Most, if not all, great music starts out as folk music, music borne of a community and nurtured by and descriptive of that shared experience.
The impact of — among many many others — The Sex Pistols, Louis Armstrong, Run DMC and Eminem, Bob Marley, Elvis Presley, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Paul Simon was achieved through reaching out, crossing over and catalysing their music and creating the foundations for more — much much more — to be produced and embraced and carried onwards and upwards.
But it is the engineering of a suitable Afro-purposed 21st century bridge that needs to be urgently attended to. Rights issues also need to be embedded in the architecture of a bridge to the rest of the world for African music that prevent the structural flaws of historic exploitation.