African Music Quotes

I listen to music mostly in the evening. I've come to love what is called world music, like the Zimbabwean Oliver Mtukudzi and the Colombian singer Marta Gomez. I also love the Irish folk singer Mary Black. Other favorites include Chet Baker, Eva Cassidy, and Billie Holiday.

Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.

At 16 I was living in the Congo, and, you know, it's your teenage time. I really wanted to find a way to express myself, so I started to write songs in the Congo, and I think that's why my music is quite open, with a lot of different influences.

I like African music but also R&B, rap, alternative rock, and classic.

What you have to understand is that blues... it's in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you're playing it like it's an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.

You have Vampire Weekend who have more African references musically than most African-American artists.

You cannot sing African music in proper English

I started to write my songs when I was 15 and living in the Congo.

Because I don't play guitar any more, African harmonies and rhythms have been an inspiration to me. I love the raw origin of the sound. It complements my voice and words naturally.

America needs to hear some good sounds from Africa, man. The sanity of the world is going to be generated from Africa through art.

White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant.

The art, the greatness of the music, the experience of the music is what I'm about. I think most African artists have destroyed their artistry by commercialization, and I don't want to belong to that bag.

The music of Africa is big sound: it's the sound of a community

I think hip hop allows us to talk about everything, and Africa is what I choose to talk about now. If people are not talking about Africa, that's them, that's cool, there's nothing wrong with that. But this is who I am, this is what I have to say, this is what I have to offer.

Somalis really are very musically sophisticated, and they're about their own thing.

I stream this radio station, Radio Nova, that's based in Paris. They curate a beautiful set that's really all over the place - they'll play blues or some West African music, then A Tribe Called Quest, then funk from Ethiopia, then James Brown, and then the Beatles. It's an amazing mix.

My mother is half-French, half-Malagasy, so I've been listening to African music, like Malian and Congolese music, since I was a child.

What I'm trying to do, in my own small way, is trying to bring African and Afro-Cuban rhythms into rock.

Stuff like Buena Vista Social Club and Fela Kuti were quite a main thing to my childhood. As soon as I reached an age where I realized that Fela was singing in English, when I got past his accent, I loved the rawness of it, and the funk and the rhythm and the melody.

I listened to birds and crickets, looking for the ways that rhythm appears most naturally in the world. I listened to the Smithsonian's field recordings of pygmy choirs from Africa.

When you do an album about Africa, you can't be too superficial.

The trick of Afrobeats is it doesn't just move your upper body, it moves your hips as well, and I think that's what people have been missing in popular music for a while. I think that's what people need around the world.

Egyptian drumming happens to be a favorite of mine. It's a really simple instrument, but it's really difficult to play. You can take it anywhere with you - you can play it in your room, in an airport. It's very quiet, so you explore the quiet side.

The curious beauty about African music is that it uplifts even as it tells a sad story.

Most people have no idea what Cabo Verde is or even where it is to mention, so I definitely want to make people aware of this beautiful culture.