African Music Technology: Branding, Identity, and the Global Music Market w/ Kingsley Kwadwo Okyere, Louise Meintjes, and Reginold Royston

3:21 Meet the Guests: African Music Scholars

6:03 What Are Afrobeats and Amapiano?

7:56 Afrobeats vs. Afrobeat: History & Identity

11:49 Branding, World Music, and South African Context

14:29 Recording Studios as Sites of Negotiation

17:42 Digital Networks and Diaspora Influence

23:23 Listening Practices: Streaming, Social Media, and Algorithms

29:00 Dance, Timelines, and Global Rhythms

33:13 Economic Realities and Global Music Industry

SVR: SpectreVision Radio

Intro: This is phantom power.

Mack: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I'm Mack Hagood. Today I'm joined by three remarkable scholars whose work sits at the intersection of African music, technology, and culture. Dr. Louise Meintjes is Marcello Lotti, professor at Duke University. She's a distinguished ethnomusicologist whose groundbreaking research on South African music has transformed how we understand the recording studio As a site of cultural negotiation and creative production. Media anthropologist, Dr. Reginold Royston is an associate professor jointly appointed in the School of Information and the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He examines a wide range of African and African diasporic media and technology from Black Atlantic audiobooks to African podcasting to viral dance videos emanating from Ghana and Chicago's footwork scene And Kingsley Okyere is a graduate student at Penn whose work on African and Afro diasporic music, circulation, and genre is bringing fresh perspectives on the sounds shaping the continent today. In this episode, we'll talk Afrobeats and amapiano, two genres that have captured global attention in recent years. We'll talk about technology and diaspora networks that have shaped African popular music. We'll examine questions of genre identity and global circulation And we'll consider the social and political contexts that inform music production and reception across the continent and beyond.

But first, before we dive in, a little housekeeping. First off, I want to just say that we will not be taking a holiday break. We will have a December episode for you. I'm gonna be talking to Gabriel Soloman Mindel, who is a writer, composer, and along with Pete Swanson he's one half of the Legendary Noise Group Yellow Swans. We had an amazing conversation about noise and politics among other things, and can't wait to share that with you for the holidays. I also wanna let you know that Phantom Power is now not just a podcast. We're also a newsletter. This newsletter is a cabinet of curiosities for the sonically obsessed.

You know, every month I come across all kinds of fascinating sound works and articles and technologies and people, and I'm always like, damn, I wish I had time to put that in the show. And finally, I've just decided to create this newsletter as the place where I can share all of those things. It drops on the second Friday of each month.

So the podcast drops on the last Friday of each month, you might have noticed. So now mid month, I'm gonna be able to share this newsletter with you. And if I don't say so myself, it's really cool. Um, this month we've got a film director talking about the experimental sound design of her documentary on Yellow Springs, Ohio, which was home to an abolitionist colony for formerly enslaved people.

It was also a civil rights hotbed and an early L-G-B-T-Q stronghold. I also review the latest vinyl release by sound artist Brian House, a past guest on this show, as well as the app version of something that we talked about last month. Those nature records known as Environments, and every month for the truly hardcore sound nerds out there, I'm gathering all the sound related talks and conferences and calls for papers that I can find into one place into the newsletter.

Basically, I asked myself 'what do I want to see in a newsletter about sound?' And I made it. So if you like this show, you will love the newsletter and it's completely free of charge. If you'd like to support this show, you can do that, but the newsletter is free. So go to mackhagood.com and hit the newsletter button.

That's M-A-C-K-H-A-G-O-O-D.com and hit the newsletter button. And one other thing, it's been a while, but we have merch again. I'm wearing a Phantom Power hat right now with the Sonic Interference logo. There are also shirts and mugs. The most popular right now has been, uh, a shirt that we call the listener, which has a little girl holding a bottle up to her ear.

It's a, it's an a very nostalgic image for me based on an out of print book about sound that I had as a child. Uh, my wife and I went out to our favorite bar last month and my wife was wearing this shirt and the minute we walked in, two people asked her where she got the shirt, turns out they were musicians and it started a whole conversation.

So if you want a conversation starting t-shirt, go to mackhagood.com and hit the merch button. Alright, that's enough shilling for me. Uh, let's listen to our three experts on African music. Reginold Royston, Kingsley Okyere, and Louise Meintjes.

Mack: Welcome everyone. I'm just super thrilled to have you all here. I mean, we have three scholars at different points in their careers, but I think with very similar interests, both, you know, topically, but also theoretically and I thought maybe we should just start off by laying the groundwork for folks who might not be totally dialed into African popular music. And Kingsley, because I believe you're the youngest among us. I wanna start with you. So like help old man out. What are the kids on the continent listening to these days?

Kingsley: All right. Let me try to make it succinct as I, I can. Um, now I know that the most popular genre, or what I call a genre composite, emerging from the continent is Afrobeats. Okay. I would say Afrobeats and amapiano, um, afrobeats, which, um, mainly began in West Africa, Nigeria and Ghana, and amapiano, which emerges from, uh, South Africa as a kind of continuation of South Africa's interaction with house music.

That's what mainly people are listening to. Yeah.

Mack: I think maybe for a lot of people who are on the older side like this, when this term afrobeats with, with the s started getting thrown around. My mind, immediately went to, uh, Afrobeat singular and Fela Kuti, who actually, this will show how old I am.

I got to see live at a club called Tipitina's in New Orleans. And it was like, a profound religious experience. It was just amazing, and my mind was completely blown by it. But this Afrobeats style, it seems like a different kind of club sort of music. But then I also hear when people are talking about it, like the s kind of comes and goes, like, and even sometimes in the same sentence or phrase, somebody will say, Afrobeat and it sounds singular, and then it'll sound plural. So Kingsley, I think you've thought about this like. More deeply than perhaps any of us.

Like, is this a genre or like, how do you think about what Afrobeats is and like, what is its relationship to this older style of music that people attribute to Fela Kuti that took Nigerian and Ghanaian sounds and combine them with, with us Jazz and Funk. How do you think about all that is in terms of genre?

Kingsley: I think about Afrobeats more like a combination of, um, many years of synchronization of, uh, different genres, um, across the diaspora and within the African continent itself. The only thing being that with, uh, latest technology and how the internet especially has democratized the space, it's easier for artists, um, who merely produce these musics in the studio to take influences and incorporate them, right?

So you can think about Afrobeats as an amalgamation of many genres. And so many consider it as an umbrella term, capturing a lot of existing contemporary genres. But I also think about it as something that inches towards standardization. But because of its promiscuity and scholars like Kofi Agawu who has said that popular music is notoriously promiscuous because of its promiscuity, it still doesn't necessarily have a certain essence that, um, makes it sonically consistent in a way, but.

I believe also that the fact that people refer to it by a name and this, uh, concept of genre formation, scholars like David Brackett has talked about. Because when you assign a name to something, it starts to develop a certain border, you know, certain confines, certain parameters.

Um, but to take it back to its relation to Afrobeats, um, many people would associate Afrobeat without a s with Fela Kuti, who you've mentioned that you saw, back in the days. Fela established a certain procedure, uh, for lack of better word for how Afrobeats should sound.

So if we are going deeply into its analysis or its form, uh, you can think about the influence of highlife, which Fela was playing before. In fact, uh, when fella coined the term Afrobeats described the genre, uh, it was in conjunction with Tony Allen. He was, of Ghanaian Nigerian parents.

Uh, they were in the club in Accra, and Carlos Moore writes about this in,

Mack: And this Fela's drummer?

Kingsley: Fela's drummer. Yes. Yes, yes, So he generated the typical Afrobeat, uh, beat, which is kind of like slowed down funk, you know, when James Brown visited Nigerian in 1970s, he heard Fela's music and was like, oh, I could, I can hear a lot of my influence, but then I can hear that it's different.

And, uh, I know, uh, Paul Gilroy writes about this in The Black Atlantic. So usually you have long vamps, you have horn solos that go on for very long and then Fela start singing, you know, and it's mainly, uh, reflecting the, the times when Fela lived, it was mainly a kind of political commentary, social commentary, you know.

Chastising the government, and we know Fela's life and what happened, but what

Mack: And an anticolonial commentary.

Kingsley: Anti-apartheid, you know, because Fela himself had been influenced by the black consciousness, uh, movement that was happening in the US during his early visits, uh, to the us. But I think sometimes the confusion and as many have noted is in the coinage of the term, Afrobeats,

um, simply adding the s um, it's, it, it has caused a lot of confusion.

Um, even at an award acceptance by, uh, Nigerian musician Rema he, he mentioned Afrobeat, you know, instead of Afrobeats. And then later he said, whether it's Afrobeat or Afrobeats or whatsoever, people should embrace it. People should carry the sound. Despite these confusions, one thing we know for sure is that, um, it has created a kind of brand.

For ferrying across, especially to non African places, African culture, you know, African contemporary culture, um, and dance. And it has created a, a kind of reception that I would say has been, uh, unprecedented, especially, um, thinking about the reach that Afrobeats has got into, uh, both sonically and visually because there are certain visual aspects that are associated with it as well.

Mack: You know, that raises something that makes me think about Louise's work because when Louise, when you began your ethnographic work, you were, in the sort of aftermath of Paul Simon's Graceland album, which incorporated South African elements. And then also the context for people in the Global North for African music generally was this concept of world music. That's how it was marketed. And so I'm wondering if maybe you can talk about that moment and, and what that context meant for the production side of things and the way people in South Africa were thinking about making music.

Louise: Yeah, it really was a very different moment. It was a different moment politically in South Africa. For a start, but it was also a different moment in the music market. Right. And it wasn't a moment in which the idea of branding in the way that you were talking about it Kingsley, that, that the idea of branding wasn't really a conversation that was being had in the way that it is now I think.

I think also the difference politically, is the way that, ideas of resistance, at least in the South African case, were hitched to, um, the circulation of, of South African popular music, so

Mack: I Ideas of what?

Louise: of resistance.

Mack: Oh,

Louise: Yeah, that in the 1980s South African popular music, uh, that was circulated around the world was very much tied to an idea of struggle. And I'm not sure if Afrobeats has quite the same kind of resonance or of South African music, amapiano and other musics now has that kind of resonance. But it was such a contested political time and a time of great struggle, violence and aspiration. Um,

so I think that's one of the key differences in terms of the kind of political world in which African popular music came to play a huge role in the world music and world beat market.

Mack: Yeah. You know, Louise, I, I first encountered your work when I was a master's student in folklore in ethnomusicology at Indiana University, and I was actually feeling frustrated because I didn't feel like people were talking or writing very much in the field about the production or the recording of music.

And then I came across Tom Porcello's work and your work, and I was just like, ah, I was so excited. And one of the things that I found really fascinating about your work was that you were treating the recording studio as this kind of microcosm for the type of political and cultural struggles and transformations that you just referred to.

Right. So looking back on that moment when you were first doing your field work, like what drew you to the recording studio to begin with?

Louise: Well, it was such a black box in terms of the way that people wrote about popular music and African music. That is, that ideas and people would go in and then magically music would come out at the other side.

And in fact, I think recording studios, they're spaces of negotiation that they're all these people who are collaborating, but who are all deeply invested. In particular ideas of what the sound should be. And so just in terms of how people musically and creatively figure out a way to make their sound is in and of itself interesting.

But if you put on top of that, like you ask the question, well, who is in the studio? Who are the people collaborating? And then you would have to say, well, there are different laborers in, in the recording studio. They're people with different kinds of responsibilities and different forms of knowledge.

And, uh, all of that has to be negotiated. And that brings in particular kinds of struggles, not spoken right, but sort of worked out through the way people shape a sound through technology. And then if we put on top of that, who are these people in terms of their kind of social positionings, and you bring biographies in and a political moment in, then the struggle in the studio or the negotiation or the discussion or the, the creative process in the studio gets heated up further.

In the case of the, of South Africa at that moment, which was the moment of transition out of apartheid, uh, you had white sound engineers, very largely, who had technical know-how, but were recording African musics and who didn't necessarily have much understanding, uh, much deep cultural knowledge of African musics.

And you had musicians who didn't have any technological knowhow. And then you had producers who were these sort of gatekeepers and talent scouts, but who didn't necessarily have the technical language, for and people were speaking multiple languages.

So enveloped in all of that, one could see how these generational, gendered, raced, struggles happened purely and just in the way people were all invested in the same thing that is making good music. And so I think nowadays you, it's not that those struggles have disappeared. But what the tenor and the registers and the modes of those differences are and how they get articulated is probably different.

Mack: Yeah. Um, just listening to you speak about that, I started thinking about really the roots of American popular music and very similar racial dynamics and, and different types of expertise and who understood the culture and who understood the technology. And now we are in this moment where the technology has become a lot more accessible.

And Reginald, that really makes me think of your work because I think you consider very deeply this decentralized moment on the, and so maybe in response to what Louise has said, like thinking about the production side of Afrobeats today, what sort of resonates for you? What seems different? What seems the same?

Reginold: that, yeah. I think what's interesting, listening to Louise talk, and again, thank you for opening up, I think in, in both of your works, again, this idea of the studio as a black box, right?

Mack: Mm-hmm.

Reginold: think that translates to so many different genres. And as Mack was saying, thinking about the early roots of American recorded music. Right. Um, I'm thinking of people like Chris Blackwell and reggae being a gatekeeper, how Bob Marley and the Whalers sound transformed tremendously after their time in the England or even hip hop when you think about Arthur Baker helping Afrika Bambaataa construct, an entire genre, electro electro funk. And I think you document that story very well in South Africa, and we can learn from that to think about, how genres are formed. I do think some of those same consistent, uh, kind of pressures; social, race, class, marketing, you know, race, music, right? Come back again. Those, those are cyclical.

I think what's interesting particularly about Afrobeats, again, you, when I think about the dj, or a set of DJs, listeners who coined the term right there, there was already a beats culture, right? As particularly in England, coming out of a post hip hop era in the two thousands.

Hip hop it become mainstream. You're dealing with dubstep, you're dealing with, EDM to a certain degree. And so throwing Afro onto the sound that of you're hearing R&B urban musics, that seems to make sense, right? Especially in a mixtape culture and especially where people are thinking about sounds in terms of beats, right? Um, beats and rhymes. Again, what's different here, perhaps, uh, is the idea of black agency, African agency and the construction of the genre, the production of the genre.

Some of the most vibrant, uh, sounds of the early 2010s as the genre Afrobeats was really starting to come into its own were relying on diaspora networks. Were relying on, Yahoo Messenger to share MP3 files. Right. Uh, so there

Mack: Can you, can you open up a little bit what you mean by diaspora networks?

Reginold: Sure, sure, so diaspora, I mean, you know, the dispersion of, migrant populations or historic black populations through slavery, or through 20th century migrations.

The Windrush generation in England in particular. But all the circulations of, of people of African descent Latin America , the United States, Canada, right? And back again. We talked about, uh, Fela Kuti coming to the United States, hearing James Brown and then transforming highlife, which was already a Caribbean genre, right? And, um, so the diaspora has been in communication, lord Kitchener, a Calypso singer, wrote a tribute to Ghana's, um, independence in 1957, It became a major hit and was reflective of what became highlife. So these networks have existed through trade, through politics, uh, through cultural movements. And what happens in the digital era is time kind of collapses, right? So you have diaspora networks, you have sailors or traders during the early 20th century who are bringing some jazz records to Paris or maybe bringing jazz records to the continent, and you have this lag that happens, but by the 2010s and two thousands, you're having people email each other instantly.

So, it would still take a while for sounds and scenes to develop, but you could potentially get what's being played by DJs in Accra, Lagos or Abidjan into the hands of DJs in Paris, London, New York City, uh, Los Angeles, uh, overnight. Right? And people start to collaborate as well. They start to think about, I would like to work with that producer who's in um, Bristol. I would like to work with that producer who's in, uh, Abidjan or what have you. So a number of internet channels enables this. Some of it's through Yahoo Messenger where you can download or share large files as opposed to, let's say, email. We can think of all these different upload sites that became very popular, that have gone away.

Obviously, Napster, right? There's that discussion about Napster, imeem . There's one called imeem that was very influential in a lot of house music in particular. Uh, so that in some ways it, it collapses some of the time lag with, Brent Hayes Edwards calls décalage, right? Uh, this sense of gap or jet lag that happens between traveling décalage is collapsed to a certain degree.

Um.

Mack: And then even, even in, the earlier electronic era, I mean, you hear stories that the way ska happened in Jamaica was there were these powerful AM radio stations in New Orleans that were just blasting out this really hot signal that they could pick up all the way in Jamaica, but they couldn't pick up all the other cultural context the way that you can now.

Right. Um, Kingsley on the reception side we're talking about the way that these different kinds of networks, these historical networks of people moving around, but also these communication networks affect the production of the music on the reception side in West Africa. are people listening to the music?

What is, what are the mediums? Are they using Spotify, like people in other places or, or how are they actually listening?

Kingsley: Immediately you asked that. I, I thought about the year of return, which has become like an annual gathering of people of black descent, uh, in Ghana. I think the first time it started was in 2019. And so you would often have mainly black people from North America come to Ghana in December.

There are a couple of activities, there are lots of musical shows that people attend. And, um, usually, uh, people are looking forward to whichever artist has the hottest song, to see them in concert and to enjoy. But I, I, I would say, um, mainly the ways through which people get to encounter the music is through streaming services.

Yes. So Spotify, YouTube, um, there are other streaming services that are more popular locally because they offer more affordable. Services or they're just easily accessible, like Boomplay, Justplay. Um, yeah. But YouTube mainly is a means to reach people, encounter these musics. Um, but also, um, the radios, you know, good old radio and television.

But one thing that people, I would say mostly engage with is social media. And the mechanism within which social media operates now basically boils down to algorithms.

You know, like people engaging with algorithms. A lot of things are very algorithmic. And these sounds circulate as sound bites, not as full on songs necessarily.

So you could have like a catchy part of a song, you know, that keeps being repeated. Creates a kind of earworm that's changes people to want to find out more about it. And how this happens is that like on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, where they have short, uh, videos, you have sounds that you can use to, yes.

Like you can, you can attach a dance to it. So then, then there's a visual aspect, then there's a somatic experience that you can have, you can choreograph it with your friends. They call something, um, challenges, that they do, social media challenges.

I believe that us these things keep being played. Like even when you're sitting at the airport and you see a teenager, um, on their phone and you hear, uh, maybe some of these sound bites, like it as you hear it from time to time, you are drawn to it. These are some of the means through which, people get to know some of these musics and to engage with them.

Yeah.

Reginold: Kingsley. Well, uh, what you're seeing at the airport is not a teenager listening, but a teenager filming a TikTok.

Kingsley: Yes. Yeah. That happens.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Reginold: I think what's interesting about that, I've, and I've written about how dancers are, have been tremendous in curating and spreading Afrobeats music, uh, through African viral dance or viral dance styles. Chop Daily is a, was a channel that has been very important, in showcasing dancers. And those songs again then become sounds for DJs to spin and play at parties and so there's a folkloric aspect to it that I think that we should also note. Right.

Um, it's similar to the way you think about reggae rhythms or even songs in hip hop or samples are used by several artists, right? And so with the sample index, the original artist, also the use of the, the song across different producers and, and rappers, the same thing when you're hearing Afrobeat, songs with different dancers performing to the background really amplifies, you know, their acceptance and their interest and interest around it.

Um, and then ultimately the remixing of those songs. So dance has been particularly for Afrobeats on channels like, uh, Vine and then TikTok, the way that the music was curated in many ways.

Louise: My wondering, is about the sound quality with which people are listening? So is it that if people are just watching, uh, and listening to snippets, that they are then listening to the full song somewhere else on better sound quality? I mean, is most of people's listening being done on crappy phones? Or what is the relationship between that and the broader world in which people are hearing Afrobeat in their lives?

Kingsley: What I'm observing is; wherever, whoever the audience is situated, um, their engagement, uh, drives the algorithm, which in turn drives the, the value of whichever musicians songs are being played in some way, and whatever devices they are accessing it from, and whether they, uh, follow up to listen to the full music or not.

Those, uh, sound bites become circulatory motives that people are associate with someone or with something, right? And so sometimes the end goal is not even, uh, towards the popularity of the musician becomes towards the popularity of whoever choreographed its first dance, right? And so it's, it's working in, in that way as well.

What I would also, um, say is that. If you are familiar with Instagram reels or with TikTok, they occur in such a way that you scroll to the next thing, it's not supposed to capture attention for too long, otherwise you get bored, you know, you just move on to the next thing. Right?

And at a moment there are several different things circulating, right? And that's what brings me to, uh, the idea of timelines, which we can talk about later. Timeline rhythms for example, the most popular, the Son Clave, which Bo Diddley transformed to the Bo Diddley beat, had its own movement in rock and roll.

Bossa nova clave, or bossa nova rhythm which was popular in Brazil, served as the basis for, you know, that whole bossa nova movement. That song clave uh, timeline in Ghana, um, based in mainly West African and Central African timeline parties. You hear them now in altered forms in, uh, amapiano, for example, in several other musics. Even in K-pop, you know, you can hear it in Adele's, Can I get it Right Now?

You can hear it being strummed, in the guitar. You know, all these are very subtle, subtle, sonic marker that also drive, you know, the dance ability of the musics. and, I think one example that I can think of recently was, uh, there's this American singer, I don't know if I would consider her jazz singer or, uh, something similar, but she has a, piece, uh, that was recently remixed to reference what Reginold was saying.

Uh, it was remixed, but with a timeline rhythms, right? Which makes it danceable makes people want to associate with it. So in this instance. The Artist is not necessarily an Afrobeats artist, but it's association with something connected to Afrobeats in that sense, it's making it also, uh, achieve a certain comeback, because people need to dance to it, for it to extend in its reach.

Mack: So this has got me thinking about, there's this classic, article that Steven Feld wrote, called Pygmy Pop. And it's, it's about how, you know that there's this anthropological recording of, uh, I believe they were the Mbuti people in Zaire, so people are living in the forest.

This anthropologist records them and they're performing this kind of vocalization style called hindewhu. And so this gets pressed to a record and it starts circulating among, like, jazz musicians and stuff. And then, it was Bill Summers, I believe the percussionist for, for Herbie Hancock, who performs this vocal style, but with a beer bottle.

Um, and the beginning of the like supremely funky song, Watermelon Man on Hancock's Head Hunters album. And so suddenly this pygmy sp style is getting monetized on this very successful album by Herbie Hancock, and then later it gets sampled by Madonna and it, and it winds up on Madonna's I think the song was called Sanctuary.

And so Feld is thinking about like these new contexts that this music finds itself in, um, and the new meanings that it, that get generated, but also thinks about the lack of compensation for the originators of this vocal element itself. And I'm just thinking about again, like how there are elements that stay the same in, in what you're talking about, Kingsley, but also elements that change. Because one of the things that I've been seeing on the internet lately is something called beat leasing. Have you guys heard about this?

So, you know. We are in this mode where the producer is, is just often just this one person who makes the beat, makes the rhythm or whatever, like the track that people are going to dance to or rap over or sing over or what have you. And producers used to sell these and they still do sell them to artists. But what I've been hearing about is, is lately producers have begun putting them in the different social media platforms where they're hoping they're going to one day circulate so that they can get a unique identifier for that music and so that they can get all the royalties for it.

And then they don't care, like they want as many different people to wrap on it or dance to it as possible because they're gonna get that revenue every time it plays. So I'm, I'm wondering if that economic piece is, um, something that you guys have encountered yet.

Reginold: If only those royalties were so generous.

Right? I mean, I think it's interesting. I think I have not heard the term beat leasing yet, or applied to that practice. I mean, certainly artists want to get their material out as much as they can. What it makes me think about are artists like DJ Khalid or people who are really known for just putting this producer tag, sonic tag on, on a piece of music, uh, mustard on the beat.

Mack: Mustard. Yeah.

Reginold: You know, the same thing happens in Afrobeats as well.

Kingsley: Yeah. Yes. This is the first time I'm hearing about beat leasing, but I think I have an idea, uh, what you're talking about, especially since I think last year, um, Universal Music had this whole thing going on with TikTok where they were, uh, threatening to take all musics associated with people signed to their labels, uh, of the platform because I think they couldn't reach an agreement as to how much revenue is being generated on the platform whenever someone uses any song or any beats from any of people associated with their, uh, label and whatever proceeds they could get, you know, from it.

Yeah. So, I, I, I believe there's, there's something like that going on, and to what Reginold was saying, considering how much these people could be earning, like there are still certain nations whose, um, systems have not yet been approved to generate that kind of revenue, you know, from engagement on social media.

So for TikTok creators in Ghana, for instance, uh, most of them, what they are generating revenue from is to be popular and to hopefully get brand deals from, you know, the local markets or foreign markets, not necessarily to get reward. Yes. So you could get,

Mack: So they could actually not have the ability in Ghana to monetize on TikTok. Oh my God

Kingsley: yes. I don't know if that has changed, but, uh, as, uh

Reginold: That that's a financial, you know, in my research, I call it the digital red line,

right? We think in the US context, redlining around housing, Africa has a giant red line around it with regards to financial services. So, the fact that you're able to even use a credit, get a credit card, or have your credit card accepted for Distrokid or have that revenue go into a, an African bank, it's highly unlikely, right? Uh, only changes are being made in the last five years or so to break down those digital barriers, red lines.

So yeah, absolutely, it's totally possible that, you're doing it to get exposure and then, you might get a sponsorship from a local brand or a local media company. But, unless you're represented, uh, internationally, you're not going to make the revenue. But that again, it's been a big part of, discourse about afrobeats, not simply as a sonic style, but as a economic, uh, vehicle that promotes African agency, right? So many of the producers and record labels who are managing artists out of Nigeria and Ghana were some of the first to really push back against what might be kind of like a colonial approach towards the developing the non-white world in the music industry, uh, precisely because, Afrobeat artist in Nigeria could do quite well, just making money from the local audience, right?

Mostly performances. But then to put it onto Spotify requires licensing, lawyers, organization. And the difference between what happened in reggae for instance, and what's happening between the Nigerian artists now is quite tremendous.

They're organized, uh, they make solid demands, and it's no surprise why you could see Burna Boy or Mr. Eazi, do so well from their enterprise is because the sound has been locally focused, has realized that the continent is a continent of 1.2 billion people.

How many of them are consumers in the same kinds of ways? That consumers are in the United States or Europe, that's a different story. But, they could make a living if there's great organization there. And so the Western music apparatus has had to deal with Afrobeats on its own terms. In some ways it really has.

Mack: Louise, in your recent work, you've shown some interest in another like thing that's circulating out there, which is, I've been sweating whether I'm gonna say this right, but you'll, you ululation, I always have so much trouble with that word. But, uh, I was really interested by how you're talking about how this gets picked up in a western pop music context.

So can you tell us how to say it and, and, and tell us what it is, and then talk about how it's been sort of picked up in the west.

Louise: Yeah. So ululation is, that a high pitched trilling that, uh, women do, which is often thought of as a celebratory and affirming response to performance. And so it women ululate in all across the African continent in South and Southeast Asia, and all across the Levant as well, and it's really been sort of thought of as a kind of post performance clapping rather than, as a really integral component of music making or, or of an event. I mean, it's a absolutely brilliant and projected sound of women's voices.

And, uh, so you found out that on the one hand sort of ignored, as a creative, component of music making, in terms of the way it's been analyzed, but at the same time picked up as this absolutely captivating sound, um, in different kind of contexts. And, uh, so there are different ways in which you see it circulating in the world of, of popular music in South Africa, say in Zulu music for instance, it actually often gets overdubbed onto a musical track and kind of the use for instance, to delineate the form. And that is for a Zulu audience pre predominantly, right?

You also hear it often with a lot of reverb on it. For example, picked up as an isolated sound in various popular musics, um, particularly in relationship to the Levant. Uh, where, it can become, uh, sort of a symbol of an alluring exoticized other, for example, and sometimes I think it also stands in or does the same kind of popular function, sonically as the hijab the veil does in terms of the way it gets circulated, either as political critique or presumptions of political critique or as the sort of alluring and exoticizing phenomenon.

Mack: And then if I remember correctly, you spoke about how it gets picked up in Black Panther. Am I, am I remembering that correctly?

Louise: No, but it does of course,

Mack: Oh, okay.

Louise: right.

Mack: I just invented that in my mind. Do you think that, does that become like a sort of sonic, touchstone or signifier of some kind of Africanness or.

Louise: Yeah, I mean, I, in that context, of a, a sort of generalized Africanness. And also, it can be a generalized and resistant Africanness as well, right? Or an Africanness has a kind of resolute women sound. And how it gets produced, where it gets placed, in a mix, for example, how it gets recorded and, um, processed, I think is a really fascinating thing to watch from context to context as to how it gets used and placed.

Mack: Well, I think that's just a theme that frankly, Louise, you're such a trailblazer on, which is really thinking about sound itself, timbre, and the kind of work it can do and also the kind of symbolic weight that it can carry. But I think that that's also something that I can see in all of your work is that this kind of attention to this sonic dimension. Kingsley, you have this great piece about the rivalry between Nigeria and Ghana in terms of who originally created this sound of Afrobeats. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Kingsley: So Ghana and Nigeria has longstanding, uh, rivalry, from food to clothing to music to other forms of entertainment. But before I go into that, I also want to say that both Ghana and Nigeria also have a, a history of, I don't know if this is the right word, subsuming, you know, other cultures like, into African, they have this history of taking other stuff from other places and then incorporating into their own thing, right?

Yeah. Now the thing with doing something like that, and I'll defer back to what Reginold said about the diaspora connections and the role that the diaspora plays in propagating these sounds like Nigeria has a large diaspora in the UK, in the US you know, you have a lot of Nigerians, you have a lot of Ghanaians as well, right?

So if Nigerian and Ghanaian musicians incorporate a lot of amapiano aesthetics into their music, um, there is the tendency for them to represent it as something coming from them other than, as something coming from South Africa, right? And so some people might now take amapiano to be Afrobeats, you know, it creates that kind of confusion, right?

And then to the non-African audience, it's just something that comes from Africa. And who are the people presented at Ghana and Nigeria, right? Yes. But I digress, uh, to come back to the rivalry. Especially regarding Afrobeats.

So I mentioned earlier Fela Kuti's connection to the whole Afrobeats then many people, not just Nigerians, there are many Ghanaian's also that see him as a kind of father, um, orchestrator, you know, origin of all these sounds that have now become, very popular. For me, I personally think that a lot of people are so attributed to Fela because of the whole Afrobeat Afrobeats, you know, moniker, name and yeah, which is serendipitous in my opinion when, British Ghanaian DJ Abrantee coined the term Afrobeats.

Other people note the influential highlife sound on Afrobeats, especially of the many genres that Afrobeats promiscuity takes it to. Um, highlife has been one of the most influential, and so people say, 'okay, if we have a consensus that high life started in Ghana, then Ghana has a claim to, the whole Afrobeat thing too.'

But what makes that complicated is the fact that there is a proliferation of Nigerian artists in the space, right? They are the most successful in the Afrobeat space, Burner Boy, Tems, 21 Savage, Wizkid. All these artists, uh, have more popularity as well, right? And some of that popularity is homegrown.

Nigeria has a large population that the most populated, uh, on the continent. It drives streams. Even though most of Nigeria friends will, wouldn't agree with me and say I am just making an excuse. It is true that it generates organic streams, you know, organic following. And I was in Nigeria, um, in

Mack: Wait, would your Nigerians friends say that because you're Ghanaian.

Kingsley: yes, yes, yes,

Reginold: 2, 2, 200 plus million Nigerians

Kingsley: 30 and only 30 million Ghanaians. Yeah.

Reginold: Right,

Mack: you're, so you're punching above your weight

Kingsley: Yes, yes. Yeah.

Mack: saying? Yeah. All right.

Kingsley: I was in, I was in northern Nigeria, in June, and I was in a hotel restaurant and I heard them playing a song in Twi, which is the language I speak in Ghana. And I was like, wait, I didn't expect to hear that here. So I had one friend who uh, also goes to school in the US and she was like, I told you, I told you, we play your music, you claim we don't play your music.

So it has that tension as well, right?

Um, yes, but uh, what I'll say is that I conceive of Afrobeats as because of its origins within these two countries. It is a collaborative affair, and even in the UK where DJ Abrantee who necessarily isn't the originator of Afrobeats, it's just that he put that name on it and gave it a brand. You know, there were several things going on even before he, he brought that name. And scholars like Franco Fabbri has mentioned how sometimes genres exists before we put a name to it, and then that name gives it a character, right?

Yeah. So, um, even when DJ Abrantee was playing these songs that were primarily Ghanaian and Nigerian, which, uh, he was using on this Afrobeats show, and then kickstarted a lot of things that make Afrobeats what it is today. It is still something that has a lot of Ghanaian iss and Nigerians injected into it.

And now it is extending even beyond those places, right? Because Afrobeats artists themselves also partake in this global culture of injecting influences from several places like Rema, who had this 2022 hit with, uh, Selena Gomez, uh, from the US. Calm Down. They played it at the Qatar World Cup.

Rema injects sometimes in Indianisms, for lack of better word or like, certain sonic characteristics that we associates with the Middle East, you know, all this melismatic singing, unusual cadences that you, you hear in Middle Eastern music that you wouldn't hear in West African music necessarily.

So it's not only within Africa that they take these influences, right? So now it is becoming a Pan-African tenant even. Beyond. But yes to be succinct about, the Ghana Nigeria rivalry. But I also add this thing, that there have been several different instances, uh, in history where Nigerian and Ghanaian musicians have collaborated.

Like sometimes I go to check musics from the latter half of the 20th century, like even Hugh Masekela, South African Trumpeter Hugh Masekela albums. I go to check the musicians, I see Ghanaian, a lot of Ghanaian and Nigerian names, right?

And then South African collaborators. So it, it has been a Pan-African affair.

But, uh, sometimes for the sake of banter, we argue about a lot of things. Yeah.

Mack: It's fun.

Reginold: I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna jump in for another reference here. Jace Clayton, DJ Rupture wrote an amazing book that almost never gets talked about up, uproot travels in the 21st century, and he talks about the melismatic and ululation in the context of autotune. And describes how much autotune he heard in Morocco, right.

And, uh, with these Moroccan, North African artists, and what appealed to those artists in the sound. And he links it, I think, really well to a Pan-African circulation of sounds, right? Pan-African circulations from the Caribbean even, right? We saw in reggae music and soca music, really the pioneering use of autotune before, uh, we heard it in the Miami culture, right?

And, now that it's become so synonymous with not only R&B but particularly like kind of world R&B or world romantic musics, I think it's really interesting. He talks about that really interesting From a participant point of view, him DJing and then exploring as a traveler, North Africa.

anyways, that's called Uproot is the name of that

Mack: Yeah, it's a great book. and Reginold, that actually really connects to something that you write about, which is, you, um, use a term by, Rayvon Fouché, who's actually somebody who was a helpful mentor to me back in the day. but Ray's concept of black vernacular, technological creativity.

Reginold: Sure.

Mack: and the way African people and their descendants in the United States have used technologies reminiscent of that, old folklore saying like, hit a straight lick with a crooked stick. like people deploying technologies, maybe not exactly the way they were intended and making something new and wonderful out of it. So, Ray's example was, scratching on the turntable and then we

wind up getting a whole new type of, music technology based on this black vernacular use of technology. so maybe can you talk a little bit about that? Because what I really like about what you've done with that concept recently is to add this, spiritual element and my reading of what you're saying is that this process often brings the human back into the technology in a way that sometimes feels under threat in our technological age.

Reginold: sure. so, this paper that I've written and this concept of explorer called Soul Craft kind of questions, what we think about. As technology, what counts as technological? particularly in the space of African creators and African diasporic creators. are we simply dealing with material culture?

we tend to think of technology as gadgets, apps like innovation that comes out of a science lab engineering, right? But most theorists of technology, describe the process as innovation itself, innovation upon material practices. And so whereas we kind of set up this dichotomy with the west is scientific and technological and the rest are not right, they're on some scale of getting to technological.

What I try to do in the concept of soul craft is not only disrupt that dichotomy by talking about, what we mean here is material innovation, right? So innovation in practice. so doing something, new with a guitar or with, a production soundboard or with a tool such as autotune, counts as musical innovation as much as, uh, the creation of, a console, right?

A DJ console, right? And so we, we need, can look at people, not only on the continent, but in work that I do in Chicago, uh, with black DJs and inventors and innovators in the Chicago House genre called Footwork, or sometimes it's called Ghetto House or, juke music. You know, young men and women who.

Don't have access to the latest tool We can see it in gqom as well. Right. This is another fascinating development. Nobody is looking for this sound. This is a completely, vernacular local sound to South Side Chicago, to West Side Chicago. uh, where the juke music, uh, house music is a lot faster.

And, some people have written about it. Uh, ShaDawn Battle has written about how the sound developed in the projects, the project, the public housing projects, because of the way it has a particular snare, let's say. And you would hear this snare sound and hear, wow, that is the worst snare I've ever heard in my life.

Right? What cheap, Casio was that produced from? But the way that sound resonates off the walls in a concrete project, housing building creates a really spatial. kind of innovation and reverberation, that's playing with the environment. So along with the you know, house beats, it's the environment that's special to this.

The sound gets turned up. in interviews with DJs, they talked about hacking turntables to, to adjust the crystals inside the turntables, the, the quartz time pieces to speed up. the percentage from, let's say just from 10% to something like 25% on a mechanical turntable. This was happening in the nineties.

So by the time you get to, uh, the two thousands, people are using not the latest technology, not the latest Roland drum machine, but kind of discarded Roland drum machines, to produce something with their hands. Right? not timeline based, but. Hand based drumming, so there's a lot of innovation that's happening there.

And when you, interview the artists and you ask them, what are you trying to get to? They say, well, I'm trying to get to soul music. I need something that's gonna free my soul. There's an ecstatic quality to the music. Obviously, the notion of ecstatic means to throw oneself outside of the body, and that is completely apparent in the dancing that accompanies the music with the dancers are very fast, right?

Blinding foot speed, uh, and movements. and so thinking about that, you know, in relation to again, what counts as technology, I've found an affinity in this, between, different styles, different producers and dancers on the African continent, where I've interviewed folks who are dancers and, uh, DJs and again, talking about, well, what, drives you to produce. African viral content. Right. what's your goal with this music? Are you trying to get on the Rihanna video? And, uh, the people I've interviewed said, well, I'm actually trying to reach my highest potential of myself, right? I'm trying to free my spirit.

and so the narratives in these two, black, uh, not only diasporic, but rhizomatic urban youth cultures, kind of converges on this notion that the material. It's not distinct from the spiritual that the metaphysical and the physical, uh, material world are linked in these practices, and that really creates this, you know, other worldly dimension to both the sounds or the even the aspirations.

Right? many of the artists say 'I'm driven by destiny.' which is, their futuring of, uh, their own spiritual selves. yeah, I

Mack: but you're, you're emphasizing a more spiritual thing, there's been a lot of, talk about Afrofuturism lately, but, what you're doing is a different emphasis. it's almost like not a technological future, you know?

It seems like it's more of like, what's my future self or what am I, yeah.

Reginold: well, thanks for saying that. Thanks for saying it. so I have a book coming out in October. It's called Pan-African Futurism. And in many ways, the book talks about, the book talks about innovators, tech developers in Ghana. It talks about the notion of digital diaspora and how, media producers, diaspora communities, Ghanaians living in Amsterdam have created a, an entire media culture that has impacted Ghanaians around the world, that diaspora events in Chicago become transnational events.

And we saw this particularly during COVID. Chicago has this amazing, GhanaFest uh, one of the largest in North America, and it's had it for over 30 years. During COVID they turned it into a virtual event. There was performances, live singers and dancers, broadcasting via the internet, from, uh, Accra from Takoradi and there were media production companies that were involved. So there was really a sense of a global Ghanaian identity, even though no one could be physically in the same places. There was, a lot of physical parties and, and events that were happening and the digital media allowed people to connect.

For me these practices demonstrate a Pan-African ethos and ethos around connection. The use of technology, not really for a fantastical or speculative future, but to unify and coordinate and develop and connect people in our current times. Right. That's, that said, my approach in this book is almost purely secular, right?

I'm talking about social connections, community development, community building, the kind of innovation that happens there, which is a little bit different from what you might say, the more spiritually attuned, notion of soul craft, right? Thinking from, uh, again, Kwame Nkrumah talks about the soul, right?

Léopold Senghor talks about the soul. It's not simply, uh, an aesthetic or genre that emerges out of the black civil rights experience, right? This notion of soul has connected Pan-African publics for decades, if not longer. And, um, so to think about material innovation as you know, rather, technology, I thought this notion of soul craft more aptly spoke to things that I was observing across these different, black diasporic populations.

Mack: you know, Louise, you too have written about dance. your book, Dust of the Zulu was about dance. Does anything Reginald saying sort of resonate with the way that you interpreted Zulu dance?

Louise: Yeah, absolutely. I think what strikes me around the way, originally you were talking about soul craft here is how, um, densely social it actually is.

and in a way, and so while you were talking, I was thinking about the kind of dense sociality of soul craft, right? And of the way that you describe, this, you know, Chicago dance scene. and I was thinking in the same time of also what Kingsley was, you were saying Kingsley, about all this sort of negotiate, this play around genre categories and how densely social that is too, in the sense that, it seems like a sort of highly elaborated poetics in a way that people play with these different ideas of ni Nigeria and Ghana, as a mode of listening, right? But, uh, it's still, it's densely social and connected.

And, I think the way that I bring that back to dance, in Zulu, at any rate, and I think in your case as well, Reginold, is the, that dance enlivens, right? That, in so many places, and in so many genres or performance practices, it's very hard to separate the idea of dance from song, because they're both housed in the body and they are both housed in, um, social relations.

and they, are created so essentially, essentially, so, uh, I think there are lots of resonances, not only in looking at different kind of competitive dance styles, that are very often about, men's camaraderie. but more so in just the way that, however technological you might think of the world of listening and music production is, it comes down to, these moments in which those technologies are completely humanized and completely integrated with ways of being and ways of being that are fully social.

Mack: Well I think that's a really lovely note to end on. I love that sentiment and, um, and that reminder. 'cause I think sometimes we just focus too much on the technology itself. At least me as a media scholar, I succumb to that temptation. So I've really, really enjoyed this conversation and, um, just wanna thank you all for spending some time with me.

Reginold: Thank you.

Mack.

Kingsley: Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Mack: And that's it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to Reginold Royston, Kingsley Okyere and Louise Meintjes , and especially thanks to Reginold to help me plan out this episode. If you'd like to hear the extended version of our conversation, become a member@mackhagood.com. That's also where you can sign up for our new newsletter and pick up some merch, mackhagood.com.

M-A-C-K-H-A-G-O-O-D.com. Today's show was expertly edited in the United Kingdom by Cameron Naylor. I also had some major web assistance from Abe Hagood and our outro music today and always is by blue the fifth. I'll be in your inbox in two weeks with the newsletter and then I'll talk to you again next month.

Have a wonderful holiday season if you celebrate, peace.