The Beninese singer and songwriter Angélique Kidjo knows that to cover a song is to make both music and an argument, and her 2018 release Remain in Light puts this fact to good use. Track by track, the record reimagines the celebrated 1980 album of the same name by New York post-punk eminences Talking Heads. Through incisive new arrangements, Kidjo underlines and reinvigorates the Afropop effects and Africanist philosophy that Talking Heads lifted as the inspiration for their supposedly most innovative work. She and her band play the album as the profoundly grooving Afropop it might have been, rather than as the art school pop pointillism it was—it's tempting even to say that she unearths what its songs actually wanted to be. The result is at once a keen reminder of the Western music industry's extractive relationship with African and Afro-diasporic musics and a deft act of cultural reclamation....

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