A Quick Ting on Afrobeats hardly reflects on moral conundrums. Seemingly obsessed with Black pride and optimism, Adofo’s book embraces a positive outlook and perhaps this is the right attitude to afrobeats.
A Quick Ting on Afrobeats is the latest addition to the growing corpus of the ‘A Quick Ting’ book series commissioned by Magdalene Abraha and published by Jacaranda books. Written by Christian Adofo, this expository book of eleven essays is described as ‘the first book of its kind’ on its cover. It chronicles the emergence of afrobeats from precursor sounds—like highlife, hiplife and afrobeat—and tracks its ascendance to becoming one of West Africa’s major cultural exports to the world. Charting on international billboards, selling out international megatours and winning Grammy awards have been checked on the afrobeats bucket list, these are unprecedented achievements, hence it is important that a book of this kind has been written by this particular kind of writer.
Adofo is a Black British journalist and writer of Ghanaian descent. His parents migrated to England from Ghana in the 60s, in the aftermath of the military coup that destabilized the young nation. The culture they brought along with them inadvertently became part of Adofo’s experiences...
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