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“This site is about the scenes and the people in rap, ragga and reggae in three African capital cities as it was in 1997.” :: an ethnomusicological perspective
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“Dancehall bytes from Jamaica and across the Globe … directly to your cellphone or other Internet-enabled mobile device”
audiyoga ::
Nice that you’re taking an interest in East African music recently. I definitely appreciate these links and things.
May I ask, though, why so much genge? I always thought that was the most boringly happy-go-lucky pop of the genres in the region, much preferring Bongo Flava (although that’s becoming very formulaic), takeu and Ugandan ragga. I guess on occasion genge feels like East Africa’s soca, but it’s not as inventive or fun to my ears.
Hey Birdseed, I actually don’t know all that much about genge. I only recently caught on to the term by watching “Hip-hop Colony,” an excellent documentary on Kenyan hip-hop by Michael Wanguhu. In the film, there are a couple of artists who bemoan the fact that Kenyan hip-hop is only known (in Kenya) as “local” whereas S.Africa has “kwaito” and Tanzania has “bongo,” so they propose “genge” as a way to distinguish what they’re doing. From the film, there’s no suggestion that genge is marked sonically as different from hip-hop, though I suppose the stuff that most engages with other local musical styles tends to be labeled that way. If that’s the case, I suspect that genge and bongo flava have similar soft spots for r&b, dancehall, and other “happy-go-lucky” pop. But, again, I don’t know enough about it to generalize.
I just taught a unit on hip-hop in Kenya and Tanzania, which is why I went digging in these directions. Any other recs appreciated. Didn’t have the time to scour EastAfricaTube, but I’m sure that has loads of stuff on it.