CIM409 Week 6 Project Submission: AfroFISHER
Exploring Southern African Rhythm through the lens of Western music theory
Having recently been on holiday to South Africa and Zimbabwe, I discovered modern Southern African Afropop in the bars, clubs, supermarkets and restaurants. To my surprise, the lack of a significant bass kick in almost all locally produced dance music was a bit of a shock. As a student of Western music theory, I experienced a range of ethnocentric sensitivities (Bennett, 1986): my initial reaction was the absolute denial that this could be dance music without the drive of a four-to-the-floor kick, followed by the minimalisation of observations that there are strong electronic bass synths, vocoded, heavily processed vocals, and driving high-hats. It felt so familiar and yet so alien at the same time. Watching girls dancing on tables and the crowd going wild, to the party dying when a Western-style DJ came on, made me question the integration of Western dance music theory into this music.
I decided to experiment by taking a top Australian producer’s acapellas and mixing them with a popular Southern African producer’s beats. The resulting remix is undeniably an intercultural phenomenon that listeners of each respective region of the world might appreciate, despite having never heard of the musical counterpart. The question remains though of cultural appropriation:- I would like to refer to an Instagram user @wuki who has a video series called ‘Beats I Can’t Release’. He makes ‘bootlegs’ (unauthorized remixes of copyrighted music) and performs them at his ticketed DJ sets. Legally, as long as he references his source material, he is allowed to profit from this artistically. What this means for my project is that although I may not be allowed to officially release my remixes without permission from the original artists(e.g. on Spotify), I am allowed to make social media content that references the source materials, as well as perform the track(s) at live entertainment events.
In summary:
The track that I made for this project sits in a commercially uncomfortable grey area (as pointed out by lecturer Toby Wren). From my perspective, it is an educational piece of music that is targeted at Western listeners: there are familiar vocals, SFX (reverse crashes and whooshes every 8 or 16 bars) and driving percussion, however, the similarities end there. The lack of breakdowns, buildups and drops as experienced in Western dance music; the sporadic and melodic bass contrasts the usual Western rhythmic bass.
The few Western colleagues I have shown actually like the piece, calling it uptempo, but chill, which vastly contrasts the instrumentals that I used, which were originally slower, yet considered heavy dance music in Southern Africa. I toyed with the idea of adding a kick to make the piece more accessible to my Western audience, but decided to keep it authentic. What I ended up with is an example of modern Southern African dance music, with familiar acapellas (to Western listeners, to draw them in), that would still serve the source demographics’ originality.
To be clear: I do not claim that this piece is an original work by myself. It is a remix for educational purposes that uses copyrighted material without consent. I have provided links to all original files used, plus links to the source material on Spotify.
Lecturer Toby Wren pointed me to a paper that discusses the legalities of using other musician’s work to create new works and states that “the performer shall, …, have the right to be identified as the performer of his performances,…” (Hayward et al., 2013) and so I will list all performers of the music I used here:
Australia: FISHER, Aatig, Kita Alexander
Africa: DJ Tucks, Wav MusiQ, Infinity MusiQ, uLazi
Here is a link to download my remix for CIM409 Intercultural Creative Practice in 2024 T1:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12tuqeiGnOz-lf0C33EvyURRoUVGPr-Hi/view?usp=drive_link
And a link to a Spotify playlist of Modern Southern African Afropop:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5sPwvgss7bmQbgIMdH6UVw?si=fabc5037ea2b4a94
And a link to the original instrumentals and acapella files that I used:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1peqx0UU2Wj-t7wwvUOp0Nm1ZEkYSTf7Y?usp=drive_link
References
Bennett, M. J. (1986). A Developmental approach to training for intercultural sensitivity. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 10(2). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223565305_A_developmental_approach_to_training_for_intercultural_sensitivity
Hayward, P., Fitzgerald, J., & Brennan, D. (2013). Planes of Illusion: Music Soundtrack, Rendition and Attribution in Sanctum (2011). ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.v13i2.111
