The 4 Songs You Need to Hear This Week

At the end of every week, we'll be highlighting the creme of the crop in music and rounding up the best tracks, videos, mixtapes and releases that came across our desks throughout the last few days.

Check out this week’s selections below.

Booba heads to Dakar

French rap superstar and veteran Booba pays homage to his Senegalese roots in this stunning music video for "DKR."

The track blends a chopped-up kora melody with 808 bass and drums for a head-nodding dose of West Africa-meets-French hip-hop. The rapper travelled to Senegal to film this beautiful music video for the single, which follows him from neighborhood soccer games to the Senegal's Pink Lake.

Alicia Keys' intimate acoustic set

Keeping with the French theme, Alicia Keys was filmed by La Blogothèque for a "Take Away Show" in Paris, where she played an intimate show for 100 people.

Accompanied by her bassist and herself on piano, Keys ran through songs like “You Don’t Know My Name,” “In Common,” “Hallelujah,” and “The Gospel.” On “She Don’t Really Care,” Keys belts out lines like: "She lived in Somalia, her parents from Egypt, she was a queen in Cairo," in between bepop improvisations.

The whole performance is pretty magical and something to hold us over while we wait on that Wizkid collaboration.

Davido & Nasty C are the "Coolest Kid(s) in Africa"

Davido linked up with South Africa's Nasty C for "Coolest Kid in Africa," one of the highlights from the Nigerian star's Son of Mercy EP. The single's new video is as lively as its beat work and features the two MCs delivering their rhymes from spinning gusheshes.

Our contributor Sabo Kpade broke down some of the lingo of the song in his review, It’s Pop, Not Afro-Pop: On the Impact of Davido’s ‘Son of Mercy,’ which you should definitely check out:

Words and Meaning

‘Iyawo’ – wife (or simply girl in this instant)

‘Owo’ – money

‘Jamo’ – Jamaica.

serpentwithfeet's haunting new video

We've been following Josiah White aka serpentwithfeet's output ever since his collaboration with Spoek Mathambo and DJ Spoko's Fantasma project. Serpentwithfeet's new music video for "Four Ethers" is deeply honest and hauntingly beautiful.

serpentwithfeet previously spoke with Okayafrica about the "Four Ethers," mentioning that the song "is inspired by my own story and also by the beautifully difficult men I have been involved with romantically. I often think about how black men are encouraged to be elusive as a means to maintain some sort of leverage in relationships. We have been taught to tuck away our sadness and longing and regret and that is so lame to me."