The Birth of Afropop

This weekend, we have dueling world music festivals happening here in NYC. The Mondo Mundo event at the Hiro Ballroom on Saturday and SOBs on Monday; and the GlobalFest, which takes place on three different stages at Webster Hall on Sunday. (And which we’re webcasting live on WNYC2.) It’s an embarrassment of riches, but it’s also a sign of the importance of world music on our cultural landscape. And for many people, the engine driving the world music phenomenon has been the irresistible mix of musical styles from Africa known as Afropop. South African mbaqanga, Senegalese mbalax, Congolese soukous, and a host of other styles, have become a part of the cultural currency of modern Western pop. Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and Sting were early adopters, but now, this music is truly a global sound.

So it’s odd that the man who, more than anyone else, was responsible for starting the Afropop trend is just now getting an American CD release – 20 years after his death. Franco was a Congolese guitarist, singer, and bandleader… and to me, back in the 1980s, a rumor. When I started WNYC’s “New Sounds” program in 1982 (“I was six at the time,” he says desperately), recordings of music from South Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana were beginning to trickle into the States. I was a big Brian Eno fan, and Eno had talked about Nigeria’s Fela Kuti, the James Brown of Afropop, so I was aware of his work. And Robert Christgau, writing in the Village Voice, had touted the “highlife” music of King Sunny Ade, whose records were also becoming available. But for me, the first Afropop LP that I really fell in love with was a fairly obscure disc that nonetheless became a staple of those early “New Sounds” programs. It was Aly + Tams avec L’orchestre Malo. I never really knew who these people were, and I’ve never seen a CD reissue so the album has faded a bit in my memory, but it was the gateway to a whole continent’s worth of great music.

Peter Gabriel came on the show back around 1987 to introduce the Congolese superstar Tabu Ley Rochereau (and the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), and it was around that time that I began to hear the name of Franco. But getting the music, and therefore a real chance to understand just how important this guy was, would take years. A track here or there on a sampler disc was about all we had in our library, until the recent FRANCOphonic retrospective. But there he is, the teenaged Franco, playing guitar in 1953, and heading down the track that would launch the Central African pop style known as soukous, and eventually spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa. So for me, discovering Franco was a matter of working backwards, from the music I knew and liked to the music that influenced those folks. Sort of like rock fans discovering Robert Johnson by working backwards from Cream or Led Zeppelin.

Tell us: What was your first exposure to Afropop? And where (if anywhere) did that lead you? Leave a comment.