Listening to Afrobeats

Catalog description

This course will explore the social and musical background of the recent global music phenomenon of Afrobeats, examining its history in African and Afro-diasporic popular musics like calypso, highlife, hiplife, Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, and African hip hop as well as in dancehall, house music, and r&b in the UK. We will investigate Afrobeats as a fluid musical category using several different approaches, from Afro-futurism to economics and theories of musical genre.