Mali's "Guitar Gods" Tinariwen receive Racist threats ahead of US tour

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/23/744518696/malis-guitar-gods-tinariwen-rec...

<< A guitar band from Mali called Tinariwen is famous worldwide. The group's fans and collaborators have included Robert Plant, Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Bono of U2 and Nels Cline of Wilco. The band has fought extremism in their home country of Mali, and been victims themselves. But ahead of a September show in Winston-Salem, N.C., social media commenters are leveling violent, racist attacks against the musicians.

A refresher on Tinariwen: This a group of Tuareg musicians from the north of Mali. The members have been hailed as guitar gods, playing rolling melodic lines and loping rhythms that evoke the desert sands of the Sahara — the band's native home. The band's name literally means "deserts" in their language, Tamasheq. >>

<< Fast-forward to this week. The band is touring the U.S. in September and October to support a new album. A club in Winston-Salem, called The Ramkat booked a show with them for Sept. 17. The venue's owners put up an ad on Facebook for the show and in response, they started getting a number of racist, vitriolic comments and even violent threats against Tinariwen. (The situation was amplified by the local alternative newspaper, the Triad City Beat, which posted a report on July 19.)

Andy Neville, one of The Ramkat's owners, told NPR on Tuesday that he found the comments "highly disturbing, hateful, and sad — very sad."

He continued: "If any of these commenters had done any sort of homework on the band, the Tuareg people or their history, they'd find that the band and the Tuareg people have been marginalized their entire lives — and that Tinariwen themselves have stood up to some of these kind of hateful and and racist forces in North[western] Africa. It's incredibly disappointing, and then probably the most disappointing thing of all is the fact that we're talking about these misguided commenters, and what we're not talking about is what an incredible band Tinariwen is." >>

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ3wH-v5zOcq4ZZWI58TGKA