Afropop Worldwide Launches New Website

Afropop Worldwide is best known as a nationally syndicated NPR program dedicated to (obviously) music of Africa and the African diaspora. Their website, Afropop.org, is certainly one of the finest online resources for the same sorts of music, and now they've expanded with an awesome new project called Hip Deep. Hip Deep is, in their own words, "a media project dedicated to the idea that music is a key to understanding everything: History, religion, cultures, political and social realities, science, families, and even human nature itself." That's a lofty goal, but wow... it makes for a cool website. The features on the site bear titles like "Music and the Story of Haiti" to "The Story of Bembeya Jazz", each vignette is a short, commercial-free program dedicated to telling a specific story about a genre, an artist, an area of cultural interplay, and the effects that the music had on its surroundings. It's a pretty inclusive project, as well, with scholars of music and culture from far and wide contributing on the various pieces. Thus far, I've found it to be good for wasting at least two full days, and I'm nowhere near done. Check out Hip Deep for yourself and you'll see what I'm talking about!