SRR #4: Spit Me Sweet Nothings
Indian hip hop, Chinese hyperpop, and even more amapiano videos
Welcome to issue #4 of the Scene Report Report. For those of you that are new here, this is a monthly round-up of articles and other media reports on under-covered music scenes around the world. Each report is led by a custom playlist that features one song from each article. The songs in the playlist are in the same order as the article list, so if you like a particular track, you know where to go for more.
This month we’ve got some great rap cuts from Asian BRICS buddies India and China, plus a whole lot of Africa—north, south, east, and diasporic (via the Caribbean). From the traditional to the contemporary, there was plenty of ink spilled this month on music from the world’s two largest continents, and I’d say we’re all the better off for it.
The Scene Report Report:
Issue #4
Anurag Tagat takes a freewheeling tour through multiple Kolkata music scenes for Rolling Stones India, touching on hip hop, metal, post-rock, and a handful of other genres that I’ve probably forgotten to mention.
At what point does a collective become a scene? Whenever it is, Isaak Muk’s feature in The Face on the team of Chinese zoomers turning the country’s music upside-down has all the hallmarks of a great scene report: on-the-ground observations, incisive artist quotes, and insightful reflections on how the Nu China scene is moving music creation away from China’s main metropolises and giving lesser-known cities some time in the sun.
Jo Minor goes deep for Bandcamp Daily on Tanzania’s street music scene, zeroing in on mchiriku’s influence on the East African country’s dizzyingly vibrant selection of sub-genres.
Writing in Pan African Music, Tela Wangeci tracks the evolution of Kenya’s homegrown hip hop style, gengetone, into the more commercially fluent arbantone, a genre that Wangeci assures us “is here to stay.”
I’m only just beginning to understand how influential Congolese music like rumba and soukous has been in Africa throughout the decades, and Paul Owere’s article for The Citizen offers a pretty definitive history for the uninitiated.
Charis McGowan looks at Dutch bubbling for Crack Magazine, pulling up the hood on the diasporic Surinamese and Antillean sub-genre that laid the groundwork for contemporary EDM.
OkayAfrica is turning 15, and is celebrating by looking back at 15 defining African moments over that time. As part of this series, Tšeliso Monaheng came out with a short piece (and accompanying 3-minute video) on amapiano’s roots, its pandemic-catalyzed rise to global dominance, and where the South African genre’s going next.
Richard Villegas is back again, this time using a new compilation by Colombian DJ Edna Martinez as an excuse to pen a comprehensive account of Colombia’s picó soundsystem culture.
OkayAfrica again, this time with Amuna Wagner providing some well-researched context on the fantastic new Libyan cassette compilation by Habibi Funk Records. And if Wagner’s piece somehow doesn’t satisfy your curiosity on this topic, check out my recent review of the same compilation in Bandcamp Daily.