Switched on Pop - Radio Africa

Episode Date: February 19, 2015

Reporting live from Kenya, we search for African pop that is making its way into global dance music. The barriers to producing high quality audio are reduced to merely owning a laptop. Now, regional artists are reaching a global audience. We speak to Blinky Bill, leader of the dance/pop/hip-hop group Just A Band, about their unique sound that attracts fans from Tokyo to Nairobi. And we also speak to Jeff Maina, lead designer at Waabeh, the Spotify for African content. FEATURING Fuse ODG – Azonto (learn the dance!) Sauti Sol – Sura Yako Diplo – Crown Just A Band – Looking for Home Just A Band – Life of the Party Just A Band – Probably for Lovers Just A Band – Huff + Puff Just A Band – Dunia Ina Mambo Charlie’s high school a cappella group – Give Up the Funk  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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hot. I'm hot to trot. Welcome to a very special episode of Switched on Pop

because Today, we are reporting live from the field. My partner, Charlie Harding, is in Nairobi, and he is going to tell us about the latest sounds on the Kenyan radio dial. Yeah, Nate, great to join you. I'm here at the I Hub technology incubator in Nairobi. Sorry for the background noise. Quite all right. So I came here and I thought, I'm going to try to find that unique Kenyan sound that's going to make it into all the DJs playlist.

this year. Right. There's all these blogs saying, yeah, East African music, it's going to be big this year. Well, I was sorely wrong. And it's not for lack of great music. So the other night, right, I'm going out and I'm dancing with all my friends here. Yeah. And what are they playing in the dance club? Right. Obviously, I imagine some local Nairobi musicians, perhaps. Plenty of Beyonce. No surprise. Of course. We're going to hear Western pop music everywhere we go around the world. Yeah, true. But more interesting was around 11 o'clock at night, the Western music sort of slows down,

and more regional African music picks up. The first thing we do, my colleagues get up to dance to this tune, Azoanto. Nobody want to see your rising. And when they do, they don't even like it. They just want to see you deep in crisis. Drive us off, you don't need their lasses. All of hers, you can't even ride it. Go ahead, move your feet just like this. Then he showed me the latest.

We walk over the paiters. Now what you do, my house will. Now, Zonto is a traditional Gnan dance. Yeah. But the song from this guy, Fuse ODG, he's a UK-based artist. He's of Ghanaian descent. And it basically sounds like Euro pop with maybe some more like traditional rhythms. Okay.

So we're all dancing along to this song. It's not just this one tune. We're hearing Nigerian music. We're hearing South African music. And of course, we're hearing some of the best Kenyan pop music. What do you think that tells us about the state of international pop music today? For me, it's so clear that the barriers and the differences of national and regional music just don't hold up. And that there's significant cultural exchange going on between all worlds of pop.

Yeah. It really got me thinking about how are international sounds being remixed, mashed up, and shared. And why does it seem like this is speeding up that more sounds are ending up in more kinds of pop music at the time? this moment. Live from Kenya, this is, I'm Nate Sloan, joining you from San Francisco. And I'm Charlie Harding, live in the field in Kenya. And this is switched on pop, the show that explores the art and science of pop music. We are incredibly lucky that Charlie was able to sit down with two key figures of the Kenyan music scene right now. One is Blinky Bill, the lead singer of just a band, Kenyan group that is blowing up right now.

And the other is Jeff Mena, one of the founders of the African music market, Wabe. We're so grateful for their time and really excited to broadcast those interviews later in the episode. Okay, Charlie, so you're at the club, you're dancing to Beyonce, Azzonto. You did say there were some Kenyan songs also bumping at the club. Like, what was there one that really stood out to you? Yeah, absolutely. So undeniably, the number one hit in Kenya right now is by this band Seltes Sol. And they have a song called Sura Yako, which has been playing everywhere.

And I guess it's the number one's wedding song of the year, right? Like Zonto, it has this dance. You can go check it out online, learn how to do the dance. So I was learning how to do the dance on the dance floor, making me fool of myself, as I do. Good man. And what I'd like to do is take a listen to this. hit to kick us off, get us moving. And Nate, I want to know what you're hearing. What do you think DJs are going to be pulling from from this sort of sound? Cool. I'm excited. Let's give this

a spin. I feel like this song is a great place to start off because in many ways, it's clearly a Kenyan pop song. And in other ways, I feel like it's drawing from so many other traditions. Yeah. Most obviously, we're listening to a song in Suhili that is using more local rhythms. Right. What are you hearing which sounds maybe uniquely Kenyan? am by no means an expert in Kenyan music, but I can definitely pick out some elements of this song that seem pretty salient. Right. What sounds familiar?

What sounds new? Off the bat, the syncopation of the drums totally grabs your ears and grabs your hips, too. I mean, this is a great dance floor song. Yeah, this is a far cry from some of the really straightforward four on the floor beats that we've listened to on this very podcast. This is like obscuring the downbeat and... Yeah, what does that mean? So we're obscuring the downbeat.

We're hearing different kinds of rhythms. What is that? The downbeat is the first beat of a measure. So if we're going one, two, three, four, one. You put an emphasis on that one. Here we take it off of that. In fact, the beat kind of dances around one because it goes, cha-cha, cha-cha, cha-cha, cha-cha.

So it's like avoiding instead of hearing that one, you're hearing the offbeat one. Tata. Yeah. Tata. Tata. Nice. Yeah.

So we're definitely different style rhythm. I think another element that sounds distinctly African to my ears are those guitars that are present throughout the song. And I think what's so distinctive about it to our ears is that 99% of the time we hear a guitar in pop music, it's being strummed. Right. Someone's playing chords on an acoustic and electric guitar, occasionally a lead line. Right.

But here, the guitar is only playing. these beautiful limpid lead lines that just both provide melodies of their own and stand as counter melodies to the vocalists. But there's other stuff on there which feels much more Western. There's a moment towards the end where these very American gospel style harmonies come in. It sounds a lot like American R&B to my ears. Yeah, I feel like especially the harmony sound R&B, maybe the, the, the, the, rhythm of the vocal sounds like it's adopting that that da-da-da-da-da-d-d-d-d-d-d-rhythm that you were talking about. Yeah.

But I feel like there was some even more flagrant references to just straight dance floor DJ music here. I don't know if you heard it, but there was this moment where there's this huge synth pad that comes in. Oh, yeah. That's totally a diplo move. So hearing you talk about what's on the Kenyan radio dial actually makes me realize that while I might think that American pop music has some sort of homogenous core, in fact, it's incredibly diverse. And anyone coming to America would turn on the radio and hear different sounds. And any time you go to the club, you're going to move from straight ahead pop music to hip hop to probably some Latin music. music.

Absolutely. Yeah. I feel like the music that I'm hearing on the radio and in the club here is not that much different from what I'm hearing in Los Angeles, right? Totally. Maybe there's a little, there's like not as many country stations. But there's definitely a lot of influence and cross pollination between genres that are all, that are all touching each other.

Yeah. I'm curious, like, why is this happening now? Because I don't think that this has always been the case for pop music. No, no. I think you're right. If you go back not too far in the past, like 1965, the Beatles rubber soul, that was the first time that anyone, or at least 95% of the Western population, had ever heard a sitar being played in their life. Which is the Indian stringed instrument with that, with a buzzing, sympathetic strings all over the Beatles music in the mid-60s. Yeah, exactly. This was like a seminal moment, Norwegian wood, George Harrison.

Had bought a sitar a few weeks ago. It was in the corner of the studio. He said, oh, maybe I'll try playing this. People go, what is that sound? It was totally foreign to them. So that was then. That was then. Meanwhile, fast forward to Justin, something like Justin Timberlakes, what goes around.

Massive pop smash begins with the sound of this Middle Eastern instrument called the Ood. Right. And I don't think anybody even blinked an eye that there were a, an ood in the background of Justin Timberlade's music. No, because what's changed? We live now in a world where these national borders are so relatively porous and sounds seem to travel so freely that I would be surprised if there's any sound that we haven't really been exposed to.

Right. Now that every sound is infinitely available, we have to navigate the choices of what we produce and consume? How do we negotiate our identity as a member of a nation or region and as a member of an international musical community? Right, absolutely. Modern pop music

is even faster. It's grabbing bits and pieces of different sounds such that the lines of Europe, hop, hip-hop, reggae, pop, they're all breaking down. Right. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions.

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That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. So I had the awesome opportunity to talk to one of the best bands from Kenya. Just a band. Yes. Is breaking all traditional boundaries of genre. They are a self-proclaimed

to do-it-yourself band that records, produces their own music, and they even make their own music videos and animations to support it. So they're a powerhouse. Yeah. And they were titled with having the first viral video out of Africa. What's interesting about their music is that it feels totally cosmopolitan, right? There's as much hip-hop and daft punk as there is Congolese guitar and Kenyan drumming. So I had the chance to sit down with Blinky Bill, who is the leader of the band. Leedsinger also plays guitar and produces. And we sat down in a catar. And we sat down in a catar. in Nairobi just a few days ago to talk about his music and what it's like to negotiate those differences, genre, and identity.

I thought that she said that you did not want me. So why did you come to the dance flow? Now I am the life of the party. What? Did you lose your mind? Testing, testing one, two. No, it's too hot. It's too hot.

Oh, damn. We just, our last episode was on Mark Ronson. I really like him. Charlie and Blinky Bill were meeting at a cafe, a crowded cafe in Nairobi, so that's why there's so much background noise in the interview. It was actually reading this, there's this blog, some big UK firm. It's like 2015 is the year. The African music changes UK dance music.

Yeah, I saw that. One of the things was that African music. You guys are going to hear much more African music. So my question to you is what elements of the... sound would you expect to hear? Like, the most the drum is the most fundamental

unit of African music. And that's what moves people, I guess. It's like the rhythm and then how it's put together. A lot of times one of the challenges African music has had is that

the production, like the ideas were very strong, but the production quality might not have been. You don't have to go to a studio anymore. No, your laptop. You have your laptop. And that's across it, like, all over the world. People are, someone can try and can make beats on their laptop.

And because the playing ground has been leveled and the technology has become better. So it means that when you get a hot record from Africa and the production quality is really good, like there's no reason for you to not play it. Right. Because it's as good as music for manual else. So that's one of the things. that I think is going to be a game changing. What other kinds of sounds do you think are characteristic

and really quickly easily make that transition? Again, we are using the same synthesizers, but the way we use them is different. I remember I was playing one of the new songs I'm walking, and I got a bass that sounds like Jay Diller, because I'm such a fun. But then I use it. as an instrument to accentuate the drum.

The way the bass sounds is also as rhythmic and adds to the kick and the snare. Yeah. So it just plays off of it. And a lot of music that I've listened to from South Africa, which is a huge dance music powerhouse. Right. And Nigeria is the same.

They're using synthesizers, they're using keyboards, but the rhythms that we're using is very different from how music from the States or for the UK would sound. I wrote a letter but you never ever see it I made a promise that you never ever know I think about you but you never ever know this we might be better but you probably okay yeah

I'm here again falling in love probably for lovers which is an amazing tune. I love the song. It has a guitar line which sounds like it's sort of pulling from high life music.

I think for most American or Western listeners this sounds more African but what I thought was really cool about the tune is the core progression is totally non-traditional. It opens up with this rose. Yeah, the core progression is interesting

but it's not too complicated. It loops throughout this. Yeah, so you get used to it. Yeah. So it makes it much more easier to consume as opposed to having a lot of chord changes. You would never hear traditional Kenyan music. Where does that kind of stuff draw from? It's mostly how we've grown up.

I'd listen to Michael Jackson growing up as a kid, but then my dad used to play a lot of Congolese music. And a lot of the music from Congo, which is heavy on the guitars. a lot of Kenyan music, old school Kenyan music as well, is pretty guitar-held. And so you take from all these words and come up with something that is how you see it. I'm curious in your writing process how much you think about taking something which is really compelling for your ear, but then making sure that everybody over here is going to want to dance to it all my life. That's always one of the trickiest things because a lot of the people who have, who have done,

into just a band from other countries. It's because the sound is different, but it's not overly different. I hear you're going to have the four to the floor, right? But then you're going to have synthesizers in the background that are emphasizing other rhythms, and usually offbeat. So, like, it's almost easy to get into it.

Right. But there's a ton of African music that will just a little bit more time. and the way things are going will find its way to the dance influence easily. So it's almost like my influences, you'd expect that they would be African for some reason, but they don't need to be

because the world doesn't operate like that. I have African influence, but I also have a lot of influences like West Montgomery. Missy Elliott, Duffington, who had a huge role and how I see me how listen how nice I was a good time

I was listening to puff and puff in the outro you do this arpeggiated synth very similar or like daft punk's aerodynamic yeah

they are a huge influence they are almost the godfathers of modern dance music if you think about it And they gave birth to this thing And it's morphed to something That they're not happy with

So that's why their last album It sounded so different from From everything else It's a departure from the Tweetoo-choo-ch-too-ch-twee-ch-ch-twee-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. Because it's like, like, everyone's making music That sounds like that music right now Right, right now.

So they wanted to make it a bit more funky and more human. In as much as I really like it, like I've grown up with hip-hop. And that's, I want to figure out a way to incorporate hip-hop and dance music and pop music into something as opposed to trying to fit myself into boots that are too big for me. Yeah. Yeah. I love this song probably for lovers in their video, which is this fan video with performances from Japan, from London, from all.

over Africa, clearly they have a totally international fan base. And it got me thinking about, well, how are these different people finding music? Well, YouTube, I think, as this video is, you know, evidence of, it's definitely one way that an international community can sort of exchange and explore music together. But not every channel that I typically use can I find. True. So, like, this song, South Day Soul, it's not on iTunes. It's not on Spotify.

No. Wow. What's the answer? Where do you get? Where do you access this music? The way that music is found, consumed, and distributed in Africa looks very different than it looks in the United States. Yeah. So what I learn is that people are getting a music in very different ways, whether it's from their mobile phone, downloading it from their mobile operator, or obviously finding music in markets from basically pirated CDs. Right. But there's also unique streaming services built just for African music. I had the opportunity to sit down with a friend of mine, this guy Jeff, who created a music service called Wabbe. Think about it as like Spotify for African music. Okay.

Is that okay? That's fine. Cool. Can you tell me about what Wabi is, what it does? So Wabé essentially is an audio market for African content. It's purely Afrocentric in that all the content that you find on Wabwe, be the podcast, be it an audio book, be it a song. It's purely from Africa. Why do you think there's a need for uniquely African content?

So right now, you'd find that there's a lot of content out there. But there's no one who has taken the time to sort of curate and put this content in an organized manner. So I might have a song that I loved in the 80s, but where do I look for it? Yes, I'll go to YouTube. but it's randomly and there's something something the name is off you know we don't know who uploaded the content

so as much as you know we're trying to distribute content it's more it's also a way of arranging this audio content what does the record label world look like here it's really messed up in that you find the musician is the producer he's the marketer he's everything

he's the label right earlier I was speaking with Blinky Bill from just the band and they are sort of a self-proclaimed do-it-yourself band and they literally do everything they do everything i know plenty very well and uh and he's a good example of what i'm trying to say like you find a band that does everything from scratch everything for themselves even distribution are people still pirating CDs or is that sort of is that over there's been less pirating of canon content so like you can go to someone on the streets who sell like musical CDs

He might have Jay-Z, Beyonce, counterfeit, but you'll not find any Kenyan music. Why is that? It's highly illegal. Like, you'll be in big trouble if you found pirated in Kenyan content. But people don't mind you, pirate Western content. And are people here using other more Western-centric streaming services? Well, for platforms like Spotify and the rest, they're not available for this region. Why that is?

I don't think they think the market is big enough for them. plus we have the disadvantage of not having constant good bandwidth people see the value of spending time on Facebook but to listen to music are most people who rather own it

You guys help people own it We do streaming and purchasing I wonder to what extent people are pirating Western music because it's just not available I think people are more inclined to buying stuff they connect to

because we have not had anyone complain about the price. It's more about how do you make the buying process more streamlined. So I think you guys are sort of at the cutting edge. Yeah, I think it's an angle we need to really push at. I really hope to see that this thing goes huge

and that I think what's very compelling about what you're doing is solving that hard problem of compiling that content which previously has been super fragmented. It makes it so much harder for the listener to find. Hopefully, eventually these larger companies start paying attention and saying,

hey, if I want to get that content, eventually they're going to have to look at Wabé. It's a really hard not to crack, but I think we'll get there. So given the commercial and technological innovations of services like Wabé and the global ambitions and capabilities of musicians like Blinky Bill and Just a Band,

I think we're living in a moment of international music like never before. Yeah, absolutely. Going back to the predictions of the blogs, it's no doubt that we're going to hear more interesting rhythmic music that's pulling for more traditions. I would like to see more of this melodic

guitar playing coming out. Totally. And I really suspect, listen to your SoundCloud playlist. We're going to hear more and more crossbreeding of music across international boundaries and across genres. And it's probably going to be coming from a lot of the DJ world.

Next time on Switched on Pop, we're going to take a look at another burgeoning genre of music. Acapella. From a very different source. What was once the past time of Preppy College Kids has gone utterly mainstream. That's right. We will be looking at Acapella as it's moved from the college dorm room onto YouTube and now this year at the Grammys. Yes. If you like what you heard, you can find us on iTunes, on SoundCloud, Stitcher Radio, or, as always, switchedonpop.com.

I'm Charlie Harding. And I'm Nate Sloan. Thanks for listening. Mbbaugh, watcha that you know mait cavaliers who me say, she's mischis, oh. Papa and Mama, Wally me, Cusia, Ewe.