ANGELIQUE KIDJO makes the record of her life

Oyo is mostly a covers album, featuring Kidjo’s takes on everything from traditional West African songs

As a young girl growing up in the West African nation of Benin, Angelique Kidjo

lived and breathed music, thanks in part to her father—a banjo player who brought music home from France—and her brothers, who started bands when she was just old enough to drive them crazy. When instruments arrived at her house, she reached for a drum, which she’d never seen before. “I got my hand spanked,” she says, “and was told, Don’t touch’ I went and touched it anyway, and no one could stop me.”

As Kidjo grew up, she discovered music so captivating, so exciting, so inspiring, that hanging out with her friends on the streets of Cotonou seemed like a waste of time. Her father’s records (everything from classical music to Nat King Cole) and Benin’s eclectic radio station (which “pretty much played everything until the Communist regime arrived”) didn’t displace the traditional music she’d been fed since the womb—everything just blended together. That freedom to listen without prejudice shines through on Kidjo’s new album, Oyo, which she says pays “tribute to the musicians—male and female— that really have carved my way of doing music and kept me out of trouble by keeping me singing.”

Oyo is mostly a covers album, featuring Kidjo’s takes on everything from traditional West African songs to Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. It’s a covers album like Werner Herzog’s crazed Bad Lieutenant is a remake. Every song offers a revelation— whether it’s Kidjo slipping out of English on Redding’s “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember,” or the mishmash of “Dil Main Chuppa Ke Pyar Ka,” a nod to the Bollywood flms of Kidjo’s youth. Why, of all things, Bollywood? “That’s what I could afford to see because that was the only thing available for us to see.”

Kidjo, 49, says she reached a moment when she said to herself, “Let me go and dig back and let me reassure myself of what I was doing.” But Oyo, the sound of a supremely confdent singer at her most liberated, makes it clear she needs no reassurance. Over the years, Kidjo has lost none of the hunger that drove her brothers crazy.

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