As has been the case throughout the Western hemisphere where Africans were used as slaves, the African population in Peru brought with them their own traditions, including music. However, unlike North America where it became one of the key foundations for popular music, in Peru their music, like their population, has remained segregated from the mainstream. African Americans in South America are routinely second class citizens, and anything associated with them is considered inferior, including their music. So, aside from sporadic recognition from outside performers like David Byrne's The Soul Of Black Peru released in 1995, little Afro-Peruvian music has been heard outside of its own community.

In 2001 four young Peruvians, Ramon Perez-Prieto, Grimaldo Del Solar, Rafael Morales, and Carlos Li Carrillo, from outside the Afro-Peruvian community formed the group Novalima as a way to experiment with their appreciation for both Peruvian and modern music, and in 2002 released their first disc, Novalima. They had invited various musicians from the Afro Peruvian community to participate and created a disc that mixed both traditional rhythms and contemporary sounds. When the disc went platinum in Peru, they realized they were onto something and in 2006, they released Afro internationally, and firmly establishing Afro-Peruvian music on the world scene as it spent ten weeks at number one on the US Collage Music Journal's Latin Alternative and New World charts.

The band has now expanded to include permanent Afro-Peruvian musicians; Juan Medrano Cotito, Mangue Vasquez, Milagros Guerrero, and Marcos Mosquera, as well as renowned Peruvian drummer and percussionist Constantino Alvarez. It's this group, plus a variety of guest performers from the Afro-Peruvian music community, who can be heard on the band's forthcoming release (January 13, '09, US and Canada and Jan. 16 for the rest of the world) Coba Coba on the Cumbancha label.

The OUP imprint, however, demands a modicum of academic high-mindedness, and the first pages of Gordon Thompson’s Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out worried me. Three-hundred-plus pages of dry ethnomusicology was definitely not what I’d bargained for. I scanned the list of interview subjects and couldn’t find a single surviving Beatle or Rolling Stone there, let alone a Kink, Animal, Yardbird, or Who. Where was all the “inside” dirt I was hoping for?

Well, luckily, once Thompson gets past his intro -- once the grownups stop paying attention -- he plunges delightfully into the music itself, and delivers a different kind of inside scoop: behind-the-scenes detail on how the record industry of the time actually worked. Forget those oft-quoted headline stars; what Thompson scored instead was exhaustive interviews with several of the period’s top producers, engineers, arrangers, session musicians, and songwriters. The result is a rich and surprisingly nuanced portrait, a vivid fly-on-the-wall view of how those iconic records of the 1960s got made.

Thompson’s got a wonderful ear for rock music - I found myself continually running over to my CDs to replay some track he was writing about, and hearing things I’d never properly paid attention to before. Want to know who really played drums for the Dave Clark Five? Who really wrote “The House of the Rising Sun”? Who sang the backing vocals on the Who’s “I Can’t Explain”? How Donovan’s classic hit “Hurdy-Gurdy Man” gave birth to Led Zeppelin? It’s all here, along with fresh takes on historic moments like George Martin’s original signing of the Beatles and the weekend when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reluctantly wrote their first song.

After Thompson’s book, I turned with high hopes to Annie J. Randall’s Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods. As a longtime Dusty Springfield fan, I was ravenously curious about this corner of '60s Britpop history. I adore Dusty, one of the greatest-ever singers of “white soul,” captured in hits like “Son of A Preacher Man” and “I Only Want To be With You.” Randall’s quite good on tracing Dusty’s Motown roots, which went even deeper than the Mod generation’s trendy obsession with American R&B. Where Randall really opened my eyes, however, was in fleshing out Dusty’s embrace of a less well-known genre, the European pop aria (just think of Dusty pulling out all the melodramatic stops on her classic tracks “I Close My Eyes and Count To Ten” and “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me”). The histrionic hand gestures, the platinum beehive wigs, the sparkle-draped evening gowns, the thick mascara and frosted lipstick – every element of Dusty’s iconic '60s act melded these two performance styles with verve and vitality.

The title of that final exodus is tragic in a way, as none of the girls in the present-day or past Destiny's Child lineup beyond Beyonce and her sister Solange have been hits with the public. There's many an obvious reason for that. The oldest one you could use in this case is that none of the others have the chops for the business.

There are things you have to do in order to get noticed. You have to be different, exciting, sexy, and the dream of every man or woman alive. Michelle Williams, Latavia Roberson, Kelly Rowland, and Letoya Luckett don't seem to want the spotlight as much as their former leader. I don't count Farah Franklin, given that her time in the group was shorter than anyone else who’s been in DC.

Beyonce, for all of her acclaim and sexiness, has no real chance to be herself. Coming from a musical catalog of hit songs discussing the art of booty shaking and dumping a trifling boyfriend, it's hard for her as she gets on in years to make that leap and still be relevant. Kelly Rowland actually tried that with "Stole", which she recorded for her first album Simply Deep. 

Because that song didn't involve anything remotely trivial and sounded too much like it belonged in another musical genre, the song got dismissed. Kicking herself probably for breaking from the DC formula, she returned to the more radio-friendly airwaves with her second album Ms. Kelly. It still didn't do anything in the states, but overseas apparently the album is killing the charts.

Michelle Williams is back this time with yet another album, Unexpected. The title basically informs the person buying it that this is not the Michelle Williams of Destiny's Child that no one pays attention to or largely ignores. This Michelle Williams is her own person and is ready to compete in the R&B genre without hesitation - that is if you believe that title. If you take a listen to the actual album, that's a different story.

Like Kelly Rowland's latest effort, Michelle Williams and her venture to party on this latest album feels dishonest. I understand that as an artist you have to do what's necessary to be able to eat. I also understand, however, that you have to do what's comfortable for you.