African Music Essay

Beats from the Dark Continent African music is rich, ancient and diverse with the different regions of Africa having different musical traditions; From North Africa and the Horn of Africa to the West, central, southeast and South Africa all having very distinct musical traditions which help make the African culture among other things very colorful and delightful. African music (especially from the west coast) has since travelled out of the continent since the slave trade era to Latin America where they influenced genres like samba, rumba and salsa and to the Caribbean and influenced genres like Zouk and calypso. According to Adewale, “music has gone beyond being viewed or interpreted only as art and is now carrying subliminal messages that represent the way that artists want to be seen or what they stand for”(p.31). This can be seen where artists have adopted new ways of presenting who they are. They have done so by cultivating their own kind of Hip hop genre called ‘Afro hip hop’; which blends African beats with contemporary rap and features multilingual characteristics like code-switching where music is performed in a mixture of standard English and one or more indigenous

While African music has influenced other musical genres around the world, globalization has made it easier for African music to also be influenced with the help of new media spheres like television, internet and mobile phones and technology. The genre Afro hip hop found itself in its birthplace Lagos the economic capital of the largest African country Nigeria and has thus been used to not only describe African hip hop but hip hop from Nigeria. Globalization has helped put Afro hip hop on the map in such a