Last month Ben Herson’s Senegalese hip-hop project released “Depths of Dakar,” the follow-up to his Nomadic Wax label’s “African Underground Volume One: Hip-Hop Senegal” cd from 2003. Depths of Dakar is another, and I think even better, compilation of tracks recorded in Dakar and New York.

For those not in the loop, Herson has been a leader for the last ten years in bringing not only news of African music to the US but in also integrating straight-up news of any sort from Africa into the American cultural consciousness.

Herson’s “African Underground” project is a mutli-media mutli-platform passion that grew out of his travels to Senegal as a student in 1998-2000. In 2000, while he was there, Senegal made a dramatic break with its dictatorial past and elected Abdoulaye Wade president. What Herson learned in Dakar was what everyone there already knew: that hip-hop was the country’s main source for political information and inspiration. As one of the rappers Herson interviewed put it, “When the whole city, the whole country is a ghetto, hip hop is CNN.”

When he returned to the States, Herson completed a killer thesis about Dakar rappers and then went back to Senegal with a rigged-up mobile studio to record more of what he had been writing about. Word of the American nomadic engineer with the open-door policy drew wide talent, including, according to the label, “rising stars, established hit-makers, and plenty of unknown neighborhood MCs with serious lyrical chops, all of whom rolled through the doors to cut acappellas.” Herson brought the tracks back to New York and asked artists there to put music and beats behind them. “African Underground, Volume One” came out in 2003. Since then Herson has been on fire with the project of championing African and Global hip-hop and has been hosting the popular African Underground night in New York, bringing in DJs from all over the world.

Nomadic Wax together with Sol Productions has also produced a web documentary series on Senegalese politics as told by many of the top figures in Senegalese hip-hop. The series now includes seven roughly eight-minute episodes that explore a contemporary reality cable news will never even get around to noticing. The series starts in the Dakar ghetto during the 2007 presidential election season and finishes up in Paris and New York, making it a story of global politics and immigration that exposes the debates in the US on both as mere posing.

The episode above is the first of the series. Listen here to “Li Gueun pt 2″ from the new cd by Omzo, a veteran Dakar rapper whose hit “politichiens” was the centerpiece of the soundtrack to the revolutionary election of 2000— chien, of course, being the French word for dog.