Music
Kokota Piano – The New Electronic Sound of Mzansi
Get the lowdown on Amapiano, the latest groove to emerge from Gauteng
“I like Piano because it is from Gauteng. It’s not because it’s from Soweto or from Pretoria, I like it because it is from Gauteng. It pushes up and coming DJs. Many can produce diPiano.
The basslines knock with the force of the police at the door, the snares clap like children playing slapping games, the percussions bounce like an empty bottle tipped over and not breaking, the shakers sweep like a broom over a yard, the harmonies remind you of something, someone, a time you can’t quite pin down. Amapiano, South Africa’s latest and fastest-growing electronic music movement, is generations of sounds that have reverberated in Gauteng’s townships reincarnated into a disruptive force.
Amapiano Crowds
© Setumo-Thebe Mohlomi
Piano, the instrument central to its formation and naming, echoes Jazz while other elements borrow from Kwaito, diBacardi, Deep, Afro, Vocal and Tech House. These are the helix strands of its genetics, but its exact place and time of birth are unknown. Dinho, the DJ/promoter behind Mamelodi’s annual Dinho Café festival says “I like Piano because it is from Gauteng. It’s not because it’s from Soweto or from Pretoria, I like it because it is from Gauteng. It pushes up and coming DJs. Many can produce diPiano.”
Possessiveness over its origins is a distraction for more pressing concerns says Da Kruk, host of The Player’s Club on Gauteng’s YFM radio station. “I really think it doesn’t matter where it started from. My biggest thing is where is it going? I feel those kinds of things, focusing on the fickle, does not give it legs or you end up not thinking (how) the next level of Amapiano is going to sound like.”
A deluge of Amapiano music flows through messaging application Whatsapp, is accessible on social media platforms, can be heard on most streaming platforms and freely downloaded from a number of file sharing sites. This distribution model favours the music’s independent producers who mostly have minimal equipment and resources behind the marketing and distribution of their work. Streams and plays can’t be measured or monetised in this way, but the promise of a hit or at best a breakthrough into mainstream music are near-irresistible odds.
Amapiano Crowds
© Setumo-Thebe Mohlomi
Record labels Sony Music and Universal Music are signing producers and DJs. For Universal Music, this is partly to investing in acts that release music through channels that make it possible to collect royalties revenues from streams and downloads. Major record labels like these are spouting their dying coughs the world over, partly because of the free distribution models that perceivably benefit the artist first- like Amapiano does. But as independent artist evangelists celebrate the demise of the major, some of the Amapiano artists signed to these labels are professionalising rapidly because of the infrastructure, resources, know-how, access to markets and machinery that these labels offer them.
Music and business veteran DJ Sumbody’s label, Sum Sounds, recently signed a deal with Sony Music. The most recent major hit to come out of the stable is Ngwana Daddy where Sumbody features Kwesta, Thebe, Vetty and Vaal Nation. The plays are racking up for that song. But more importantly, the stable can release music produced by younger acts like The Low Keys, Snow Deep as well as other, older, artists.
A chance at fame, even momentary, eludes most Amapiano producers. Though it can be overwhelming when it does arrive. When Isikhathi (Gong Gong) flooded the streets and became a breakthrough hit, the song’s producer KwiishSA betrayed his 21 years of age. He took bookings outside of his contract with Nazo, a booking agency he had signed an exclusive contract with. When they saw a poster advertising one of the events he had booked himself for, “they asked me what was happening and I told them,” he says “they suggested that we terminate the contract and I agreed. We are still grand though.” Now signed to Content Connect Africa, Kwiish is working on a second EP that’s due for release in 2019.
“Mature” is the go-to descriptor used by Amapiano’s inner circles and those surrounding them. Sound emature is mature, sure, but also unique and developed beyond the crushing tide of what is released daily. For 38-year-old Stokie, who is the only Amapiano signing for Universal Music, some commercial Amapiano songs are unbearable. “There are those that make too much noise and those that have vocals that are used too much in the streets. Those vocals make the songs catch on quickly because it’s simple for the kids in the streets to sing along to it.” If it were up to him, he would only release music closer to Deep house on the Amapiano spectrum. He has had to add catchy elements to the music to help it sell and get radio airtime.
As this electronic music movement unleashes deeply disruptive production and distribution models on a mostly structured South African music industry, much will be swept away with the tide. Some of which might belong to Amapiano itself. The rapid rate of production and release of new music makes the sound’s evolution faster than established genres and subgenres. And so the Piano knocking through the country at this moment is bound to be different from what knocks in some months, a year or even some days from now.