So, if you are as all about NPR in your car as I am, you may have heard this report on the BBC world service about the Bird Flu dance that is spreading in the clubs of Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoir. On the radio you could hear snippets of the bird-flu song which was created by an artist called DJ Lewis, and it sounded hectic! So I wanted to find a link to it for this site.
Here's the problem- Although tons of sites are linking to BBC story and commenting on the phenomenon, I couldn't find one that had a link to the actual song, or better yet a video for it. This seemed strange to me and then more offensive as I went over it. All these people want to have a good cubicle chuckle about the crazy Africans, but no one wanted to hear the actual song? Like it was assumed that the song would be garbage.

This isn't the first time I've seen Ivoirian music dissed in print- in the awesome book Nine Hills to Nambonkaha, author Sarah Erdman has nothing but respect for the culture of Cote D'Ivoir, her home for two years... except the music. She describes the dance music from Abidjan as noisy repetitive casio beats and says at one point she was "desperate to get away from the screaming atari whine of the music". Casio beats? Atari whine? Sounds awesome!

I was also weirded out to see that very high up on the list of Google hits for "Bird Flu Dance" was a white power message board where someone had put up a link to story. This seemed kind of strange and ominous. If I wrote "Bird Flu Dance" on the Hollertronix message board, it wouldn't even rank. But this board, run in the same way, had big pull in the rankings. What's up with that?

Anyway, I tried to find some media relating to the Bird Flu dance, and this is what I came up with- a video of a kid showing off a completely different version of the bird flu dance! This one is based on a Jamaican dancehall song that predates the African version by several months. So, did DJ Lewis bite the bird, or was it just something in the air?