Superstar singer Angélique Kidjo
creates a sound without borders
By John Mark Rafacz
Angélique Kidjo, who grew up in the West African country of Benin, writes and sings about a lot of serious topics, such as poverty and AIDS, but manages to do it in an upbeat way that makes people around the world want to dance. It’s a bit of magic she learned from the traditional musicians of her country.
“It’s not up to you as an artist to make people feel guilty,” she recalls the musicians telling her. “Guilt is something that doesn’t create. Bondage doesn’t create growing. You have to bring the message to the people, and let them make their decision without you forcing them to make the decision. Let the body dance, and the soul will follow.”
The singer-songwriter, who lives in New York City, draws upon her West African roots to merge Afro-funk, reggae, gospel, salsa, jazz, and other styles with American rock, pop, and soul to fashion an intoxicating sound without borders.
Kidjo makes her Penn State debut with a band of five instrumentalists/background singers—two guitars, bass, drums, and percussion—in a concert at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 30, in Eisenhower Auditorium. Her striking voice, compelling stage presence, and fluency in various languages (including Fon, French, Yoruba, English, German, and Portuguese) have made her a leading light in world music.
Her most recent release Djin Djin, a title that roughly translates as “seize the day,” took home the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album. The CD, which features songs that embrace the joys and sorrows of life, includes a mix of original material and covers of Sade’s “Pearls” and The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.”
“The Benin-born singer delivers a thoroughly engaging collection of songs,” writes a USA Today reviewer. “She spans musical cultures with her mesmerizing vocals … . Kidjo seizes your attention and then keeps you riveted.”
“After I’ve done my trilogy tracing back the roots of slavery through music, I decided to come back home [in Djin Djin], because home has taken me to different places,” says Kidjo, speaking by phone from her residence in Brooklyn. “Home has brought me to America, brought me to Brazil, the Caribbean, Cuba, all over the world. Home allows me to explore everybody’s music because home is in everybody’s music. So from time to time, I go back home. I’ve seen what you have brought to the world, and let me get back to you and see what I can bring to the world from you.”
Kidjo has long collaborated with musicians from many cultures. Djin Djin (pronounced gin gin), a co-release of Starbucks Entertainment and Razor & Tie Entertainment, includes A-list guests Peter Gabriel, Josh Groban, Alicia Keys, Branford Marsalis, Carlos Santana, Joss Stone, and Ziggy Marley.
More recently, Kidjo can be heard covering “Mysterious Ways” on the 2008 release In the Name of Love: Africa Celebrates U2. The CD also features the Soweto Gospel Choir, which entranced an Eisenhower audience in February 2007, singing “Pride (In the Name of Love).”
“[Kidjo’s] supercharged pipes have never sounded better, her irresistible energy and joie de vivre never more palpable,” writes an LA Weekly critic. “Kidjo reaffirms her global-diva credentials.”
Despite the critical acclaim and fan support she has garnered for Djin Djin and earlier albums, Kidjo does not enjoy the process of making recordings.
“I hate the recording studio,” she says. “I just hate it because it’s too cold, man. It’s too freaking technical. It’s too like the Western society, no interacting with nobody. You’re in a box. I don’t like that.”
“I’d rather be on stage—surrounded with people, interacting with people, seeing what they’re feeling.”
Kidjo’s songwriting partner, Jean Hebrail, is also her husband. She and the Parisian born Hebrail have been together for more than two decades. They don’t have a set pattern of who writes the music and who the lyrics. The roles often grow from who first gets the inspiration to create a work.
“The song dictates our life,” she notes. “We don’t dictate the life of the song.”
The daughter of a father who played banjo and a mother who was an actress, dancer, and theatrical producer, Kidjo grew up with nine siblings in the Atlantic port town of Cotonou. Inheriting a love of performing, she made her stage debut at age 6 with her mother’s theatrical troupe.
“I started learning English with James Brown and all those people,” she recalls. “And they go, ‘That’s not the good English you learning with James Brown then.’ And I say, ‘I don’t care. It sounds great. I can groove on it. That’s all that mattered to me at that time. It was good English, it was not good English—it doesn’t matter. When you’re a child you just don’t know.”
Even as a youngster, Kidjo now realizes, she was laying the foundation for the world music ideal of seeking common ground across cultures.
“Benin is a French-speaking country, so I spoke French more than I spoke English. But it doesn’t change anything in the way that I listened to the music and tried to make [the songs] mine and find connections with the traditional African music I was growing up listening to,” she says. “I didn’t even realize that I was doing that when I was a child. Now that I’m grown up, I’m trying to understand how the process started. I can’t tell you when and where it started. I just listened to the music, and I liked it so much. And because I love the traditional music of my country so much, I will always try to find the link between them. This rhythm—can you mix it with this?—I’d been doing this before I even had the sense of writing a song.”
Inspired by the music of Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Miriam Makeba, Aretha Franklin, and Brown, Kidjo was singing professionally by the time she reached adulthood. The oppressive political environment of Benin prompted her in 1980 to relocate to Paris, where her international career started to blossom.
“The biggest influence Paris had on my music is [Western] classical music because we didn’t have that much access to classical music in Benin. We listened to some classical music, here and there, but not as the way I was exposed to it in France. It opened my mind to a different way of doing music,” she says. “And that’s why you have the Ravel Bolero [on Djin Djin], and you’re going to have more of those because every time I listen to a classical piece that really touches me, I can hear the words. So if the words are there, they’re going to come out of me for sure.”
Her haunting a cappella rendering of Bolero features lyrics she wrote to accompany Maurice Ravel’s music. She is convinced that Ravel, a Frenchman, was influenced by African music in his composition.
“The first time I heard [Bolero], I was still a student in Paris, and I go, ‘Wow, this is African music,’ and the students at the school look at me and go, ‘You stupid, everything is African for you. This is classical music.’ You know, they were really racist with me. ‘You savage people, what do you know about music? This is music that you can never play.’ And I’m like, ‘Alright, whatever you say. But I’m telling you, this is African. You can be nasty. You can tell me whatever you want. You won’t take that away from me.’”
Kidjo devotes her time to more than just making music. She is also a spokesperson for the international aid agency OXFAM and a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. She recently created a non-profit group, Batonga, that seeks to create a culture that values and supports the secondary education of African girls.
“Batonga is a word not found in dictionaries,” Kidjo points out, “but it is a yearning in the hearts and minds of all African girls who dream of a better future for themselves and society. I know girls can change Africa. I know girls can make a difference.”
Batonga’s focus is on building secondary schools with student populations of at least 50 percent girls, providing tuition for girls, training teachers to improve their skills and increase their sensitivity to the needs of girls, and providing mentors to help girls in cultures that don’t traditionally support females being in school. At least half of the girls targeted by Batonga will be orphans who have lost one or both parents to AIDS. The organization’s initial service area includes Benin, Senegal, Cameroon, Mali, Malawi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.
“… I believe that art is a prime facilitator of truth,” singer and activist Harry Belafonte writes in the July 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, “and those who have come to embrace this have always enhanced our humanity. Angélique Kidjo is such an artist, using her work and her growing fame to change the way the world views Africa. She helps raise the profile of social causes. Beyond her music, she uses the upheaval of her childhood, in Benin, as the backbone for Batonga, her nonprofit effort to help educate young African women. Most artists talk about doing good; few go out and do it. Angélique Kidjo is one of them.”
“Her spirit,” singer-songwriter Gabriel says, “is irrepressible, and she brings life to everything she touches.”
Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring singer Angélique Kidjo, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis.
Angélique Kidjo
7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 30
Eisenhower Auditorium
Adult $29
University Park Student $10
18 and Younger $19
sponsors
Don and Mary Ellen Fisher
