FunkHighlifeAfro JazzMandingoUS SoulUS FunkUS JazzHip HopWe should start with obvious and classic material and avoid to get things double.I had a conversation with the German Ambassador here in Conakry who is also responsible for the small german consulate in Freetown and he promised his support and perhaps will even take care of international shipping through the Foreign Ministry's Courier system.As said before, this project is in the very early stages, I just wanted to test the waters here and find out if some of you guys would want to help out.I'm a bit stressed out with a bunch of other things right now and on Saturday I'll be gone for another 10-day digging expedition to Cotonou, so don't be surprised if I don't show up here to often within the next 2 weeks.Whoever is interested in participating in this project, let this sink in for a while and then we start figuring out how to get this going.One thing should be considered about the Hip Hop Genre (that I personaly know little to nothing about...), this might sound totaly retarded at first but just think about it:I strongly believe that any lyrics glorifying violence, guns, expensive alcoholic beverages, big cars, loose women and jewelery would be potentialy harmful and at the very least obscenely out of place in a country that is amongst the world's poorest and is still recovering from a ten year long civil war which was amongst the most violent and gruesome in modern history. A whole generation was used by the so called rebels of the RUF to rape, torture and mutilate. These "soldiers" were mostly kids as young as 10 to 13 years and were given cheap synthetic drugs, Machetes and Automatic Weapons and then let loose to commit massacres on civilians. Noone can possibly imagine how those kids who nowadays must be in their early to mid-20s will manage to cope with what they have done and seen. I'm normaly strictly against any form of censorship but this here is a different story. Ah yeah, almost forgot:My PMs don't work... if you want to contact me, drop me a mail atsoulpusher"at"soulexplosion.de