Skip to main content

Angelique Kidjo’s Ayé

Angelique Kidjo’s Ayé cover

Angelique Kidjo’s Ayé

Quantity
Pre-order. Available May 27 2027
$24.44 RRP $30.55 Website price saving $6.11 (20%)

Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available

Description

Angelique Kidjo's 1994 album Ayé, meaning “Life” in the local Beninese language of Fon, is a landmark Afro-funk album that anticipated contemporary developments in Afrobeats music by several decades.

Recorded at Prince's Paisley Park Studios in Minneapolis and Soul 2 Soul Studios in London, the album emerged out of a lineage of global funk stretching from James Brown and Prince to European Afro-house and Burger highlife. While the album partakes of many of the new, smooth synthesized sounds of 1990s music technology, Kidjo firmly grounds its themes in African vodun cosmology, environmental activism, and her own experiences with motherhood. Drawing on interviews with Kidjo and producers David Z and Will Mowat, as well as the lyrical and musical analysis of key tracks such as “Agolo,” this book installs Ayé in its rightful place as a boundary breaking album that raised the bar of what was possible with an Afropop album.

Accessibility Information

Additional accessibility information

  • PDF/UA-2, 1.4
  • accessibility@bloomsbury.com

Hazards

The publication contains no hazards

Support for non-visual reading

Has alternative text descriptions for images

Navigation

  • Page list to go to pages from the print source version
  • Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
  • All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Angelique Kidjo, Force of Nature
2. Aye and the Minneapolis Sound: Afro-diasporic Funk at Paisley Park
3. "Agolo": Eco-feminism, Ethics, and African Religion
4. "You Want to Tell Me How to Be African?" Critical Reception in the 1990s World Music Industry

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published May 27 2027
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Pages 128
ISBN 9798765144862
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Series 33 1/3 Africa
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Sarah Politz

Sarah Politz is Assistant Professor of Music at th…

Related Titles

Environment: Staging