The Scene Report Report: Issue #1
A new feature rounding up the best global music coverage from the past month
This newsletter has a fairly simple premise: that there’s a vast amount of great music being made across the world that is under-covered by the established music press. But while this is largely true, it’s not the case that Western media completely ignores what’s happening outside its semi-cloistered walls. A number of outlets do publish thoughtful and well-researched features on the artists and influences shaping scenes around the world. This coverage is sporadic at best, but it does exist, and it’s worth recognizing the publications and journalists that are putting in the time and resources to cover scenes that most of their readers don’t think about on a day-to-day basis.
This is why the No Chambers project is launching a new feature called the Scene Report Report. The purpose of this feature is to provide an account of some of the best articles on less-covered geographies that have been published in the last month (or so). It’s called a “scene report” report because it aims to elevate articles that do more than just list a handful of bands making music in the same place. Instead, it focuses on journalistic pieces that attempt to identify and describe the underlying artistic, cultural, and political factors that shape different music scenes in unique ways, ideally based on actual interviews with the artists making up those scenes.
Of course, what constitutes a “scene” (or, for that matter, a “scene report”) can be difficult to define, and this report won’t be too rigid about it. Its goal is simply to present a collection of recent media pieces that help illuminate where different musical movements have been, where they are now, and where they might be going in the future. If that’s accomplished, the specific format is an afterthought.
The plan is for this Scene Report Report to become a regular monthly feature, and the first issue kicks off today with coverage ranging from hip hop in South Africa to house in Serbia to salsa in East Asia. It’s a big world out there; hopefully this report helps make it feel a little closer.
Scene Report Report: Issue #1
Sabelo Mkhabela wrote about Pretoria and Cape Town’s street rap scenes for HYPE Magazine, showing that there’s a lot more happening in South Africa than amapiano. Scroll down to the bottom of the article for a custom playlist, and bring your Xhosa and Zulu dictionaries along to translate some of the lyric quotes.
Jimmy Trash had a piece in Bandcamp Daily covering the Surinamese artists and producers mixing beats in the Netherlands, shedding some light on a less-covered segment of the Dutch-speaking diaspora.
Blossom Maduafokwa made the argument in Mixmag that amapiano’s spread has unleashed a new era of creativity for electronic music in Nigeria, backing up her case with enough genre and artist recs to keep her readers busy for a year.
Aaina Bhargava contributed to South China Morning Post’s underrated culture coverage by writing about the spread of Latin music in China. While only a “scene report” in the loosest sense, the piece dives into a pretty cool area of cross-cultural collaboration and shows that there’s a thriving community of salsa enthusiasts in Hong Kong.
It’s hard to call K-Pop a “scene” now that it’s a global phenomenon, but Katherine St. Asaph’s article for Stereogum does a stellar job outlining some of the cultural and political factors that have underpinned the most recent developments in that rapidly expanding section of the musical universe.
My own piece on Kinshasa’s music scene came out in Bandcamp Daily this week. Reporting on contemporary music in the Democratic Republic of Congo feels a little flippant as the country once again struggles with a violence-driven humanitarian crisis, but I’m still glad to have had the chance to highlight the bands and artists operating in one of the most creative corners of the world.
Kelly Projects did an in-depth cover for Mixmag on the intersections between Serbian club culture and the student protests that are currently taking on the country’s increasingly autocratic and corrupt government. Might be some lessons there for their American peers…
Charles Maynes, the Moscow correspondent for NPR, took a break from heavier topics to put out a short audio piece about what could be fairly accurately described as the Motown of Central Asia.
The Economist gets around to reporting on Brazilian funk, calling the decades-old genre a “new kind of Brazilian music” and then interviewing exactly zero funk artists about it. Still, it’s a notable article in that, when a publication like the Economist is saying that a style of music is about to go mainstream, it kind of means it already has.