1976
Eleven records, six countries, one year. Lagos, Kingston, Casablanca, Lusaka, Istanbul and Accra all having a better 1976 than anywhere with a music press.
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Fela Kuti & Africa 70 / Zombie
Twelve minutes calling the Nigerian army a column of unthinking bodies, released in Nigeria while that army was in power. They burned his compound down for it and threw his mother out of a window. Nothing else here cost its maker as much.
Prince Nico Mbarga / Sweet Mother
Reportedly the biggest-selling African record ever made, in a year when the British charts had no idea it existed. Highlife at its most untroubled, and the exact opposite of the entry above from the same country in the same twelve months.
Osibisa / Sunshine Day
Ghanaian musicians in London making a record that got played on daytime radio without softening what it was. Included because the traffic went both ways in 1976, and this is the year's best evidence of it.
Ngozi Family / Nizakupanga Ngozi
Zamrock at full volume — a Zambian band playing heavier than most of what was coming out of Britain that year, in a scene almost no one outside the country heard until reissues found it thirty years later.
Nass El Ghiwane / Bouderbala
Gnawa rhythm and Moroccan poetry played by a group Scorsese later called the Rolling Stones of Africa. Recorded with almost no Western instrumentation in a year when that was a choice, not a limitation.
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Selda Bağcan / Yaz Gazeteci Yaz
"Write it down, journalist, write it." Turkish folk melody over a fuzz guitar, sung by a woman who was imprisoned repeatedly for records like this one. The year's clearest case of a local form being used to say something dangerous.
Augustus Pablo / King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown
The most-cited dub record ever made, and it is a melodica line and a mixing desk. Kingston in 1976 was inventing the studio-as-instrument while London was still arguing about guitars.
The Upsetters / Super Ape
Lee Perry's Black Ark at its peak, which means a four-track studio being pushed into producing something no larger studio could. Jamaica has three records on this list and could support ten.
Junior Murvin / Police and Thieves
Written about Jamaican election violence and adopted within months by a London that had just had the Notting Hill riot. The one record here whose journey out of its own scene happened immediately rather than in retrospect.
The Revolutionaries / Kunta Kinte Dub
A Kingston rhythm that would not stay in its decade: sped up and cut into jungle plates twenty years later, which puts it in the same story as several records on our 1994 list. 1976 is where that line starts.