For Hong Kong audiences who grew up listening to Canto-pop music, Kidjo's bold mixture of languages may be slightly disorienting, as the emergence of Canto-pop in the 1970s is linked closely with the city's cultural identity and the Cantonese language itself.

But music remains the biggest—and primary—language for Kidjo, a language "beyond the colour of skin, country or culture". And Kidjo surely doesn't pick at her musical forebears. With an insatiable appetite, she gobbles up whatever music comes her way—Celia Cruz, Sam Cooke and The Beatles, just to name a few. And she was lucky enough, growing up in a family of music lovers, to be exposed to such varied sounds as Cuban salsa, American jazz, Cameroonian makossa and of course, her native Beninese music. Unabashedly eclectic in style, Kidjo never shies away from acknowledging her creative debt to an earlier generation of musicians, particularly Cruz and Miriam Makeba, who had an impact on a world that was not always kind to women—let alone black—artists.

From the 1960s' funk music that summarises the African-American identity, to the protest songs that railed against the Vietnam War, music has always been a powerful tool for social change. But few in the West have taken it as far as African musicians, whose activism is practically inseparable from their artistic personas. Fela Kuti, perhaps best known as the inventor of Afrobeat, used music as a weapon against  neo-colonialism in Africa; while Makeba inspired an entire generation of African singers—including a young Kidjo—with her defiant, anti-apartheid spirit.