This is the third of four emails in which I’m writing about my favorite (pop) music of 2020. In case you missed them: Part One and Part Two.
Here is the YouTube playlist of the songs I’m writing about. (And here it is on Spotify, for good measure.)
24. Aya Nakamura, “Doudou”
Mali-born, Paris-raised Aya Nakamura’s importance in pushing sophisticated French pop in an Afrocentric direction over the past few years can hardly be overstated; comparisons to even such major US figures like Beyoncé or Rihanna fall short. “Doudou” is a dancehall/Afrobeats hybrid produced by up-and-coming Black French beatmakers Machynist and Ever Mihigo, giving Nakamura a smoky showcase for her burnished alto, as she vacillates between recognizing her lover’s lies and wanting to be loved by him anyway.
23. Camila Moreno, “Es Real”
Santiago’s vibrant queer-friendly indiepop scene has been one of the brightest spots of global pop throughout the 2010s, and Camila Moreno has been a notable figure in Chile’s folk and rock scenes since 2009. Her albums have tended toward literate rock based in Chile’s canción nueva tradition, but 2020 saw her pushing into adventurous electronic territory and embracing explicit queerness: “Es Real” (it’s real) both describes the electric rush of sexual attraction (the video clarifies to whom) and embodies it in vertiginous drops as her voice flanges into electronic glitter.
22. Darkoo ft. Hardy Caprio, “Juicy”
I admit that I don’t pay very close attention to the UK scene except where it overlaps with West African pop. Darkoo was born in Nigeria, but she was raised in London and is part of British rather than Naija pop. Her androgynous presentation makes this string of compliments to a female-coded love interest another in my collection of quotidian queer love songs: that it’s more or less in an Afropop style (production is by Dutch beatmaker Diztortion, of Surinamese descent, while homegrown British rapper Hardy Caprio barely makes an impression) just speaks to how international Afropop is these days.
21. Pongo, “Canto”
Angolan-Portuguese alt-pop star Pongo first came to international attention two years ago with modified kuduro rhythms, but her experimentation with all kind of rhythmic variation has gone past the Lusophone world. As she sings here, this is essentially a Portuguese version of Cuban mambo, although still with a modern, international flavor (electronic burbling, dense rhythmic patterning, trancey chant lyrics). The lyrics too are a fusion of Spanish and Portuguese, sheer blissed-out optimism delivered to a world that desperately needed any ray of sunshine it could get.
20. Lady Zamar, “Adore”
Sometimes I feel that including South African house in my mostly-tropical musical diet is almost unfair: not only is South Africa only subtropical, the music is so gorgeously sophisticated that it can make everything else seem overstated and crass by comparison. “Adore” first appeared on Lady Zamar’s 2019 album Monarch, but the video was released in 2020, so it counts: I couldn’t do without my annual dose of Zamar’s uncomplicated love songs over a bed of precisely layered percussion courtesy of her go-to beatmaking team David Balshaw and Bubele Booi.
19. Mihney, “Marionette”
My favorite Cameroonian pop star by a long shot is Mihney, whose colorful looks and international flavor are immediately grounding for an outside observer like me. In “Marionette,” a song about regaining self-respect after a man has broken her heart, she switches between French to describe her feelings and Nigerian Pidgin to address the asshole in question, except in the chorus, where she repeats “j’suis pas ta marionette” (i’m not your puppet) as a feminist anthem. Like “Asabe” at #36, the song is produced by Cameroonian hitmaker Phillbill, which suggests that at (least within Cameroon) I have a type.
18. Nailah Blackman x Konshens, “Slow Wine”
I expressed some skepticism about soca in general above, but one thing 2020 gave me was undying respect for the intelligently varied work of soca star Nailah Blackman, whose output over the course of the year was nothing less than stellar. This was never made clearer to me than when I accidentally included a video with a repeating loop of this sweetly sensual collaboration with Jamaican dancehall star Konshens in my daily listening and emerged out the other side loving it more than ever.
17. Tiwa Savage, “Koroba”
Since I first ran across her work in 2016, I’ve nearly always made room for Tiwa Savage in my year-end list, because she’s making some of the most meaningful music in Nigerian pop — which is to say in pop, period. The Yoruba slang of “Koroba” — carry your bucket, i.e. mind your business — is a danceable cover for the real message of the song, which is the double standard that self-dealing politicians are held to, when sexual scandals brand women as whores without affecting men’s reputations.
16. Amaarae, “Leave Me Alone”
Ghanaian-American indiepop star Amaarae is as close as this list is getting to covering US pop; she was born in New York but grew up in both Atlanta and Accra, and her music career has always been explicitly internationalist. “Leave Me Alone” is a classic young pop star’s plaint, expressing exhaustion with the ever-increasing demands on her attention and time and the difficulty of carving space to just be. Which, in the era of working-from-home, always-online, depressive isolation, is of course resonant for many more people than just young pop stars.
15. Calema ft. Cubita, “Allez”
Afro-Swiss production house Klasszik has been one of the brands I’ve been keeping up with since my deep dive into Afro-Lusophone music in 2015, so I’ve been familiar with the São Tomé-born duo Calema for years. But their sweetly harmonized balladeering never really spoke to me until the promo cycle for the 2020 album Yellow saw them collaborating with several other Klasszik artists (like the brilliant butch kizomba singer Cubita) in more uptempo settings. This zouk-inflected coladeira song in Portuguese, French and English about psyching oneself up to attempt a romantic connection is my favorite of their great string of 2020 singles.
14. Fireboy DML, “Vibration”
The young Nigerian artist Fireboy DML had a surprise hit in late 2019 with “Vibration,” an album cut he described on Twitter as a spontaneous freestyle in a hotel room that was turned into a wistful Latin-inflected jam by producer Iambeatz. The video followed in early 2020, and the hordes of commenters who only found it by searching “yelele” after the nagging, meaningless but inimitably resonant hook are representative of my own experience, as the song would appear repeatedly in my head and I would mistake it for one of Peter Gabriel’s African fusion attempts before finding the source again in my 2020 playlist. But even beyond its earworm qualities (no small achievement in my book), it’s an expression of joy and desire that transcends national boundaries with swaggering ease.
13. Paranoid 1966, “Dime Si Te Quedas”
Disappointment with Rosalía’s obliviousness around racial politics has led me to even greater appreciation of another Spanish singer who combines international genres with striking visuals and close collaboration with a smart, wide-ranging producer. Being from the sea port of Alicante instead of the cosmopolitan hub of Barcelona is one uphill struggle; being a Black woman is another. But Victoria C. Weka Bekuku, the twenty-year-old daughter of immigrants from Equatorial Guinea, is more than up to the challenge, as in this pitch-shifting avant-R&B ultimatum to an indecisive lover (referred to with a feminine-ending adjective), and its video about the boredom and tentative connection of youth in late-capitalist liminal spaces.
Tomorrow: #12-1