I was reading Noah Shachtman’s NY Times piece on Bad Bunny (archived) when I hit the following passage and had to pause:
The United States is different, and more complicated. It’s really multiple markets in one, each developing and growing side by side. Spanish speakers might be watching música Mexicana videos while Caribbean immigrants and their kids are listening to dancehall, and members of the African diaspora are streaming amapiano. “When you’re that big and that culturally diverse,” Mr. Page says, “it can all happen within your borders.”
Amapiano? It looked Zulu, but there was something odd about it. So I googled, and Wikipedia explained:
Amapiano is a genre of music from South Africa that became popular in the early 2020s. It is a hybrid of kwaito, deep house, gqom, jazz, soul, and lounge music characterized by synths and wide, percussive basslines. The word “amapiano” derives from the IsiZulu word for “pianos”.
Pianos! That’s what I call a fun etymology. (I may actually investigate the music one of these days…)
For the “is like dancing about architecture” file: I could of course listen to some examples of amapiano and see if I could figure it out but I was struck by how I had literally no idea what was meant by “wide … basslines” and double-checked my intuition by establishing that I would likewise have no idea what would be meant by a “narrow” bassline. Having a comparatively wide range of pitches v a comparatively narrow range of pitches seems like an obvious possibility in the abstract, yet I somehow intuited that it’s referring to something else.
I did, however, do a tiny bit of googling and found one possible candidate on an advice-for-music-makers website:
“Go wide
“Use panning to open up the sound of your bassline. Although bass is typically panned in the dead centre for grounding, playing about with panning can lend spaciousness to the mix. Try duplicating your bass part into two tracks, panning each to the far left and right.
“Then think about using the EQ plugins in your DAW – use a low-pass filter to bring out the lowest frequencies and a high-pass filter for a wide sound.”
Not necessarily helpful evidence:
“If you think that mono-compatible wide bass is impossible to achieve. You are very wrong!”
To find out more about Low End Mastery, I’d have had to pay at least €159 for “Access to Video Curse & Community” (sic).
How about actually listening to the stuff? No idea what is meant by “wide”, but the “percussive bass” sounds like synthesized tuned bass drums. In fact most of the instruments sound like they have been artificially generated to my ears, while the vocals remind me of Afrobeat..
And here is an article about the history of the genre.
As far as African music is concerned, I still prefer Fela Kuti.
Recommending one album – I would not say I have heard a lot more, but some – please try:
“Scorpion Kings” (2019) by DJ Maphorisa X Kabza de Small
It will likely not replace Mahlathini in your South African pantheon but that is harldy the point. Although in that vein, did you hear last year’s “Buya Buya: Come Back” by the Mahotella Queens (still starring one of the original singers)? A wonderful record.
that Rolling Stone piece included this: “…put off by English in local music; it appears hoity.” i don’t know that i’ve ever seen that without its accompanying “toity” before!
amapiano
Heh. Bleek-Meinhof Class 6 ma- plural prefix (with the “augment” a- in front of it.)
Cognate with the Kusaal plural suffix -a, as in kɔn “a kind of traditional stringed instrument”, plural kɔna. (Probably connected in some way with Dyula gɔni “violin, lute, guitar.” A Wanderwort, probably. Like piano.)
” … hoity” … without its accompanying “toity” — some use for “hoitier-than-thou”