Zombie Jamborees

Two classic Zombie tunes - Fela Kuti's Zombie (1976) and Harry Belafonte's version of Zombie Jamboree (1969).  


"Fela Kuti's Zombie was a scathing attack on Nigerian soldiers using the zombie metaphor to describe the methods of the Nigerian military. The album was a smash hit with the people and infuriated the government, setting off a vicious attack against the Kalakuta Republic (a commune that Fela had established in Nigeria), during which one thousand soldiers attacked the commune. Kuti was severely beaten, and his elderly mother was thrown from a window, causing fatal injuries. The Kalakuta Republic was burned, and Kuti's studio, instruments, and master tapes were destroyed." [Wikipedia]

I really don't think this is an appropriate Response to your soulful zombie music but I'm going to post it anyways

Our two posts actually show a major shift in the Zombie Mythos during the 20th century - Zombies are bleached and whitened. They are no longer African or 'soulful' as you say.

Until 1930 'zombie' was an exclusively Haitian Voudon (Voodoo) term. It was a very broad term that meant everything from 'spirit' to a Voudon god to a mindless human labouring in the sugar fields due to a bokor's curse - but in every case it was a voudon term.  

Then in the 1930s the term starts losing its cultural connection and becomes any dull-eyed victim of mind-control. In 1936's Revolt of the Zombies the 'zombies' are mind-controlled Cambodian (an French-Asian colony rather than a French-Caribbean colony like Haiti) who are being used to storm the trenches of WWI. By the 1950s 'zombies' is a now a general term and are mostly created by alien mind-control devices and strange atomic rays - so you have titles like Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952) or The Astro-Zombies (1968).

Than Romero comes in 1968 and re-formats the whole myth: the zombies are average Americans, their victims are average Americans and the setting is middle America. No more voodoo, no more Haiti.

It has been quite awhile since I've seen Voltaire! He used to be a presence in the (fairly small) gothic marketplace of the late 1990s. He seemed to have a song on every Projekt sampler CD and I picked up a few issues of his 'Chi-chian' comic because it was advertised in one of my favorite comic 'Poison Elves'.

I had never realize Voltaire was Cuban until googling him today. Romero is also Cuban (Cuban-Lithuanian) and Al Jourgensen of Ministry was Cuban-Norwegian (Rob Zombie is basically a Jourgensen-clone) - so you could make the case that Cubans were a vital part of the American Gothic scene. That would mean that the Caribbean was not completely exorcised from the Zombie Mythos....

Voltaire's take on Zombie Prostitutes was an exercise in punning but that idea was actually seriously addressed in Deadgirl (2008). It is not a very gory movie but it is really, really disturbing one. The horror arises not from combining sexuality with decaying flesh but from combing it with a body lacking a mind. If we need to combine sexuality and zombies I like Harry Bellafontes's version: