There are plenty of World Cup albums and playlists knocking about, all with the same old nonsense with which you get bombarded every four years. I like a bit of “Vindaloo” as much as the next psychopath, but there are other countries, cultures and musics out there worth sampling before that unavoidable moment when you start necking the fizzy violence juice and screaming at foreigns on TV.

So I made an unnecessarily lengthy playlist that would serve the hellishly noble purpose of supplying listeners with music they probably haven’t heard before, but which they might (hopefully) actually enjoy listening to. It has little if anything to do with football (one New Order track notwithstanding), and has music from every nation playing at the World Cup Finals in South Africa in 2010.

Er, the North Korean one’s right at the end. Never mind human rights, those guys are playing catch-up big time when it comes to choonz.

From South Africa’s version of electro - kwaito - to Swiss art-pop, to Greek hip-hop, to Ivorian soul, to Slovenian trance… Oh dear. I’m not doing a very good job of selling this, am I? But look, I’ve listened to all of these tracks, and think they each have something to recommend them beyond Eurovision-style LOLZ. So I hope you will too.

And if you don’t, you’re a RACIST.

Click here to open 32 World Cup Nations in Spotify

Or sample it in this widget:

There’s a full tracklisting after the jump.

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Friday June 4th, 2010 at 10:05 am

Day three was all about imbibing a spot of Johannesburg’s kultcha, in keeping with the spirit (arf!) of the Smirnoff Be There initiative to step outside of one’s usual everyday experiences. Accordingly we visited Museum Africa in Newtown, where an exhibition called “Space: Currencies in Contemporary African Art” was taking place.

It was reassuring to find that contemporary art in Johannesburg (as in London) can be totally impenetrable, and that the pieces are accompanied by equally bamboozling explanations:

The exhibition title alludes to and embodies the two notions of space and pace, which signify sites or contexts and tempos or energies that are part of societal make up. Space is wherein ideas are negotiated and meaning produced through various human activities and social practices.

Sweet.

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Tuesday June 1st, 2010 at 2:44 pm