The Music That Existed Without You

There’s a particular quality to music that was never made with you in mind. Awesome Tapes From Africa is a blog by Brian Shimkovitz—a guy who started buying cassette tapes from street markets across sub-Saharan Africa and posting them online with MP3 downloads, cover scans, and whatever context he could dig up. The artists include people like Zagazougou, Solomon Manori, and Nâ Hawa Doumbia, names that mean nothing to most Western ears, which is more or less the point.

The range is disorienting in the best way: rhythmic spoken-word recordings from the ’70s, slick and slightly greasy pop from the ’80s, genres that feel like they emerged from a timeline that split off from ours around 1973 and never rejoined. Some of it is genuinely transcendent. Some sounds like a fever dream taped in a market stall. All of it has more happening than anything currently sitting in a streaming service’s New Releases row.

The usual Western gatekeepers of African music have always been a bit suspect—the charity-tour drummer abduction, the global pop star’s obligatory world music phase. What this site offers instead is a more direct line: music that got made and distributed and loved entirely without reference to us. That’s rarer than it should be. I’ve lost entire afternoons to it.