Note: This article was originally published in April 2005. It was created at a time when African music was on the cusp of becoming an increasingly large part of the Western pop culture landscape. Portions of it have been updated to reflect changes in the past five years-- particularly changes in the number of compilations and labels available. Unlike last week's article on contemporary sounds in West Africa, this one is largely devoted to reissue and cratedigging culture, to the great African music of the previous couple of generations.

The Africa 100 section, in which author Joe Tangari creates an imagined introduction to Afrobeat, highlife, and a few other large strains of African pop music has not had its selections altered; however, we have added Lala links to many of the entries.

Afropop music is a sound and a movement, music and a state of mind. It's the joyous awakening of a continent from a colonial nightmare and the crushing realization that the nightmare isn't over yet, anguish and happiness whipped together with traditional drums, cheap guitars, and even cheaper amps.

This article isn't an attempt to tell the whole story of African music; it's an account of the time I've spent exploring the popular sounds of 1960s and 70s Africa. It's not the easiest music to fall deeply in love with, in part because it comes from a place most Westerners aren't close to understanding, a continent obscured by our misconceptions, prejudices, and expectations of "world music." The other difficulties are more practical: The most fertile period for African funk, soul, rock, and jazz lasted from 1965 to 1982, a time of great upheaval in Africa, and much of this music wasn't recorded. Of that which was put to tape, if the masters still exist, they're likely significantly degraded by decades of neglect.

For what has been recovered, distribution can be spotty, and the shop that has two things you're looking for is usually missing four other things you want to check out. Compilers of these sounds must track down the musicians, hunt out masters in forgotten, crumbling pressing plants, and sift through bins of scratched, dusty vinyl in the markets of Accra, Conakry, and Lagos looking for the lost slab of brilliant funk or the 45 with the highlife A-side and the totally unexpected fuzz-rock B-side. The rewards of those efforts have been huge, though, and I'm pleased this music is increasingly getting the spotlight it deserves.

From Sea to Shining Sea Music in West and East Africa (a disclaimer)

Afropop was a wide-ranging phenomenon, but the primary geographic area I've been exploring extends from Senegal in West Africa, along the Atlantic coast to Nigeria and Cameroon, and then over to Ethiopia and Kenya, with a detour or two to South Africa. This is an immense area, and the flavor in each country is quite different, from Kenya's rough-and-tumble funk to South Africa's sleek sophistication to the wild experimentation of Ghanaian funk and fusion bands.

The decision to leave out most of Central and North Africa is partly practical and partly a matter of taste. The sound of central Africa is focused on variants of soukous, the Congolese form of Cuban rumba that dominated popular music there for much of the 20th century, and I haven't really had enough time to hear an appreciable amount of it. It also bears little resemblance to either Fela's Afrobeat or any other tangentially related African pop music. Similarly, topography-- namely the Sahara Desert-- separates Mediterranean Africa from the rest of the continent, and the culture there is more Arabic than African. Raï, Andaluse, and other North African styles are singular, and though a bit of cross-pollination is inevitable, it's really an altogether separate world.

NB: For an introduction to soukous, try Franco (2), Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Mbilia Bel.

Highlife Time A Bit of History

Afropop is fusion music in the truest sense, incorporating elements of essentially any available source material. Loosely speaking, the Afrobeat of Fela and other early practitioners like Orlando Julius Ekemode was a modernization of the dance-band highlife that dominated the popular music of Anglophone African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria. Highlife was a general term given to several styles of music that were themselves fusions of Western ballroom and swing music, Trinidadian calypso, Liberian sailors' songs, palmwine guitar music (so called because of the drink imbibed at events where it was played), and-- most importantly-- local rhythms. The greatest highlife star was E.T. Mensah, whose tours of West Africa with his Tempos Band spread the music far and wide. He's credited with introducing it to Nigeria, and his concerts with Louis Armstrong are among the earliest seeds of Afrobeat.

These new musical hybrids emerged at the same time as the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and the decolonization of Africa by European powers, beginning on March 6, 1957, with the independence of Ghana under the pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah. American jazz, soul, and funk became outlets for politics and expressions of black pride. James Brown visited the continent several times, and a listen to any Afrobeat compilation reveals his influence. By the end of the 60s, the optimism spurred by independence had dimmed considerably as some initially democratic governments calcified into autocratic regimes, as economies stagnated, militaries took power, and currencies plummeted in value. Nkrumah, a great thinker and activist, wasn't adept at governing and was overthrown in a coup in the wake of some disastrous economic policy decisions and a declaration of himself as president-for-life.

It was against this backdrop that Fela took his band, Koola Lobitos, to Britain and the U.S., where he read the writings of Malcolm X and befriended members of the Black Panthers. When he returned home, his band had been renamed Africa '70 and he embarked on the long, wild course of loud, unflinching criticism of corruption and ineptitude in African government that cemented his legend and kept the Nigerian authorities exasperated until his death from AIDS in 1997.

Fela Music Is the Weapon

Overstating Fela's position in African music would be difficult, and in Afrobeat specifically it would be impossible-- his contemporaries lived in his shadow, and newspapers referred to him on a first-name basis. Fela frequently fought with Nigeria's military governments, believing that inept or cruel local government was no better than inept, cruel governance from abroad. In Stephane Tchal-Gadjieff and Jean Jacques Flori's great 1982 documentary Music Is the Weapon, Fela-- sitting in a tattered chair in his communal home-- expressed his belief that blacks oppressing blacks in Nigeria is worse than whites oppressing blacks in South Africa, because it's more insidious: It's more difficult to comprehend your oppression when the obviousness of racism is removed from the equation, he theorized.

So much has already been written about Fela that it seems fruitless to rehash his biography, as fascinating as it is. Though he made huge sums of money from his music, he chose to live in a dilapidated Lagos compound-- his Kalakuta Republic-- with his wives and band members, and he disdained the Nigerian elites who ignored the city's massive slums and rampant crime. He also saw Christianity and Islam as destroyers of an African way of life and predicated his lifestyle, including his controversial polygamy, on a return to African spirituality. His album art spills over with these ideas: The imams and priests on the cover of Shuffering & Shmiling lord over piles of money near the words "Why Not African Religion?", while he blows bubbles containing the words and phrases "Pan-Africanism," "Total Emancipation," "Freedom," and "Justice" from his sax on the cover of No Agreement.

Fela sang most of his epic songs in pidgin English to reach as wide an audience as possible-- Nigeria's Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and Fulani communities could all understand it, and it exported easily to other English-speaking countries. And of course, there's his sound: Eighteen-minute epics riding endless polyrhythmic grooves, massive horn sections and choirs, incessant guitar ostinatos, and Fela's furious baritone. The arrangements were intricate, but left room for the accomplished soloists of the Africa 70 and his later band the Egypt 80. Fela's stage presence was mesmerizing, whether he wore his lime-green or aqua blue jumpsuits or just his underwear, his pink, cowrie-shell encrusted sax glistening as it hung from his neck.

Singing in pidgin English had other advantages for Fela, as he was a great lover of wordplay and fluently bilingual-- he claimed in an interview with guitarist Keziah Jones that English is Yoruba "wrongly spoken." "Society" is just another way of spelling the Yoruba "so si ayiti," loosely translated as "tied in such a way that it appears free," he claimed. Often he was less subtle: The cover of his V.I.P. album has "Very Important Persons" crossed out and replaced with "Vagabonds in Power" and he repurposed the acronym of multinational information conglomerate I.T.T. to stand for "International Thief Thief."

Fela's outspoken stance made his life difficult and often tragic. In 1975, police arrived at his house intending to plant marijuana on him and book him for possession, but he confounded them by eating the joint. When they arrested him to get an incriminating stool sample, he merely swapped with another prisoner and walked away a free man, detailing the whole ordeal on Expensive Shit. His 1977 album Zombie, a furious critique of the military, prompted an attack on his compound that destroyed his home and left his mother with fatal injuries. Instead of backing down, he delivered her coffin to an army barracks and wrote Coffin for Head of State, a scathing indictment of the militarys brutal repression. On his defiance in the face of tyranny, he had this to say in Music Is the Weapon: "My name is Anikulapo... I can't die. They can't kill me." Fela replaced his given middle name Ransome with Anikulapo in the late 70s. Anikulapo means, roughly, "he carries death in his pouch."

About the only thing keeping Fela from a lifetime in prison was the instability of the Nigerian government itself. Whenever he was jailed, a new regime would release him when it came to power. He remained an activist to the end of his life, never compromising his beliefs or positions to accommodate anyone. It's said that more than a million people attended his funeral, but whatever the numbers, Fela was the king of Afrobeat, and no one else comes close to that claim.