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.
African Music Compilations
Douglas Wolk once referred to Sonic Youth as “comp sluts,” for the number of tribute anthologies they appeared on during the nineties, and as a listener, that’s what I am too. So it’s worth noting up front that what I’m writing about here isn’t African music, per se, but African compilations as compilations—a specific format that evolved commercially in a particular way.
For a long time, compilations were the easiest and most bountiful route into classic African pop for American fans, as important or more than artist albums, since only a handful of individuals had made much of a dent, such as Fela Kuti, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and Youssou N’Dour. Especially as the CD overtook the vinyl LP in the late eighties, and opened up the music market even more widely, compilations of all sorts flourished, from archival box sets to dance DJ mixes. Also, Africa’s gigantic, making an expert’s selections even more helpful.
Note the word “pop” above—it’s not casually chosen. For years prior to the eighties, ethnographical recordings from Africa were more widely available in record stores than collections of songs people bought and heard on the radio—far more. To give you an idea of how modest was African pop’s commercial prospects in the States, John Storm Roberts, the founder of Original Music—whose 1973 collection Africa Dances is the starting point for this particular area of focus—told Robert Christgau in 1990 that his break-even point for a title’s sale was a modest 750. That’s not a typo—seven hundred and fifty, and not all his titles did as well.
Granted, three decades is a long time, particularly in the music business. Still, given the subsequent internationalization of US pop for its producers and audience alike, that number seems absurdly small. It did then, too: “We’re not into niche marketing or being on top of some world-music chart,” Jumbo Vanrenen, the co-founder of Earthworks Records and an A&R man for Chris Blackwell’s Island Records subsidiary, Mango, told Billboard in 1996. “We’re trying to break these acts into the mainstream.” But as localism has become easier to access, and well after the playlist became both a primary pop conduit and more widely shareable, the kind of niche appeal of compilations also seems right.
Comps have long been the way the record biz tests the waters, and when Mango Records decided to try its hand at selling African pop to westerners in the early eighties, including three acclaimed LPs by the Nigerian juju master King Sunny Adé, one of the label’s executives told a reporter, “We think it’s the coming thing, this kind of third world music. We’re starting with a zero base, after all.”
That earlier positioning is important to remember, because it was a definitively pre-Internet time, and information on this music was hard to come by in the U.S. But the nineties’ CD boom took collections of African pop along with it, along with all manner of global pop, from the Alps to the Sahara. Throughout the decade, seemingly every major label had a global-music subsidiary that pumped out compilations. In 1991, Yale Evelev, the president of Luaka Bop Records, emphasized to Billboard that it was “a label of popular ethnic music, not a label of folkloric music.”
But that touristy sense pervaded all sorts of the most successful compilation CD series of that period, from the mild-mannered coffeehouse exotica of the packages from Putumayo to the more scholarly mien of the highly reliable Rough Guide series, tied to a travel-book series and venturing into vintage Americana, as well as every conceivable area of African pop.
That set the table for the 2000s, when the number of African pop comps sharply increased in number and profile. Labels like London’s Soul Jazz and Strut, in particular, became adept at packaging Nigerian music in particular, and Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat seeped more directly into clubland, cf. “MAW Expensive,” Masters at Work’s 2003 house-music reworking of his “Zombie.” The 2008 success of the Fela! musical played another part. But so did a generational shift: Reissued obscurities were part of an omnivorous listening diet, and so was music from anywhere at all.
The reissue producer Andy Zax neatly summarized things this way: “A compilation is like an essay. A good compilation has a thesis; a bad compilation doesn’t.” Some of the best of these have the sweep of history; others are then-and-there overviews with revelatory snap. In a few cases, they share a song or two, but even then, these collections don’t much resemble one another. But as much as the best music itself, from the fluid peal of Congolese rumba and soukous to confidently bumptious South African mbaqanga and disco to turn-of-the-millennium African hip-hop, the best compilations all have their own personalities.
Originally issued in 1994 by the South African label Gallo as From Marabi to Disco, then retitled and repackaged in 2002 by the British imprint Wrasse as The History of Township Music, this is a 28-track treasure chest covering the thirties to the seventies. It stretches from 1939’s “Mbube” by Solomon Linda’s Original Evening Birds—aka the source material for “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” one of the greatest of all melodies—near the top and the Soul Brothers’ not-ready-for-Saturday Night Fever “Bayeza” (1978) near the end. Hearing how the lighter, swinging pre-sixties material—cf. the brushed drums of Solven Whistlers and Jazz Dazzlers—evolves into the blessed stomp of mbaqanga is the best kind of education.
Though Fela Kuti would be the recipient of short-lived attempts at an American breakthrough in the late seventies and again in the mid-eighties, there was little precedent for the two Sound d’Afrique collections that Mango Records issued in 1981-82, featuring music the label had licensed from International Salsa Musique. While the first volume was a continental sampler, the second had a tighter focus, showcasing Francophone West Africa’s premiere style, soukous—an extension of Cuban-style Congolese rumba, though only half the LP originated from what was then called Zaire (Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Mali yield others). As such, it’s more a reflection of where the Congolese sound went than a depiction of its formation—and its ingratiating lightness means that it remains a charming historical marker.
“Gold” feels right materially as well as judgmentally—these tracks sparkle in ways redolent of sunlight glistening off precious metals. For example, the single-note guitar ringing that occupies the first half of the solo on Grand Kalle & L’African Jazz’s “Parafifi” is about the most burstingly beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. There’s further resonance when the soloist takes a break on the next track, Tabu Ley Rochereau & L’African Jazz’s “Adios Tete,” that heavily resembles the “Parafifi” tune. But not only do the pieces of this one chime together, they’re chronological, covering 1949 to 1993. The instrumentation and production evolves—here come the synths on track eight, by Sam Mangwana—and so does the groove. But it also stays enticingly the same.
Kwaito, the South African hip-hop/house derivation, began muscling into the musical picture there during the nineties, and this comp, issued shortly before the decade drew to an end, is a fascinating détente: a very different musical future coming into focus, while the older style mbaqanga adapts to the digital era.
Fact: This compilation was released before Graceland was—1985 in the UK, on Earthworks, and a year later, concurrent with Paul Simon’s album, in America by Shanachie. But it’s still a chicken-or-egg question, since these twelve songs, recorded between 1981 and 1984, are precisely what Simon went to Johannesburg to siphon. He’d done so before this compilation was issued, but the cohesion and thrust of The Indestructible Beat of Soweto bears comparison with the most through-composed single-artist discs, Paul’s included. Out-of-nowhere vocal trills, jumpy bass, and spider-like guitar are consistent traits, sequenced perfectly, with Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s a cappella finisher like lemon icing.
If the numbers that greeted the first concentrated attempts to sell African pop to the US market in the early eighties seem low—King Sunny Adé and His African Beats’ Juju Music, in 1982, moved a mere 50k—in the seventies things were even paltrier: In his original Consumer Guide review of Africa Dances, from December 1976, Robert Christgau notes that its compiler, John Storm Roberts, still had 100 copies waiting to be sold. A lot more have heard it since then—I found it on CD at Rose Records in Chicago during the mid-nineties—and no wonder: it’s irresistibly laid out, starting with the buoyant opener, “Afrika Mokili Mobimba,” by Kalle-Roger and Rochereau with OK Jazz Orchestra, a 1960 track as instantly, self-evidently classic as “She Loves You.” Roberts compiled it from his own collection, and as it zips through the continent, it keeps up that verve.
Collections of Congolese rumba and soukous begin with an advantage—the music’s undulant undertone carries along so suavely that compiling it for flow is almost too easy. But does this double CD ever flow. Compiled by Gunter Gretz, Christian Scholze, and Jean Trouillet for the Frankfurt label Network, it offers an ideal combo of guns-ablaze forthrightness—Franco & Sam Mangwana’s “Cooperation” and Nyboma’s “Doublé-Doublé” is an ideal one-two—and historical survey; even the Cameroonian Manu Dibango gets a look-in.
“Highlife has always been with us (Nigerians), at least since the guitar of mandolin banjo was introduced to our folk,” wrote the Nigerian journalist Benson Idonije in the liner notes of this sparkling highlife overview. Views from the Ghanaian side of the debate over the music’s patrilineage are also weighed. The winner is everybody listening—the tracks slip between the early fifties and middle eighties without alarming the cochlea, and when Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Titibitis of Africa’s “Ogiobo” comes on, you’ve never heard anything so junkyard-funky in your life.
Sampler platters introduced listeners to Ghanaian music long before there was an Afro-compilation market in the U.S. The state-run Syliphone label issued seven annual Discotheque collections between 1970 and 1976, and were reissued on CD in 2000. The 1972 edition, in particular, is a bounty, with bristling guitar work even on the mellowest tracks. The highlight is Pivi et les Balladins’ “Samba,” a careening high-speed car chase of a track, the lead guitar screeching against the curb.