“Us guitar players in the West, we all have the same base vocabulary, the same handful of stereotypical licks. But Mdou’s music, it’s almost free of that stuff”: Mdou Moctar finds a new fan in Metallica’s Kirk Hammett

Mdou Moctar's latest album, Funeral for Justice, features psychedelic guitar work that draws as much inspiration from Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix as traditional Tuareg wedding dances.

Now, Moctar's unique guitar-playing style and music sensibilities have been praised by Metallica's Kirk Hammett. 

“Us guitar players in the West, we all have the same base vocabulary, the same handful of stereotypical licks. But Mdou’s music, it’s almost free of that stuff. And because of that, it sounds more spontaneous. It sounds fresh. It’s amazing,” Hammett said in an interview, as reported by the New York Times. 

The Tuareg songwriter and guitarist famously built his first guitar by repurposing the brake wires of a bicycle after seeing Nigerien guitarist Abdallah Oumbadougou, one of the founders of the ishumar genre of desert blues, play. 

“I did not know what I was going to do,” he said in a 2021 interview with Guitar World. “So, I just built my guitar by myself. I took some wood and I made a guitar. But it was just one part – it was not a real guitar. 

“Then I took the cable from the brakes for a bicycle. I, like, took the small, small cable and made it into a string. My first guitar had four strings. That helped me a lot in the beginning.”

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Since then, he has cut his teeth experimenting and mastering the fundamentals of desert blues, a genre he continued to evolve and fuse with other genres, including rock, while making his playing sound almost effortless.

As he said in the recent New York Times interview, “When I compose my solos. I’m not trying to look for them very hard. It’s more that they come to me.”

As for the sound in Funeral for Justice? “I want to be calling out crimes or injustice in the world, and I want you to feel like the sound you’re hearing is someone calling out, ‘Help!’

“If you hear a siren going ‘wee-oo, wee-oo,’ that tells you that something terrible is happening, right? So I want you to know how serious this is.”