Album Review: Remain In Light by Angélique Kidjo

In 1983, Angélique Kidjo fled fear in the then People's Republic of Benin, West Africa and travelled to Paris, aiming to study jazz at the Centre d'Informations Musicales. It wasn't as an easy move to make, and she experienced prejudice, both outside and inside the school. ("On the first day," she told the Guardian in 2010, "two white girls said to me: 'You're African, right? Jazz is not for African people'".) Made to feel so out of place, she was heartened to hear something at once strange and familiar, at a party she described recently to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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Nearly 40 years on, Talking Heads' Remain in Light remains a pinnacle of New York City rock, in part because it drew from anything but the strictures of rock'n'roll. Instead it preferred cycling polyrhythms, mesmeric vamps, and dizzying layers and loops. But depending on which half of the band you asked, you might get a different answer as to its sources.

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