400 essential African funk, soul and disco records, selected and annotated by Uchenna Ikonne, music historian and founder of Comb & Razor Sound, and Manu Boubli (Comet Records, Superfly Records). Seven chapters run from raw 1970s funk through Afrobeat, jazz fusion and disco to the global diaspora, with rarity scores, collector’s checkboxes and full-color original artwork throughout.
For years, coverage of African popular music outside the continent has been sporadic and incomplete, left to a small number of academics, collectors, and a handful of labels exporting the artists deemed marketable. Many African artists, wildly popular in their own regions, reached listeners in the Global North only through those scattershot channels. Recent years have brought serious reissue work and DJs pushing beyond Fela Kuti, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba — but few attempts to dig deeply and authoritatively into the subject.
