The Egyptian authorities recently declared that the local musical genre mahraganat is more dangerous than the coronavirus, and banned the performance of such works in public places. Although, perhaps, the Tanzanian singel genre is more to be feared, because its tracks have an extremely high speed. Or the musical direction from Angola kuduro, because dancing to it looks like a crazy break dance with missing knee joints. A huge number of genres originated in Africa, music critic Vladimir Sivash talks about the history and features of the most relevant.
Interest in African music, both traditional and modern dance, is spreading more and more actively every year to different countries. Even the large streaming service Apple Music picked up the trend and in February 2021 launched a new Isgubhu platform dedicated to the ethnoelectronics of the African continent. Vladimir Sivash talks about the dance genres that have arisen there or have become popular in recent decades. Music is one of the most popular entertainment in the world, but it is not for everyone. If you like more extreme entertainment, try betting on the 22Bet platform.
Kuduro
Kuduro appeared in the mid-1990s, when techno and house records from Europe and America began to seep into the capital of Angola, Luanda, and usually not of the best quality. Slum youth fleeing the realities of the civil war became a artisanal way of fusing new musical patterns with local genres such as kizomba, kilapanga, semba, adding Caribbean zouk and juice (soca).
The new rough mix turned out to be quite fast – up to 140 beats per minute. It sounds dirty and raw, even aggressive, but festive, combining the fuse of tribal dances with clumsy beats from cheap drum machines and penny synth presets. Sometimes the rhythm of the kuduro stumbles, as if breaking. Over time, powerful vocal reading began to be added to this music, as in hop, grime, or even raggamuffin.
The dance, which is performed under the kuduro, looks like a crazy break dance – scary and funny at the same time. It has a lot of imitations, almost clownish steps, sharp accelerations and freezes in funny poses. And the movements of the legs look like the dancers simply do not have knee joints.
There is a version that this dance appeared even earlier than the musical accompaniment itself. By the way, “kuduro” in translation means “strong ass.” According to legend, one of the founders of the genre, Tony Amado, commented on the dance moves of Jean-Claude Van Damme in one of the films.
From the poor streets of Luanda, where the sub-genres of gangsta kuduro, religious kuduro, hardcore kuduro now exist, this music migrated to Portugal in the early 2000s. Mostly to the poor suburbs of Lisbon, where a huge number of Angolan immigrants settled. So now, 20 years later, kuduro is considered an Angolo-Portuguese style.
Kwaito
In the early 1990s, apartheid was coming to an end. Nelson Mandela was released, and young men from townships, towns with a black population, got the opportunity to express themselves. And at the same time they relied, firstly, on the cultural heritage of their people; secondly, on the foundations of the street; thirdly, on information from abroad. As a result, in Soweto, a scattering of settlements in the suburbs of Johannesburg, where black residents were forcibly deported during the apartheid period, the kwaito genre was born.
It sounds like it’s slowed down to about 110-112 beats per minute, house. Moreover, early American-English house, at the turn of the 80s and 90s, arrived first in Cape Town, and then in Johannesburg. However, here they not only slowed down the rhythm, but also added keyboard lines, including jazzy ones, as well as expressive deep bass, melodiousness. And most importantly, they brought into it various South African musical cliches of the 20th century, such as marabi (marabi), kela (kwela), mbaqanga (mbaqanga), bubblegum pop (bubblegum-pop). The language that is sung to this music is a mixture of Iskamto criminal street slang, English, Zulu and Afrikaans.
In fact, kwaito was formed as an art-social phenomenon, it became a mirror of the history of post-apartheid South African townships. But by the mid-late 90s, the original revolutionary political spirit was replaced by a simple entertainment form. Young people wanted to think of a bright future rather than a bad past, so kwaito became a kind of American hip-hop counterpart. The genre broadcast the views, codes and dogmas of South Africans.
Amapiano
Under the umbrella of kwaito in South Africa, another genre was formed – amapiano, softer and more lyrical. Only this is more likely not just a slow house, but a deep house, sometimes reduced, that is, as if skipping individual bits. But this makes it more atmospheric, enveloping and even languid. In these compositions, the influence of smooth jazz, soul, even gospel is also felt. And of course, it has piano parts, which is reflected in the title. You can dance to the amapiano, but most often it is the music of reflection and escapism, with notes of melancholy and nostalgia.
The style took shape in 2012 thanks to amateur producers riveting tracks in their plywood-walled bedrooms. Johannesburg and Pretoria are still arguing where exactly it was invented, but it happened somewhere on their outskirts.
Until 2020, amapiano was a purely local little-known story, but last year there was a real breakthrough – the genre hit all radio stations in South Africa and Africa, in principle, in key streaming services and on YouTube. For example, June’s I Am the King of Amapiano: Sweet and Dust by in-demand Pretoria artist Kabza De Small is, according to Apple Music, the most popular South African album ever, with over 8 million streams in its first two weeks.
Mahraganat
In the second half of the last century in Egypt, the shaabi genre, popular among the working class, came to the fore. These songs both spoke about the difficulties, disappointment in modern Egyptian life, and just amused – they were, for example, performed at weddings.
As usual, the new generation has transformed the genre for themselves. In the late 2000s, on the outskirts of Cairo and Alexandria, street and wedding DJs began adding some British grime and harsh Puerto Rican reggaeton to shaabi, replacing traditional instruments or supplementing them with sirens, synth sounds, beats. Rough and rather heavy tracks were produced, and this low-budget cocktail was distributed on self-made CDs and via mp3 files. Such music sounded in the yards, in taxis and tuk-tuks. The direction was called mahraganat (translated as “festivals”), or electro-shaabi (electro-shaabi).
In 2011, there was a revolution in Egypt, and mahraganat turned into protest music. At the same time, the stream, having become an Internet sensation at that time, having received millions of plays and views, did not get on television and radio. Moreover, the conservative Egyptian public waged a real war on the mahraganat, stating that the genre does not correspond to Arab values, that it is “quite low”, vulgar. Mostly criticized rather defiant, offensive by the standards of North Africa and the Middle East, the lyrics, but the music itself was considered repulsive, too uncouth, rude. But it is precisely for this that young people appreciate mahraganat.
Singeli
In 2016, ethnomusicologist Arlen Dilsizyan arrived in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania: the co-founder of the Nyege Nyege Tapes record label and art center in Kampala, which promotes African music far beyond Uganda, heard about the exciting local style of singeli and wanted to get acquainted with the phenomenon. Luckily, Arlen’s taxi driver turned out to be a man named Abbas, who knew all the songwriters (they all lived on two streets) and was something of a manager on this scene, and later even organized his own label. As a result, six months later, in the summer of 2017, an important singel compilation Sounds of Sisso was released on Nyege Nyege Tapes. And it began.
In fact, the singel appeared as early as 2010-2011 in Manzeza and Tandala, densely populated low-income working-class neighborhoods on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. The parties here went wild when yesterday’s schoolchildren turned on extreme rapid-fire tracks. They took local genres as a basis – the hectic polyrhythm of the vanga (vanga) from the wedding traditions of the Zaramo tribe and the mchiriku (mchiriku) derived from this direction. Then they added instrumental pieces from the Arabic-Indian genre taarab (taarab), also mixed in some other music popular in Tanzania and Kenya.
Shangaan-electro
Almost the only genre on the list that has little to do with the ghetto and disadvantaged youth. Behind the discovery and spread of the Shangaan-electro direction was initially only one person – Richard Mthetwa, aka Nozinja, from the city of Gyani, Limpopo Province in South Africa. Until the mid-2000s, Richard worked as a mobile phone repair shop in the township of Soweto, where he moved from Limpopo along with many of his fellow tribesmen. He always dreamed of making music, but could not afford it. However, it wasn’t long before the cell phone repair shop finally gave Mthetwa financial stability, and up-and-coming artist Nozinja got down to business.
At his fellow countrymen from the Shangaan tribe, Richard spied on a street dance and overheard the accompanying tsonga disco music (tsonga disco). This is a symbiosis of Portuguese (bordering Limpopo, Mozambique was a Portuguese colony), Latin American and old South African standards, popular in the northeast of South Africa in the second half of the 20th century. In tsonga-disco, Mthetwa replaced the instruments of an ordinary European band with electronics, and almost cartoonish. Richard used an electronic marimba, comedic MIDI sounds, pitched synth trills, and of course, an intricate fussy rhythm that jacked up to 180-190 beats per minute. So it turned out shangaan-electro.
Khom
It just so happened that among the hot African genres, several were formed at once in the Republic of South Africa. The final here, but by no means the last in importance, Khom keeps aloof, it is in no way connected with the Shangaan-electro and Kwaito that arose in the same territory. Khom is a different story that has developed in Durban, the third largest city in South Africa.
“Khom” in the Zulu language means both “beat”, and “drum”, and “annoying noise”. Or quite specific – “the sound of a stone knocking on a tile.” The genre originated around 2012 on the basis of the earlier sgxumseni. Then young beatmakers from the townships of Durban, using the hacked program Fruity Loops, began to sculpt minimalistic tracks, where an evil ragged rhythm coexisted with booming echo peals. The result is a gloomy and harsh music with rough electronic drums and a heavy bass, beating backhand, but addictive.
