~ Cultural Appropriation Comes Full Circle ~
At the end of the 1970s, music was changing and influences from vastly removed cultures were being integrated into the popular music scene. One such blending of sounds came from the New Wave group Talking Heads. This emerging band was seen as one of the most exciting American groups in years. They were moving in radical new directions, and for their fourth album they found inspiration more than 5,000 miles away - in Nigeria and the music of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti. Talking Heads’ 1980 album Remain in Light is a mix of many threads, but the band openly credited Fela Kuti for his polytechnic rhythms and use of electronics and funk. They acknowledge that they were listening to Fela when they did the album, and they were reading the book African Rhythms and African Sensibility by John Miller Chernoff. They would often tell people, “You want to understand our album? Listen to Fela and read the book.”
Angélique Kidjo, a Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter from Benin, a country in western Africa, first heard the music of Talking Heads during a party in Paris in the 80s. The song was “Once in a Lifetime,” and right away she recognized it as African music. “When I arrived in Paris, I was determined to catch up with the music I didn’t have. I became a music junkie. I went to a party with some friends of mine and somebody started playing the song of the Talking Heads called “Once in a Lifetime” and everybody was standing and dancing weird, and me, I was grooving. And I told them, “This is African music,” and they go, “Hell no, this is rock and roll. You Africans are not sophisticated enough to do this kind of music.”
Thus began in Kidjo’s heart a small inkling, a desire to open up her home culture to the world, through music. Over the years, she has done just that. With more than a dozen albums, performances with international orchestras and wide acclaim to her videos and performances, Kidjo has become an icon of African culture. She is fluent in Fon, French, Yorùbá and English, and sings in all four languages. “Malaika” is a song sung in the Swahili language. Kidjo often utilizes Benin's traditional Zilin vocal technique and jazz vocalese.
In her most recent album, Kidjo revisits that early influence of Talking Heads album Remain in Light. It’s a cover of that 1980s album, but Kidjo presents it all anew. She strips away the ̓80s new wave sheen and re-imagines each song as it would be if it had emerged directly from West Africa. In making a cover album of Talking Heads' Remain in Light, people kept telling her that the absurd songs had no meaning. But it didn’t seem that way to her. She connected the music with folk songs from her home country of Benin and interpreted them through the same cultural lens that the band did. “I always say, when you are inspired by a music sound and you acknowledge that source of inspiration, it is cultural expansion.
That’s what the traditional musicians of my country have taught me. It doesn’t matter how hard the subject is, make it danceable. Bring people to the table to have a discussion. Open doors that are closed. If you have the gift of song, if you’re an artist, whatever arts you touch up on, empower yourself to be able to empower other people.
As she has matured, she has focused on the theme of empowering others. Kidjo has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2002. With UNICEF, she has travelled Benin, Senegal, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Syria, Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Haiti.
Kidjo founded The Batonga Foundation in 2007, which gives girls a secondary school and higher education so that they can take the lead in changing Africa. The foundation is doing this by granting scholarships, building secondary schools, increasing enrolment, improving teaching standards, providing school supplies, supporting mentor programmes, exploring alternative education models and advocating for community awareness of the value of education for girls. The Batonga Foundation is now working in five African nations: Benin, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Mali and Sierra Leone.
She campaigned for Oxfam at the 2005 Hong Kong WTO meeting, for their Fair-Trade Campaign and travelled with them in North Kenya and at the border of Darfur and Chad with a group of women leaders in 2007. Since March 2009, Kidjo has been campaigning for “Africa for women’s rights.” This campaign was launched by The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH). The Commission of the African Union (AU) announced on July 16, 2010, the appointment of Angélique Kidjo as one of 14 Peace Ambassadors to support the implementation of the 2010 Year of Peace and Security programme.
Adapted from Wikipedia and David Greene & Tori Whitley of NPR.org
