Who knew back in January that when Vampire Weekend tinkered with soukous' guitar-driven dance rhythms on its self-titled debut, the band would set the tone for the next 12 months? In many ways, 2008 was the year Afropop fully cracked the American music landscape. This sort of appropriation was anything but novel: Western artists have long been partial to popular music from the motherland, among them David Byrne, Brian Eno, and Paul Simon, who introduced Americans to native South... More >>>