Sounds of the Diaspora

Travel through genre, time, and place as we celebrate black artists and their foundational contributions to modern pop music. Throughout the month, we’ll present a deep-dive experience that highlights those building blocks, from some of the oldest sounds to the new. This week, we begin where everything began—in Africa, tracing the multitude of genres the continent has produced and their outsized influence. It’s music that continues to inspire styles of the diaspora around the world, including in the Caribbean and Latin America, where rhythm-centric genres like calypso, reggae and dancehall, merengue, salsa, and cumbia are resounding cultural forces. Below, you’ll find a collection of albums and songs from those regions, as well as specially curated playlists from the artists who make it all work.

• Week 2: How Jazz Evolved (and Endured)

• Week 3: The Road From Blues to Rock

• Week 4: Pride and Power on the Dance Floor

• Week 5: Hip-Hop and R&B Take Over

The music produced on the continent of Africa is as rich as it is diverse—each country, and the smaller regions therein, have their own textures, traditions, and styles. The hypnotic polyrhythms of sub-Saharan Africa are the most prominent element that connects many of those sounds—including, perhaps most notably, Afrobeat—and continue to show up in music all over the world. In turn, as sonic traditions from all over Africa traveled west to the Americas, new genres like dancehall, house, and hip-hop were eventually born—and have since come full circle to influence contemporary music back on the continent, such as Afropop, hiplife, and amapiano.

There may be no region in the world that shares the musical DNA of Africa—particularly West Africa—more explicitly than the West Indies. It’s a melting pot of sounds that reflect the cultures of both the indigenous populations of the islands and those who arrived enslaved—beauty despite an ugly history. The drum-propelled music of regional staples like calypso, reggae, dancehall, and soca are some of the world’s most distinctive and contagious sounds that feel, at once, like vacation and home.

Polyrhythms find another champion in música tropical, which encompasses the myriad genres created by the people of the predominantly Spanish-speaking islands and nations in and around the Caribbean—among them, salsa, merengue, cumbia, bomba, and bachata. Due to the Afro-Latino roots of the sounds, percussion is central, but other instruments—guitars, accordions, horns—imbue it with a sense of life. It’s the building blocks of a culture all rolled into one, a reflection of the power of shared language, music, and dance.

As hip-hop spread across the globe, the sound of Latin music began reflecting the genre’s influence as well. Two of the most prominent developments—reggaetón (which rose in the late ’90s, built around the dembow riddim popularized in Jamaican dancehall) and Latin trap (a fusion of reggaetón and rap that rose to dominance in the late 2010s)—paint a picture of how generations of people, despite differences in culture and geography, are able to communicate through music. The irresistible flavors of urbano Latino shown below highlight the striking and ever-evolving spectrum of music of and by the diaspora.