Angélique Kidjo, the singer from Benin who has been forging pan-African and transcontinental hybrids for three decades, actually didn’t need another Grammy.
In 2020 she received the award for the best world music album for the fourth time with “Celia”, her homage to the Afro-Cuban salsa dynamo Celia Cruz. True to its form, Grammy voters chose well-known names and snubbed the world music phenomenon of the year: Nigerian songwriter Burna Boy’s ambitious, thoughtful album that attracted hundreds of millions of streams and made it an international sensation. (“African Giant” also featured a guest appearance by Kidjo.)
In her acceptance speech, Kidjo was friendly, but pointedly looked ahead. “The new generations of artists coming from Africa will take you by storm,” she said, “and the time has come.”
Kidjo, 60, follows this declaration with her new album “Mother Nature”, which is full of collaborations with aspiring African songwriters and producers: Burna Boy, Mr Eazi and Yemi Alade from Nigeria as well as the Zambian rapper and singer Sampa the Great, who American songwriter Shungudzo and singer Zeynab, who was born in Ivory Coast and lives in Benin. Throughout the album, their guests do everything they can to keep up with Kidjo’s leather fervor.
“This young generation has the same concern that I have had throughout my career – they tried to convey a very positive image of my continent Africa,” said Kidjo via video from Paris. “I also wanted to hear from them about climate change and its impact on their lives and how they want to deal with it. With climate change, we will pay the highest price for it in Africa, especially the youth. It will be up to the future generation not to ask questions, but to act. Because time is running out for questions. “
The songs on “Mother Nature” offer snappy programmed Afrobeats, lively Congolese soukous, lavish Nigerian juju and a dramatic orchestral chanson. Irresistible beats carry serious messages about the preservation of the environment, about human rights, about African unity and about the power of music and love.
Kidjo recorded “Dignity” – a song that got excited when protesters against police brutality in Nigeria were shot – with Alade, 32, a major Nigerian pop star she had worked with earlier in 2019. Like Kidjo, Alade has worked with musicians from all over Africa and beyond (including Beyoncé on the soundtrack of “Black Is King”).
“I grew up with their music,” Alade said in an interview from Lagos. “She is one of the few role models I have. The only thing that definitely drew me to Angélique is her uncompromising Africanity no matter where she goes. As for Africa, she is definitely our Angélique, our songbird – anytime, any day. It’s always heartwarming to see how she does what she does and how she does it, even though she’s been doing it for so long. I look at them and I am encouraged to just keep doing what I am doing. “
Like most of Kidjo’s music over the years, the new album is multilingual – mostly English, but also French and West African languages like Fon and Nago – and it blends new sounds and technologies with Africa’s past. In “One Africa” Kidjo celebrates the year she was born – 1960 – because it was a turning point in African history when several countries gained their independence. (She was planning a Carnegie Hall concert in March 2020 around the milestone, which was canceled when New York closed due to the pandemic.) She based the music on “Indépendance Cha Cha,” which was made in 1960 by Joseph Kabasele’s group L’African Jazz was released.
For “Africa, One of a Kind” Mr. Eazi built the track around a sample of the song “Africa” by Malian singer Salif Keita from 1995, but Kidjo increased the stakes: She persuaded Keita, now 71, to come out of retirement to sing it again. The video of the song shows a dance, Gogbahoun, from Kidjo’s home village in Benin, Ouidah.
“Gogbahoun means the rhythm that breaks glass,” she said. It’s a beat, she explained, originally tapped on an empty bottle with a piece of metal: a ring, a spoon, a coin. “And if the bottle is broken, the party’s over,” she said.
The reception of “Mother Nature” was shaped by the pandemic. “We had time and had nowhere to go,” said Kidjo. Her two previous albums were re-Africanized tributes to music from America: “Celia” and before that, a transformative remake of Talking Heads’ album “Remain in Light”. But Kidjo and her husband and long-time musical partner, keyboardist and programmer Jean Hébrail, wrote their own songs in 2019, the year in which they also released and toured for “Celia”.
When bans were imposed in 2020, Kidjo set out to complete the songs with new, far-flung staff working remotely. There was one perk on an album that dealt with global warming: “a minimal carbon footprint,” noted Kidjo.
She gathered the album’s staff through connections and chance. Kidjo happened upon Sampa the Great, 27, a rapper and singer who was born in Zambia and built her career in Australia, at an NPR Tiny Desk Concert and contacted her through direct messages on Instagram. In fact, they had met years earlier at a fan encounter when Kidjo signed a t-shirt for Sampa at WOMADelaide, a world music festival in Australia.
Their joint song “Free & Equal” is based on the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the United States’ Declaration of Independence. “We have been fighting since I could speak,” raps Sampa and then praises “Angélique / Connecting through the generations, power of musique”.
“She was the person I saw, who looked like me, who was from the continent, spoke in her own language and made a huge impact outside of the continent,” Sampa said in an interview from Botswana.
“She knows how much reach African music has today – the continent is simply connected to the world,” she continued. “The beauty of this album is having legends who are able to nod to young people to acknowledge that we are continuing what people like Salif Keita and Angélique Kidjo started. She said, “I want you to express yourself. That’s why I’m turning to you. ‘”
Kidjo didn’t just invite songwriters and rappers to add vocals. She also gave skeleton tracks to some of the electronics savvy producers like Kel-P from Nigeria, who spread Afrobeats and other African rhythms around the world. “I said you found a way to make this a global rhythm,” said Kidjo. “Anyone in any part of the world can claim Afrobeats and do it their own way because their own culture fits it perfectly. The puzzle is just perfect. All the music that comes from Africa is based on our tradition and always has an integrative way of doing things. “
Some of Kidjo’s vocals are given a computerized twist in “Do Yourself,” a duet with Burna Boy that calls for Africa to become self-employed. “I asked Burna Boy, I asked his engineers and producers, ‘What did you do with my voice?'” She said. “He sent me a snapshot of the board and I don’t understand anything about it. It looks like something from space! ”She laughed. “But it’s okay, I’ll take it. I don’t have to understand to love it.
“Any collaboration is about preserving people’s freedom,” she added. “I would say I send you the song and you let the song lead you to what you want to do. I said, ‘Just do it.’ What this album taught me is that we develop beautiful things when we really take the time to talk to each other. “
