This Music, Spring Clean, Vicious Track
In this issue of 2020MG, we recommend talking about music without describing it, bebop for Spring, and some electronic dance music from South Africa.
Recommendation: The Verve - “This is Music”
I was making an argument about music recently, and my interlocutor pointed out that I didn’t really describe what the music sounded like. This was a legitimate and constructive point, as doing so would have made my argument more substantive, but nonetheless, my involuntary first thought was: well, it sounds like music. Which shortly became a new intrusive thought for me. This music sounds like music. It feels good to think and say. There is a rhythm to it, and it can apply to any music, and to different parts of music. For example a drum or a sound not recognizable as anything besides itself.
I generally find myself hesitating to write about what music sounds like, even though I know there are good reasons for undertaking the task. I used to blog about music for money and the grind of constantly describing what music sounded like made me not want to describe what music sounded like anymore. I want to say that the sound of music is self-evident but I know it’s not, because there are different models of music, music is historical, and music benefits when there is sharp competition among musicians and critics over what music sounds like.
I remember reading a Pitchfork review of Coachella 2008 in high school. The author said something along the lines of: “It was funny when The Verve announced that their next song was called ‘This is Music’ because, yes, obviously it’s music.” This still makes me laugh. But sometimes it’s not so obvious.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Charlie Parker - “April in Paris”
I’m totally cooked this week. Beyond collecting many notes (and countless texts and private diatribes) on the David Lang the wealth of nations performance I attended a couple of weeks ago, I started an intensive 200 hour yoga teacher training program this past week and my brain is too loaded to sort through the 8 pages of loose critique I’ve collected. I’ve been inspired by the broad yoga literature’s embodied and philosophical capacities to address some of the musical and cultural concerns I often write about. In particular, I’m thinking about some key differences in the “advanced” practices of yoga and the “advanced” practices of the American post-avant-garde and critical repertoires (which, I suppose, is probably my own most “advanced” practice).
I find I am deeply preoccupied with finding ways to ground the discourses that animate our critical activity in this cultural space, when the methods, the economics and politics all feel quite embattled (within and amongst themselves). This is a short way of saying, the question of synthesizing some insights about all of this has been an inspiring distraction as I’ve anticipated bringing the hammer (and sickle, perhaps) down on David Lang. That’s a longer term line of thinking as far as my writing on 2020MG is concerned, but one which I’ll attend to with regard to the wealth of nations very soon.
In the meantime (and with my apologies to any member of the mob who may have assembled this week awaiting justice against the administrative class of the post-minimalist elite) I recommend something appropriate to the moment of Spring - somewhere between the deep-historical and transcendent Hindustani classical music and perverse new music: Charlie Parker’s 1957, Verve Records album, “April in Paris.”
Why am I recommending this? In a similar, aspirational spirit as I recommended Burt Bacharach’s “Living Together” last week, there’s a warmth and virtuosity to this music that is not just purely musical - it speaks to a kind of cultural virtuosity and coherence that feels practically ancient at this point. This is not to over-romanticize a music or time in American history that was extremely complex in its own right, but is at least to recognize a convergence of art and commerce (a foundational alliance - like it, or not - at the root of our western music epistemologies, which I have much more to say on in my analysis of David Lang, and company).
This record is far from radical in the bebop canon, but Parker’s characteristic sense of line, his tonal and rhythmic intensities, applied to the romantic songs of 1930’s high musical theatre, with accompanying string arrangements by Jimmy Carroll, resonate with the Ellingtonian style narrative of a sort of American classical music. And given the wide aperture I’ve been listening through the last couple of weeks, I find it both conceptually comforting, and sonically pleasing to hear something that is masterful, commercial, unpedantic, deep and secure with its domain of depth, and of the culture in which it succeeded and proliferated its softer forms of innovation and refined sensibilities.
Treat yourself to some soft-serve. I’ll be back, along with some of my more immediate critical grievances next week.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Chongo De Flavour - “Have Fun” / Citykingrsa, Nevrr49, Jay Music, Shera The DJ - “Checkmate”
I had to slam on the brakes a few weeks back after coming across a video via Nyege Nyege Tapes of Mapanta artist Serokolo No. 7. In the clip, a group of dancers are assembled around a sound system in Ga Skhukhune, Limpopo South Africa, as an intense rhythm heaves itself forward. A crowd stomps in sequence. The video is such a clear expression of the possibility of music as a specific form that has a place, purpose, and power shaped directly by its community—its participants being artists, and its artists, participants. This has obviously happened throughout music history; but, it still feels special to hear such continuity within subgeneres of electronic music, forged by consumer technology, software, and sample packs. Mapanta is a village-rooted electronic form from Ga Skhukhune long tied to weddings, gatherings, and everyday life. Built in shared software environments (FL studio, shared sample packs) and carried through local sound systems, Mapanta moves between Shangaan rhythms and log-drum pressure with vocals in the Sepedi language. Commenting on Nyege Nyege’s video on IG was Detroit Drexciya-affiliate DJ Stingray, stating simply “Vicious track.”
This video sent me down a spiral. I ended up careening through hundreds of semi-viral TikTok videos of various dances, track-snippets, and genres of South African electronic music. Such a direct, feed-driven, two-hour sesh illuminated a thread running through various established and emergent genres—how Bacardi House, Gqom, Maptana, Amapiano, and more have evolved over the last 20+ years. In the mid 2000s, the sounds of Bacardi House and Mapantsula established very raw, functional rhythmic loops that spawned dance crews and local scenes. The genre popularized martial military-style snares, irregular synth sounds, and call-and-response vocals. In the 2010s, via Durban, Gqom emerged as a darker, minimalist, bass-heavy sound (often exchanged through WhatsApp group chats) that centralized the log-drum with little harmonic or melodic content, displaying a deep percussive sound. Amapiano, emerging in the townships of Gauteng, exploded as a global sensation of South African music—expanding on Gqom’s rhythmic pulses but reintroducing melody and harmony in the bass register, creating a highly stylized, and hybrid vision of this sound continuum.
Within this progression, I’m recommending two artists I found while surfing the feed who expand on these sounds. Together, they form (at least to my outsider ears) a snapshot on how these genres are re-hybridizing through their form and function, and physical and online distribution, in 2026. Chongo De Flavour’s “Have Fun,” carries the dance culture of Bacardi and Maptana. A stark, untreated piano melody is paired with a searing drumloop—as Chongo delivers a rapturous vocal performance leaping over the continuous rhythm. There are literally hundreds of videos of Chongo—probably in his late teens or early twenties—lipsyncing his verse with hand motions and emotes. On the other side, is producer Citykingrsa’s “Checkmate,” a moody amapiano cut with a foreboding, chant-like quality that accompanies chill dance choreo—but also creeped-out videos of people competing to make the weirdest facial gestures synced completely in time with the track’s off-kilter stomp. I love amapiano—and have been hooked with the log-drum sound since my friend Xander Seren first showed me Teno Afrika’s “Amapiano Selections” years ago. With “Checkmate,” an EDM and dubstep tinge (and stock electricity sound foley) deepen the aurafarming mood of the genre’s groove.
Interestingly enough, both “Have Fun” and “Checkmate” seem to be constantly re-uploaded under various formats and guises online—their virality being the focus rather than a consolidated link, stream, video, or profile to reference. They’ve clearly been distributed with TikTok and social media in mind, cut and re-edited to spawn and circulate, rather than farm clicks to one source. It’s about the pure circulation of the music, not the reestablishment of the profile.
A few years back, I attended Mutek Festival in Montreal and sat in on a talk by archivist and artist G L O W Z I, who discussed the virality and distribution of amapiano as being a result of South Africa’s network of minibus taxis as musical, social environments. The drivers play music loudly throughout their routes, and are often sponsored by producers and collectives to play specific songs exclusively—blowing up in physical space before being released through internet distribution channels. A hit song is “the one the taxis are playing this week”—with this physical music distribution becoming an economic, communicative, cybernetic exchange between musicians and the means of transportation. With these forms of South African electronic music, the flow of communication co-creates thriving, and varied new forms of music. It’s awesome and I recommend all of it.
—Nick James Scavo