Please! It would be of great interest. (The reason for the interest is at once trivial and profound – African music saved my life. My heart is there now although I’ve never been there myself.)
I think that's the same fallacy that the GP warned about: there is no 'African' music. There's different music and different concepts of music from different places (and I actually know and have seen a bunch, especially from west Africa). It's like saying 'Americas music', covering everything from North and South America, the Carribean, etc.
Also, Africa is overly associated with naturalistic things like wild animals, food, music, etc., like an uncivilized other place. Here, finally is an article on technology startups in Africa - fantastic - and where does the conversation shift, what does someone know about Africa ...?
There is indeed no African music! Nonetheless it was African music which saved my life. It started with Kenyan-Tanzaniyan Luo benga, then Congolese soukous, then many kinds of Nigerian music, then this and this and this… and it was precisely this entire world I had no awareness of that was my saving grace at that point in life.
We can stop cherry-picking data and chastising others for not supporting a narrative. You have anecdotal evidence where in a tech story someone's association with Africa is a naturalistic thing such as music. It's ok to accept your world view is incorrect and reality is a lot closer to home than you'd like.
This is all from before the early ‘80s. One aspect: It’s absolutely wild to compare the ‘70s in Kenya musically – live music – to electronic music today. I find it easy to trace the, uh, inspiration? from the music of colonized people to US/European electronic music and into the mainstream.
I realized while writing this, that it could be a substack series about the domino effect of innovation globally, but I can only write so much in a comment section
