Nothing Is Permanent: African Funk and Pop in the 1970s

Sunday Mayhem 11 3AM-6AM
Hosted by Public Domain

The Golden Age of African popular music is usually considered to have been from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, an era of military dictatorships, civil wars and the end of a short-lived economic boom?and the era of a bewildering array of aesthetic and cultural experiments as African musicians fused local traditions with new technologies and global sounds. This special explores some of the main branches of those experiments, focusing on the Afro-Funk and Neo-Highlife of Ghana and Nigeria, Mbalax in Senegal, and Soukous in Zaire. Tune in to hear and learn more about these uniquely African responses to a world in flux.