Africa Raps

It’s hard to remember how little African hip-hop was available beyond its borders in 2002, when this collection appeared from the ace German compilers Trikont. Africa Raps is West African rather than continent-wide—Senegalese, Gambian, and Malian, specifically—and its component parts are all but impossible to locate twenty years later. Musically, it’s all over the place, just as you’d expect, and heavily indebted to US rap production of the Rawkus and trap schools as much as the koras that also show up. No surprise that the two most resonant tracks, Tata Pound’s “Badala” and Pee Froiss’s “Djalgaty,” showed up again two years later on The Rough Guide to African Rap.