Not since M.I.A., with her well-publicized turbulent political past, has an artist with such an extraordinary life-story arrived on the scene as Sudanese child soldier turned-rapper Emmanuel Jal.

The musician/songwriter/rapper whose autobiographical album Warchild will be released on May 13th was a featured guest at the premiere of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York earlier this week where the documentary about him, the Karim Chrobog directed War Child, made its American premiere. (It had its world premiere earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival.) The film outlines the tough life of this 28 year old musician who was a soldier in the Sudanese People's Liberatin Army when he was only eight years of age.  Jal's autobiography will be published by St. Martin's Press later this year.

His story is truly an amazing one.  But what about the music, you ask?  Well, unlike M.I.A., whose music was even more exciting than the publicity package that preceded her, Emmanuel Jal's new album "Warchild," which was recorded in London in 2006 and 2007, is kinda disappointing -- to these ears anyway, after one full listen. Maybe the hype had me expecting too much.   Sung/rapped mostly in English and veering between reggae and rap, Emmanuel Jal sounds too often like he is trying too hard to emulate popular American rappers and it just ain't working. Hence, he is at his best on the tracks where he isn't trying to streamline his sound for US or British audiences.

So the other morning as I am sipping a latte, watching TV, reading Emails, listening to Bowie's "Hunky Dory" at the wrong speed and pitch:   - 8 on 45RPM, and typing up an AMOEBLOG: multi-tasking, I guess you could say - who should stop by my mountainside cottage but my dear friend Zsa Zsa who (as usual) makes herself way too comfortable at my place - pouring herself a large glass of  my fresh squeezed orange juice and munching on my very last fresh croissant - as she reminded me that David Bowie was one of pop music's early cutNpaste, deconstruction, post-modern type, lyric sampling artists. . "Huh.  Say what?" I asked confused - stopping typing for a second.  As she explained (and a little bit patronizingly in her know-it-all-music-fact way) how Bowie back in da day (the day being the early seventies)  would reportedly just flip through books and magazines and literally cut out sentences randomly here and there, and literally paste them all together in any which order - and viola -he had "Panic In Detrot"  "Queen Bitch" or "Life on Mars" etc

 "Wow" I said - not about Bowie's lazy songwriting techniques but the bright shiny blue pageboy wig I just now noticed she was wearing. I quickly pointed out that M.I.A., who was just at Amoeba Music Berkeley last Saturday to a packed house, also wears a blue wig...just like that but that MIA has been wearing hers for longer - at least for as long ago as she took that single publicity shot that shows up in every story on her these days.  .And, somewhat smugly I admit, I noted that so does that Aussie woman chef/baker in the East Bay (Bettie I think her name is) who does a great baked chicken, I hear, and who was featured in the front page of the Food Section of this past Wednesday's San Francisco Chronicle.  But that the stylish baker woman's blue hair was not a wig at all but her own real hair - dyed blue of course. All of this I rattled out as I continued to type that day's AMOEBLOG with my back turned to Zsa Zsa.  And when I finally swung around in my suede swivel chair expecting to see a look of some kind on her face I realized that I had been talking to myself (again) because she had already split...gone for who knows how long . But I noticed that she had left a magazine on the purple sofa in the hallway. It was one of mine that she had borrowed and on its cover had a picture of a former friend of Madonna's.