Two things have been crucial to a restless Angélique Kidjo since her childhood in Benin, West Africa: diverse, universal, nuanced brands of truthful musical storytelling in all its forms, and her mother.
Selling nearly four million albums worldwide, winning five Grammys, writing a bestselling autobiography, “Spirit Rising,” with its foreword by Desmond Tutu, and becoming the first Black African artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame are all just icing on a very sweet cake.
“This is everything to me,” she says loudly with a laugh (via Zoom) of her music, her mission and her mother, as she gesticulates wildly for punctuation at every turn.
She’ll receive her star Aug. 18 at 11:30 in a ceremony at 7011 Hollywood Blvd. Audiennces can watch on walkoffame.com.
Since the start of her reign as a queen of West African music (this journalist first spoke to Kidjo in 1991 when “Logozo,” her debut album in the U.S., was released), or now, with 2026’s “Hope,” the singer-composer has been sure to acknowledge the ongoing influence of her mom — a choreographer and theater director — with zeal.
As for the universality of her hypnotic, soulful sound and her dynamic, jazzy mezzo-soprano voice, Kidjo’s singing in five languages (Fon, French, Yorùbá, Gen-Mina and English) has forever been key to the funk, its frankness and her grace.
Discussing “Hope’s” tour through 2027, “the stretching of my own physical boundaries” and playing music in a world that, though troubled, “may be better off and more unified than we think,” an energetic Kidjo talked about the need for reinvention.
“How do I keep my mental health, my priorities and my values in check, and still be the person that I want to be, but evolving in this ever-changing ecosystem?” Kidjo wonders.
But inventing herself in the first place is what leads listeners to every magical Kidjo milestone: 1996’s “Fifa” where she first sang in English; 2007’s “Djin Djin,” for which she won her first contemporary world music album Grammy; her back-to-back 2019 albums, “Remain in Light” and “Celia,” where she imaginatively captured the music of Talking Heads (“When I met David Byrne, I asked if he’s sure he’s American as he’d been speaking about my culture like he lived there forever,” she says) and Celia Cruz.
Her new Africana-laced R&B album, “Hope,” with Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers, takes Kidjo to sleek pop places she’s rarely visited while maintaining her earthen, conscious lyricism. Then there are the works with minimalist classical composer Philip Glass on the poetic “Ife”: “Three Yoruba Songs” and “Symphony No. 12” (which additionally paid tribute to David Bowie’s “Lodger”) that Kidjo called “my greatest aesthetic challenges.”
If she goes back to the start of her career, then before that to her childhood on stage at her mother’s Theatre du Benet company at age 6, Kidjo admits that “my values are the same values as always. They’re about me telling a compelling story, my compelling story… humanity stories,” all filled with the core values passed down to Kidjo by her parents.
“Don’t come up with funny excuses,” she says. “When you do something wrong, you stand for it. If you deserve respect, give respect back. And if you deserve to be loved, you have to start loving yourself to be able to see the other person important to you. … My mom made me this person that I am by making me think about how my words can hurt. Mom always used to say a word is like an egg. When it falls, you can’t put it back. When you hurt somebody with your words, it stays. It’s pain. The pain you inflict on somebody’s soul with words has consequences for you too. Because when you put that bad stuff in the universe, it comes back changed. You might not like that change, and you don’t choose the time when it comes back.”
Thinking about such consequences while living and thriving among her family (seven boys, three girls) during childhood, Kidjo was blessed with being loved and seen and given the opportunity and the freedom to speak freely and be herself.
Those elements are the very core of her lifelong values, aesthetically, spiritually and humanistically.
“I have been told by my uncles and aunties in the village that I was that child that always asked all the questions and never got enough answers,” Kidjo says, laughing.
It’s important to note that as much gravitas and import that Kidjo placed upon her mother’s words and questions, there was a playful life lesson to be had between mother and daughter. Like having her mom, until the time of her passing during COVID-19, pushing Angélique to eat, nagging her to gain weight.
“She told me that I needed to eat hamburgers in America, or to come home so that she could put some flesh on my bones,” Kidjo remembers.
Earlier in their relationship, there was the back-and-forth between mother and child when it came to 6-year-old Kidjo demanding to play lead roles in her mother’s plays (“Why can’t I be the little girl that’s singing and doing all these things? I knew all the stuff by heart”), to being frightened when that same lead princess suddenly contracted malaria, and young Angélique had to go on.
“Mom grabbed my ankle and I said, ‘Nah, I ain’t going on.’ Until she then put the costume on me and shot me on stage. I was just shaking like crazy. But I said to myself, ‘The heck with it. Just go for it.’ So, I start singing. Then I did all the crazy stuff that I do. Move around. Singing and playing the part. Then I finished, walked back, and suddenly, ovation. And my mom said, ‘You gotta go back.’”
Young Angélique went back.
But the child Kidjo turned into the teenage Kidjo, seeing success on national radio singing Miriam Makeba songs. That same teen sensation left West Africa due to troubles from its dictatorship, and moved to Paris under cover of night and a clandestine air flight. Once in Paris, Kidjo picked up where she left off, playing packed pop and jazz clubs and making African-French recordings until signing with Island and becoming an international sensation — all of which is reminiscent (save for secret night flights) of the trajectory of a Taylor Swift or a Sabrina Carpenter.
What did it mean for Kidjo, then and now, to be a young woman growing up in the public eye in pop music?
“You have to be aware,” she insists. “You have to be strong. You have to remind yourself that there’s always gonna be somebody that’s gonna say something nasty about you, gonna drag you into the mud. You can’t allow that. … You also can’t be the person who wants somebody to feel miserable for us to feel better. My mom said to me all the time, ‘Don’t be that. Don’t be that miserable person.’”
Kidjo quickly told a tale about being a successful 12-year-old star, and coming back from school one afternoon with a crowd of people popping out of nowhere.
“Boys and girls were spitting on me, calling me prostitute,” Kidjo says. “When I told my grandmother and my mother, they cleaned me up, and said ‘Do not let anyone define who you wanna be.’ You were talking about the ‘Logozo’ album right? I can remember, then, how the stylist who was hired told the record company, ‘Why are you calling a stylist to style an African girl? Don’t they walk naked in their countries?’ And, I was like, ‘Really? Let me show you what modernism looks like in my country.’ And I went out and bought that catsuit that is on the album cover — beautiful, no? I was fearless. No one could stop me.”
Does she still have that iconic zebra-print catsuit from “Logozo’s” cover?
“Oh yeah, I do. My daughter wore it for Halloween once.”
Mothers and daughters and their bonds: their impact and import will never cease for Kidjo. There’s a reason her nickname is “Mama Africa.”
Her “Eve” album of 2014 is dedicated to women, young and old, of her homeland. The Afrobeat-driven “Mother Nature” from 2021 is ripe with the vision of gentle feminine wisdom while 2019’s “Celia” sings praises to Cuba’s queen of salsa. And on the tracks “Aye Kan” and “No Stopping Us,” on “Hope,” the spirit of Kidjo’s mother lives on in her words and image.
“In mourning, I was in shambles because I never thought that my mom gonna leave us so quickly,” Kidjo says quietly. “The day before she died, we had a wonderful conversation. Talking about music, about songs, this rhythm for that part. My mom was always looking for music all around the world, singing so many different songs to me, always giving me stuff to think about when it comes to music. If I was in front of this rhythm, what will I do? My mom was that person. She was still saying how people commented on how she don’t feed that kid, I’m so skinny. As we finished the conversation, she said, ‘Before you put me in the grave, you gotta sing my life after me. Make me that promise.’ And I’m telling her, ‘I’m not sure I’m gonna keep that promise. In my grief, I might not be able to.’ Now, remember, I’m taught that before you promise something, think about the commitment that you’re about to take. If you can’t do it, say no,” she says. “So, as I’m mourning, this is what I’m thinking to myself: How can I make the world discover her principles, those values that my mother gave all of us, even as we’re living in different parts of the world, being who we are?”
Kidjo’s response to keeping that promise shines through — effortlessly, sonorously — on the 21st century African diasporic R&B of “Hope,” songs of empowerment against authoritarianism such as “Bando,” and lyrics dedicated to “opening each other’s eyes, that’s the mission.”
“Hope was my mom’s favorite word; she used to say, ‘Your day starts with hope, your life starts with hope.’ Without hope, there’s nothing.”
Making that promise another element of her responsibility to herself and to the world comes through in Kidjo’s consideration of becoming the first Black African artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“For me, it is still like I’m in a dream. But you know what? My parents always used to say, ‘You have to dream big. Otherwise, shut up, don’t talk about it.’ So, for me, this is a door being open, on American soil, to welcome in artists from around the globe. And I am the first Black African to have this honor. For me, it becomes a responsibility. How do we sustain this and get the people that give me this honor to understand that I’m just the first one, that the door must stay open for all the trailblazers in Africa, Latin America, Europe, wherever in the world that should be there. Let’s keep that door open. Let’s remind ourselves that when we have something and we share it, that we have more to give.”
Angélique Kidjo’s mother would be proud.
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