Afropop Worldwide

When we talk about the influence of American performers on African music, we usually think about a few obvious examples, legends like Michael Jackson, Jimi Hendrix or James Brown. In this episode, we go beyond these stars to explore the legacy of some lesser-known inspirations. We’ll learn how the fluid guitar playing of ’70s rock band Dire Straits became massively popular in the Sahel, influencin...

The San Francisco Bay Area is a unique cultural space that has given birth to some of the most iconic countercultural American music. It is a place where identities can be fluid and hyphenated, where new voices emerge to speak to their times. Two very different Bay Area artists, Meklit Hadero and Zena Carlota, use their music to explore what it means to live on two sides of a hyphen: African-Ameri...

Beneath the gloss of Nigeria’s contemporary pop, older roots styles, mostly derived from Yoruba tradition, still thrive. In this program, we meet four top stars of fuji music, the percussion-driven, message-heavy, and occasionally profane trance music that animates weddings and parties on a daily basis in hidden corners of Lagos. Rival “kings” K1 da Ultimate and Saheed Osupa, and a rare woman of f...

Junkanoo, an annual communal parade held in the Bahamas, is a labor of love for the Bahamian people that dates back centuries. The parade, which has Akan cultural roots, emerged in the time of slavery, but it has since moved from the margins to the very center of society, becoming the bedrock of national culture. When the government wanted to invest millions into the development of a major cultura...

New York City is home to the earthshaking Latin dance music known as salsa. From the mid-1960s through the 1980s, Fania Records released many of the landmark albums of the era, creating a salsa boom that reverberated around the world. In 2014, Fania celebrated 50 years in the business; and to celebrate, we dug into the label’s history. We’ll hear from some of the principal players, including Auror...

To celebrate the launch of the second season of the Afropop Closeup podcast, this special radio program features some of the stories from the inaugural season. We’ll hear about the plight of Haitian radio stations in New York; the story of Mabiisi, a unique transnational collaboration be-tween a Burkinabe rapper and a Ghanaian roots musician; and the surprising popular resurgence of U.K. grime mus...

Life in the music business has its ups and downs—especially in Haiti—and Serge Turnier (A.K.A. Powersurge) has lived both extremes. As a producer he makes his living from recorded music, not from concerts, and so many of those ups and downs have revolved around the question of copyright: a legal system for controlling who can copy, record and perform a piece of music. The concept can seem abstract...

*Music in this show contains some explicit language* New Orleans, Louisiana is home to some of America's greatest musical traditions, and plays an outsized influence on the evolution of everything from jazz through to r&b, rock and funk. Today, the city is still legendary for its second line brass bands and brightly costumed Mardi Gras Indians. But if you've rolled through New Orleans on pretty mu...

The island of Hispaniola, located in the western Caribbean, is divided in two by an invisible line that snakes down its central mountain range. On one side is Haiti, the other the Dominican Republic: one colonized by the French, the other by Spain. The island was the first place in the Americas colonized by Europeans, and was the place where trans-Atlantic slavery was first implemented. It was als...

Working closely with Christopher Kirkley, the writer and recordist behind the Sahel Sounds blog and label, we will meet the newest generation of musicians from Mali. With their possibilities transformed by technology and their musical tastes reshaped by an exposure to sounds drawn from across the world, these young musicians are radically rethinking centuries-old traditions. Get ready for the fast...

In the 1930s, infamous Dominican dictator Rafael Truillo ordered the burning of the country’s palos drums, hoping to erase the powerful vestiges of African culture in the Dominican Republic. Luckily for us, the breakneck, trance-inducing sound of palos still reverberates at Afro-syncretic religious parties across the Caribbean nation almost a century later. This week, Afropop revisits the home of...

This spring, Afropop returned to Fes, Morocco, for the 23rd annual World Sacred Music Festival, a sumptuous spread of music from across the globe that blurs the boundaries of what is sacred. Interwoven with Morocco’s ornate history and fertile fabric of daily life is a mosaic of many musics: Gnawa, Arabic pop, Amazigh ahwach, classical Andalusian, Issaoua, raï, rap, chaabi, jazz, metal and so much...

Every year on Sierra Leone’s Independence Day in late April, musicians and revelers descend upon Freetown from throughout the country. Parades and celebrations traverse the city, joining diverse neighborhoods with processional music, including one particular local style called bubu, a trance-inducing sound played by groups of young men blowing interlocking hocketed breath patterns into bamboo tube...

Louis Sarno, an American original who lived for 30 years among Bayaka Pygmies in the Central African rainforest and recorded their polyphonic music more completely than any audio adventurer or ethnomusicologist could dream of, died where he was born, in New Jersey, on April 1, 2017. In his memory, we bring you this encore Hip Deep program. Read more of Banning Eyre's tribute to Louis Sarno at http...

Technology is one of the great drivers of musical change, and often one of its least understood. In this episode, we explore the synthesizer, looking closely at the history of this ubiquitous (and often debated) piece of musical technology, and investigating how and why it was first used in a variety African musics. Enabled by groundbreaking record reissues by synth pioneers like William Onyeabor...

We honor the late Joe Cuba with this encore portrait of "Bugalú," produced for Afropop Worldwide by Ned Sublette. Bugalú is the Spanish spelling of boogaloo, and was also known as “Latin soul.” It hit the scene in 1966 with the original and organic concept of combining black and Puerto Rican music. The dance club crowd went crazy and then the fad quickly faded. But what a ride along the way! Joe C...

Afropop producer Banning Eyre takes us on a surprise-filled tour of his 30-some years of covering African music. Through conversations with Georges Collinet and producer/agent/DJ Rab Bakari, the program reflects on how the world, the music, the culture and the media have changed and keep on changing throughout Africa and the diaspora. Along the way we hear some of the tunes that have most inspired...

As work continues on the vast Afropop archive, producer Banning Eyre takes a deep dive and comes up with some gems. On the vinyl front, the focus is on South Africa and Zimbabwe, where the Afropop team collected a good deal of rare vinyl in the 1980s. Then Banning samples some his favorite field recordings from Zanzibar to Mali. In the age of YouTube, Pandora and Spotify, you might have the impres...

[Extended Online Version] Kano State in northwest Nigeria is a land of paradox. The ancient home of the Hausa people, it has ties back to the oldest civilizations in West Africa. Muslim since at least the 12th century, the region remained largely self-administered during the era of British colonialism, and never significantly adapted Christianity or Western culture and values as in other parts of...

Summer is always the most active season for African and diaspora touring artists. We’ll clue you in to what we think are the best. So wherever you are, enjoy the fun fun fun free open-air concerts at Central Park SummerStage, Celebrate Brooklyn, Nuits d’Afrique in Montreal, Concert of Colors in Detroit, Grand Performances in L.A. and more. Artists we’re looking forward to seeing perform in New Yor...

Cape Verde, land of the the playful coladeira, the entrancing batuque, the high-energy funaná, and of course the sensual morna that Cesaria Évora helped bring to the world. At the intersection of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Cape Verde's creole identity is reflected in the richness of its musical output, one which continues to uphold traditions while maintaining a youthful energy and demonstr...

The massive Niger River Delta is a fantastically rich cultural region and ecosystem. Unfortunately, it has been laid low by the brutal Biafran War (1967-70) and by decades of destructive and mismanaged oil exploration. This program offers a portrait of the region in two stories. First, we chronicle the Biafran War through the timeless highlife music of Cardinal Rex Jim Lawson, perhaps the most pop...

Live from Brooklyn, it’s Afropop Worldwide! In collaboration with Brooklyn Internet radio station Stewart Avenue, Afropop invited New York-based artists from Africa and the diaspora to our office for a unique live broadcast on Sat., Feb. 11. In case you missed it, we have highlights from the six-hour broadcast which featured interviews with singer and keyboardist Jean Gnonlonfoun of Beninois band...

This Hip Deep episode presents the stunning radio premiere of “Oh, David,” the traditional song of the annual Easter Rock in Winnsboro, Louisiana. The Easter Rock is in fact a surviving ringshout—the oldest known form of African American music—but it’s about 600 miles west of the ringshout’s heartland in Georgia. It’s located across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg in the Louisiana Delta, wher...

The music being made in Puerto Rico before and during the salsa years had its own sabor, even while the salsa boom was exploding out of New York. We talk to three of Puerto Rico’s all-time most important bandleaders: Rafael Ithier, founder of El Gran Combo; Quique Lucca, founder of Sonora Ponceña; and Willie Rosario, and hear key tracks from the island. Produced by Ned Sublette with José Mandry. F...