THE RECORD STORE!
*DING*
Welcome to the record store!! Here I'll rate albums and just talk about cool music I find that I think should be shared. I'll link different ways to listen to the song(s) if applicable ^^
THIS PAGE IS A WIP!! You may notice it looks eerily similar to the library! You are not lost in the backrooms, I am just lazy!
Dur-Dur Band - 5/22/2026-
Genre(s): Funk, Soul, Disco
While I actually like almost every Dur-Dur Band song I've listened to, my favorites always include the vocals of Sahra Dawo. For that reason, instead of choosing an album/collection, I decided to just go over their music in general.
Dur-Dur Band was a Somali band from Mogadishu in the 80s. For a while, they were basically the face of Somali disco. After war broke out in Somalia, the band members broke up due to obvious circumstances and are now sort've scattered across the world. My personal favorite vocalist of the group, Sahra Dawo, lives in the USA and last I heard she still does small local shows.
I am embarassed to say I was introduced to their music by Gorof getting popular on Tik Tok, but I'm glad I was introduced nonetheless. Listening to Dur-Dur Band introduced me to some more African artists, mostly from the east, but some west African artists as well who I really enjoy!!
As I don't speak Somali, a lot of my favorites are based on the actual sound alone, though I have found some English translations done by Somali people that I really enjoy. It's hard to know which ones are accurate because there are SO many shitty English translations that float around from people using online translators with 0 understanding of the language.
That's all to say, I recommend giving them a listen. Unfortunately, many of the original tapes of their songs were lost during war. However, there are a good bit of surviving recordings that are still accessible on Youtube and Spotify (I am currently building a Spotify playlist that has every song Sahra Dawo has ever done vocals for that I can find on the platform).
In no particular order, my favorite songs go as follows:
It's hard to find titles for some of these because, again, I don't speak the language and don't really know what's going on sometimes. Hopefully these are all right, I'm trying so hard to learn more about this band but it's very diffiuclt on the Western internet.