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Spotlight on.. Africa
The music of Africa!! Africa is a large and diverse continent, consisting of dozens of countries, hundreds of languages and thousands of races, tribes and ethnic groups. As such, there is little that can be said that applies to all the music of Africa, as there is no distinctly pan-African tradition of folk or classical music of any kind; the only shared form of musical expression is pop. Nevertheless, there are regional similarities between dissimilar groups, as well as popular trends known across the continent.
African popular music includes an array of teen idols, boy bands and girl groups, as well as numerous practitioners of imported rock and roll, soul and hip hop. Most distinctively, however, Africa has also produced indigenous styles of popular music which are known across the continent, and further abroad.
Hip-Hop has been popular in Africa since the early 1980s due to widespread American influence. The first Hip-Hop group from Africa was Black Noise, a group from South Africa. They began as a graffiti and breakdance crew until they started emceeing around 1989.
In 1985 hip-hop reached Senegal. Some of the first Senegalese rappers were M.C. Lida, M.C. Solaar, and Positive Black Soul, who mixed rap with Mbalax, a type of music that's been played in West Africa for centuries. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, rap started to escalate all over Africa. Each region had a new type of style of Hip-Hop. Rap elements are also found in Kwaito, a new genre based on house music.
Reggae is a kind of Jamaican popular music that's spread to much of the world, especially Africa. There are many African reggae musicians with a wide fanbase both on the continent and abroad.
Afrobeat is a combination of American funk rhythms fused with African percussion and vocal styles, popularised in Africa in the mid to late 1960s. Afrobeat originated from the southern part of Nigeria in the 1960s, influenced probably by the American free jazz movement. Fela Anikolapu Kuti went through experimenting different forms of music - first by highlife jazz, and then other forms of contemporary music of the time and local African harmonies and rhythms, taking different elements and combining, modernising and improvising them.
