How Fool’s Gold Fooled Me
September 24th, 2009When I first heard Fool’s Gold in May of this year, I pigeonholed them as trend-hopping Echo Park poseurs who decided to play afro-pop following a weekend of smoking cotton candy kush, snorting Dexedrine, and listening to “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” on repeat. As you can see from the video above, they seemed too happy, too healthy, too Caucasian–particularly in contrast to the other bands playing that night at The Dub Club: Extra Golden, The Meditations, and Yousouppha Sidibe. As I am wont to do, I made a snap judgment and pledged that for all eternity when someone asked about Fool’s Gold, I’d make some snide remark involving pyrite, alchemy, and the great Rift Valley. It probably wouldn’t be funny.
So when Paul Tao, half of the pair behind IAMSOUND, told me his label had signed Fool’s Gold, I kept my mouth shut because no one really wants to be told, “sorry, you just invested in fool’s gold.” However, I downloaded the album and threw in into the vast churning miasma that is my hard drive, next to the hundreds of Gigabytes of African music I own made by actual Africans, ostensibly never to be heard. About a week later, with iTunes on shuffle, an absurdly funky slice of soukous guitars came on. I checked to see who it was by. Uh-huh.
