Mother Nature

At an age when most legends coast on catalog, Angélique Kidjo instead hands the microphone to the continent's next generation and builds a bridge between her decades and theirs.

The gesture is most naked on "One Africa (Indépendance Cha-Cha)," where she rebuilds the 1960 pan-African independence anthem as a communal shout rather than a museum piece, its cha-cha lilt intact but pushed toward the present. Elsewhere the record leans hard into modern Afrobeats production — clipped percussion, sub-bass, English-and-Yoruba hooks built for phones and dancefloors — a sound Kidjo could easily have refused in favor of the folkloric West African fusion that made her name. She doesn't refuse it; she inhabits it, and her voice, older and rougher than the beats it rides, becomes the argument. The result reframes eldership as active welcome instead of gatekeeping.