In rural Cameroon, acoustic groups playing folkloric assiko, mangambe and bikutsi music worked the town bar-rooms in the days before the makossa boom. Bikutsi, the frenetic roots music of the Beti people around the city of Yaounde, has now developed into an electric sound that rivals makossa. But bikutsi pop dates back to the '40s when veteran singer Anne-Marie Nzie first recorded. Messi Me Nkonda Martin and his band Los Camaroes then pioneered electric bikutsi in the '60s and '70s using keyboards and guitars to play the quick balafon melodies of the traditional music. Whenever these groups played, wild and sexually suggestive dancing ensued. "Bikutsi was bar music," recalls international radio personality Georges Collinet, originally from Cameroon. "There were a lot of small orchestras here and there, and most of them were drunk for their performances. The basic group had three or four balafons and drums, and the music had that deep forest, primeval sound." Les Vétérans also played a major role in popularizing bikutsi. But the outside world discovered bikutsi when media-savvy journalist and advertising student Jean Marie Ahanda launched the Têtes Brûlées in 1987. With colorfully painted bodies, torn clothing, and partially shaved heads, the group combined the music's spikey, bucking rhythms with a space-age image. In 1988, the group weathered the suicide of their original guitarist, Zanzibar, who innovated the trick of damping the strings with a strip of foam rubber to produce the music's characteristic balafon-like thunk. Though the Têtes Brûlées still corner the bikutsi market abroad, they get stiff competition back home from rougher-edged outfits led by singers like Mbarga Soukous and Jimmy Mvondo Mvelé.