What Is Afropop? The Music That Connects a Continent

When I started Afropop Socks, people would ask me about the name. Why Afropop? What does it mean?

The honest answer is that Afropop is the sound I grew up with. My parents are Ghanaian. Our house in London was full of music from back home. Highlife from the 1970s. Hiplife from the 1990s. The kind of music that made you feel connected to something bigger than the street you were on.

But Afropop is not just one thing. It never has been.

Where Afropop Comes From

The word Afropop was first used in the 1980s by music journalists trying to describe a wave of African music that was reaching Western audiences. Peter Gabriel's WOMAD festival in 1982 brought artists like King Sunny Ade from Nigeria and Youssou N'Dour from Senegal to stages in the UK. Suddenly, African music was not just something you heard at home. It was something the whole world was paying attention to.

But the roots go much deeper than the 1980s.

In the 1950s and 1960s, as African countries were gaining independence, musicians across the continent were creating something new. They were taking the rhythms and melodies of traditional African music and mixing them with jazz, blues, and Latin sounds that had come back across the Atlantic. The result was something that felt both ancient and completely modern.

In Ghana, E.T. Mensah was playing highlife. In Nigeria, Fela Kuti was developing what would become Afrobeat. In South Africa, Miriam Makeba was singing about freedom. In Senegal, Youssou N'Dour was creating mbalax. Each of these artists was doing something different, but they were all part of the same story. African music finding its voice in the modern world.

The Sound of Independence

There is something important to understand about African music in the 1960s. It was not just entertainment. It was political. It was cultural. It was a statement about who African people were and who they intended to be.

Fela Kuti understood this better than anyone. He took the jazz he had studied in London, mixed it with Yoruba rhythms from Nigeria, and created something that was explicitly African and explicitly political. His music was a direct challenge to the Nigerian government. He was arrested over 200 times. His compound was burned down. His mother was thrown from a window by soldiers and later died from her injuries.

He kept making music.

That is what Afropop is at its core. It is music that refuses to be silent. Music that carries the weight of history and the hope of the future at the same time.

From Highlife to Hiplife to Afrobeats

In Ghana, the story of Afropop runs through highlife. Highlife started in the early 1900s, when Ghanaian musicians began mixing traditional Akan rhythms with brass band music brought by British colonists. By the 1950s, E.T. Mensah and his Tempos band were playing to packed dance halls across West Africa. Their music was joyful, sophisticated, and unmistakably Ghanaian.

In the 1990s, a new generation of Ghanaian artists took highlife and mixed it with hip hop. They called it hiplife. Reggie Rockstone is often credited as the father of hiplife. He started rapping in Twi, the Akan language, over hip hop beats. It was a radical idea at the time. Rap in an African language? People were not sure it would work. It worked.

By the 2000s, Nigeria was producing its own version of this fusion. Artists like D'banj, P-Square, and later Wizkid and Davido were creating what would become known as Afrobeats. Note the 's' at the end. Afrobeats is different from Fela's Afrobeat. It is lighter, more danceable, more influenced by R&B and electronic music. But it carries the same DNA.

Why It Matters Now

In 2023, Afrobeats became the first African genre to have a dedicated category at the Grammy Awards. Burna Boy won Best Global Music Album. Wizkid had already collaborated with Beyoncé on Brown Skin Girl. Tems was singing on a Drake album. African music was not just reaching the world. It was leading it.

This is the music that Afropop Socks is named after. Not just the sound, but the spirit. The idea that African culture is not something to be preserved in a museum. It is something alive, evolving, and influencing everything around it.

When you wear a pair of Afropop Socks with Kente cloth patterns, you are wearing the same cultural energy that Fela Kuti was channelling when he picked up his saxophone. The same pride that E.T. Mensah felt when he played highlife to a packed dance hall in Accra. The same joy that Burna Boy brings to a stadium in London.

That is what Afropop means to me. And that is why I named the brand after it.