"See I like Beyoncé, but she dey with Jigga / I like Nicki, her yansh is bigger..." // D'BANJ - OLIVER TWIST // afrobeats in the charts

http://db8nv44adlng0.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Empire-State-of-Mind-album-art.jpeg

based on the singles this album is shaping up to be really good! wizkid, banky w & scales

love everything about this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7_bpL4zSLw&feature=share

yeah that one's a belter

rhythmically fairly unique from what i've found too

(save el's 'kaalu' maybe-ish)

yeah, you mean with those 4x4 kicks coming in and out?

I am also pretty in awe of how stylish these dudes look tbh.

i love that neptizzle mix! what are the chances we can get marcus mixing afrobeats? he would be killing it.

"obuu mo" is absolutely my shit.

at the risk of being thick, what defines this "scene"? Like, what distinguishes "afrobeats" from other stuff? I don't want to be the genre police, I'm enjoying it, but it just feels like uk-funky influenced house?

rhythmically fairly unique from what i've found too

really?

the neptizzle mix just keeps on giving:

http://youtu.be/AktSWz4Gowg

i've gotta say i'm looking up these tracks from the neptizzle mix on youtube and i'm kind of astounded. every song i've looked up seems to be single with an HD video. it's like uk funky never died just moved to ghana and got popular! is this stuff actually influnced by the uk funky scene or it just happens to sound similar? so much of this stuff would fit perfectnly into a golden age marcus set.

i love that neptizzle mix! what are the chances we can get marcus mixing afrobeats? he would be killing it.

― hardhouse banter (tpp), Thursday, 21 June 2012 22:20 (24 minutes ago) Bookmark

ya tell me about it, i tried realising this big vision of a mix i had in my head but it turns out the required mak10/maximum type ninja skillz do not come easily to the relative traktor n00b :(

i mean none of the afro dj's i've heard have been actively bad exactly but idk it could just be so much more in the right hands

Despite the obvious similarities, I think its easy to overstate the UK Funky connection tbh.

As for DJing, Neptizzle seems pretty tight, Abrantee not at all. How much does it really matter though? Slapping the tunes on dancehall style seems enough for me.

yeah you could make a vague case for cross-pollination i suppose (uk funky djs were touring africa for a while right) but i'm firmly seeing it as a natural indigenous mutation of the usual hiplife via the azonto "dance" injecting the speed and purpose (sometimes a new name is all it takes) to make it dancehally

but i do agree a lot of the ghanaian stuff can be startlingly funky-esque. like i give world music tourism brutally short shrift and i feel as if this stuff has naturally come to me and my londoncentricism (rather than me towards it)

dancehall djing isn't "slapping the tunes on"!! ur bang out of order

cool ur boots man, I just meant short transitions rather than long mixes. Obv selection is key!

I think this thread has been mainly azonto so far so lets have some naija

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oa5KVZtAnU

right well yeah but even within short transitions you see the difference i'm making between neptizzle and co riffing through the tracks quickly and a then potential mak 10 grime style intensity bringing the best out of the material

seen

what pirates are playing this stuff incidentally. Maybe there is already some ninja djs out there playing this stuff we don't know about yet?

actually, this guy Wavy J is a good dj. Not Mak 10 levels or owt, but his AFROBEAST mixtapes are well mixed. Other than Abrantee and Neptizzle I haven't heard any other afrobeat djs tbh.

http://soundcloud.com/wavyj

i know its quite old, but did anyone see this horrible, mean-spirited and utterly stupid article in the Voice?
http://www.voice-online.co.uk/article/step-back-afrobeatreggae-still-rules

ugh^

nice video this but the second track of her EP is better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h-ptJ-nZ7g

ut i do agree a lot of the ghanaian stuff can be startlingly funky-esque. like i give world music tourism brutally short shrift and i feel as if this stuff has naturally come to me and my londoncentricism (rather than me towards it)

Yeah this makes sense. Like this is a total assumption and possibly way off-piste but I'd guess a fair proportion of these guys come from relatively wealthy backgrounds and will have spent time in London including going to clubs and absorbing music from over here, including funky.

I mean that's not even taking into account the sort of cross-pollination you get from Youtube etc. Dunno about the Ghanaian artists but Don Jazzy, who's produced a shitton of Naija stuff has been living in London for a decade.

hadnt seen that voice article but i feel like that's not the first time i've come across butthurt jamaicans wait let me rephrase that detected a resentful antipathy from that side

basically a belated realisation of how faddishness works after years of telling themselves all manner of nice things to soothe why the early to mid 00s limelight went away. insert your own proud wifebeaten tart with a heart analogy

again i think it's partly a misapprehension born of sometimes inadequate, sometimes novelty-ish presentation; you never know how serious robbo ranx is with this stuff (can be slyly very cutting in the margins of geniality) but recently on his show he'd been pressganged into having (the pleasantly pointlessly avuncular) dj edu guesting as part of 1xtra afrobeats week and it was a crying shame listening to edu's miserable attempts to convince robbo with the most uninteresting blatantly dancehall-derived stuff, like dudes speaking in ja patois and so on, everything to back up the suspicion of afro as shonky facsimile dancehall. a revelatory opportunity missed

not that it particularly matters what robbo thinks of course. the most interesting thing is that edu was convinced dancehall was sounding more like afro! (with particular reference to konshens 'stop sign/gyal a bubble part 2' iirc). oh how you could hear robbo silently bristle at that

really hating the way that daytime R1 DJ's seem to be treating Robbo Ranx and this track as some laughable onetime breakout.

from the observer today - 'The impossibly infectious "Oliver Twist" was a calculated attempt to crack the market in the UK. "I thought we could do with a sort of funky house sound. I thought: 'It's not like the music is that different from the music we listen to here.'"'

The EL album is fantastic.

killer track from last year i just came across on youtube. Amanda's getting it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6WvHVHkM7I

plenty of freshness on this new Selecta Maestro mix

http://soundcloud.com/selectamaestro83/afrobeats-workout-session-vol

still haven't caught up with all the youtubes in this thread because i can't watch youtube any more on this laptop but here are a couple of amazing songs that are new to me that were played at the afrobeats somerset house show at the weekend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5u1w-tUxaM

"save the drama for your baby mama"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXgkI7bRFHo

mista silva has an ep on itunes called full vim, i recommend it

oh wait apparently "kele kele" was on that abrantee mix i've played about 50 times, had never noticed it before. see how great songs stand out so much more in isolation

this is on this weekend also:

http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/music/gigs-contemporary/tickets/the-ultimate-afrobeats-utopia-66326

finally on YouTube, the hottest bangingest track off EL's "Something ELse" album: Egbee Mli.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfoZT7WFW9I

EL is a brilliant producer, I love the synths on that one above, banging beat, too!

So many good productions on the E.L. album, it's a bit more fake-dancehall but I adore "Mame Wossop".

e.l is pretty good but making a big deal of him is v much like saying your fave funky producer is roska

LOL what a thing to say.

The new Roska album is good actually! Poor dude, he finally does something that might please the audience who initially threatened to embrace him, but they've stopped listening.

Re azonto etc. I'm not really in a position to think in terms of "fave producer" yet anyway.

new neptizzle mixtape!
http://mixtapemadness.co.uk/DJneptizzle/UltimateAfrobeats2012/552

and just realised that his weekly shows are archived here
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/24197216

My favourite producer is whoever made that Amanda riddim. Zigi himself? Or maybe Richie? Haven't been able to find out.

Here's the new remix of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lBPusVgJnU

according to google it is richie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richie_Mensah

well it doesn't mention that song on that page, but yeah i suppose it must be him.

Talking producers, I really rate Ball J who produced Lapaz Toyota for Guru.

This is like Lapaz Toyota part two
Guru - Karaoke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDJvbe_RpDQ

Obour ft. Mugeez - One people
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lBPusVgJnU

Nhyiraba Kojo (ft.Skrew Faze & Ball J)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7R5jMLPk1A

more goodness from him here (Today be Today by Black Cat is cool)
didhttp://www.bigxgh.com/artist/ball-j/

soz, fucked some links up

Obour ft. Mugeez - One people
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfZz5o0dBrc

Ball J produckies
http://www.bigxgh.com/artist/ball-j/

richie does all the production for lynx ents, it was on another page sorry

ball j is by far my favourite, i said already 'lapaz toyota' was my song of the year and 'karaoke' is just as good; him and his nu afrika posse seem particularly comparable to early-to-mid ward 21, the heavy rap influence and slight mad scientist auteur remove from the rest of the azonto mainstream whilst still being popular. guru is great too, love that low slung flow

rate you for putting the work in benny, good stuff

ah yes I thought ward 21 when i heard lapaz toyota too, if only because of the guy with the deep voice!

here's another great Ball J production

Aaah - Anomaba
http://archive.org/details/AnomaBa_AaahDaMusician

would have posted the youtube but the homemade video was just too hideous

"Karaoke" is brilliant!

I find it funny that there's a producer called De-Genius Selections too (dude did Raquel's "Sweetio" and Edem's "Over Again", two of my favourites from the first Neptizzle mix), they're making the dancehall comparisons way too easy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLJ6M-lmrxo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JK0azayEoA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvT4fIUuGQY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4i_SSx-3tA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27ANlCrs6E

Already love "Twaame Lala"... Got some homework from this thread now.

all those are ball j

appietus, gafacci, guiltybeatz, killa beatz, krinkman are other consistently great 233 producers

wow, Ball J ftw then

i know it's been out for months and is top of the charts and is ubiquitous yadda yadda but can i just underline the fact that lapaz toyota is the craziest shit ever?? my god did it blow my head clean off.

that's great, reminds me I meant to post this beautiful azonto tune a while ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWsuzm650qw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iziTfxtaVMM

does anyone write about this stuff in a way that contextualizes it at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiHh2-6jmnU

this jam actually makes me think of

The Ibadan Sound: Jerome Sydenham, Dennis Ferrer etc.

Oops:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiHh2-6jmnU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_Lv7PedBIU

Lil Bucie

this dude Heavy K makes some jams, damn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhD_c9O1L2s

Rolling Afrobeats thread 2014