Why So Few African Pop Superstars?

The NYT asks "How Did Black Music Take Over the World?" But why hasn't sub-Saharan music taken over the world?

From the New York Times:

How Did Black Music Take Over the World? Let Melvin Gibbs Explain.

Since the late ’70s, the bassist has worked to map a musical route that mirrored the trans-Atlantic slave trade and birthed nearly all of American popular music.

By Hank Shteamer

April 7, 2026

One day in the late 1970s, the bassist Melvin Gibbs was walking through Brooklyn’s Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood when he heard loud music playing. Following the sound, he came upon a speaker set up outside the African Record Centre, a shop he’d never noticed, playing music he’d never heard.

“I was kind of like, ‘What’s that? It sounds like James Brown, but what is it?’” he said in mid-February, standing inside the same Nostrand Avenue establishment, still stocked robustly with African music.

When he had stepped inside around 50 years ago, he learned it was Fela Kuti, the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer. That chance encounter helped fuel a lifelong quest: mapping a musical route that mirrored the trans-Atlantic slave trade and birthed nearly all of the popular music that we now take for granted, including rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop. After decades of research as both a scholar and performer, he’s sharing his findings in a revelatory new book, “How Black Music Took Over the World,” out April 14. …

But that got me thinking about an alternative question: How Come African (As Opposed to African-American) Music Hasn’t Taken Over the Word?

Paywall here.