Word: afros
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...past few years, some 200 rap groups have sprung up in and around Havana, bearing names like Obsesion (Obsession), Reyes de la Calle (Kings of the Street) and Anonimo Consejo (Anonymous Advice). Many of them hail from tough neighborhoods of Havana or Alamar, a town of 300,000 mostly Afro-Cubans living in concrete high-rises originally built to house Soviet laborers in the 1970s. Working with budgets so small they probably wouldn't be enough to cover the cost of gassing up one of Jay-Z's SUVs, Havana's raperos have scratched their own thriving world...
...world that radio and record stores would have you believe exists, where American music resides in one aisle and the music of the rest of the globe in another. Worlds collide, melodies mix, beats blend. Nigerian star Fela Kuti met with the Black Panthers before popularizing his radical Afro-beat music in the '60s; rocker Shakira was born in Colombia, but is launching a run at stardom from Miami in 2001. What follows is a look at Border Crossings--key moments when cultures combined to make fresh new music, from Bob Marley's trekking to London to Paul Simon...
Orishas CUBA Combines lyrical wizardry with traditional Afro-Cuban rhythms to make cutting-edge hip-hop. Key album: A Lo Cubano...
...single Sukiyaki, an American chart topper by way of Japan. (For Bookman, even singing in Creole--which has periodically been outlawed in Haiti--is a political act.) Protest singers in Africa and the Caribbean have long preached a musical and lyrical Pan-Africanism, from Kuti's mondo-Afro beats back to Peter Tosh's 1977 rallying cry: "As long as you're a black man, you're an African...
...beginning, when mbalax [a blend of Senegal's traditional griot percussion and praise singing with modern Afro-Cuban arrangements] was starting off, it was never a question of people saying, "It's not good; it's not well done," but rather, "We don't like it." Later, as success arrived with this music, those who were more traditional began to appreciate that our success could be a window onto traditional music...