Title of a piece by French rapper Youssoupha, subject of a BBC documentary, a genre of music very popular during the last New Year’s Eve, the amapiano is above all a cultural movement born in South Africa. “Amapiano” means “piano” in the Zulu language, because jazz chords are very present there; the layers of synths airy as possible leave hovering for a moment before being bludgeoned by very fat bass lines, themselves shaken by a drum kick.
It is on these percussive moments that the South African DJs then leave their turntables to dance in front of the public, who then resume in a synchronized way their gestures, their dance steps often very simple but repeated ad infinitum: the balega, inspired by Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, mouths ready to whistle, wrists joined to mimic an arrest, a wave with several bodies.
The amapiano arrived in France recently. Nadim Makhlouf, the organizer of the first French festival dedicated to new African scenes, Pépéléfestin Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis), in July 2021, remembers: “During the first confinement, DJs were talking to me about music whose name I had trouble pronouncing. It was spreading fast on social media. This movement came just after the revival of Afrobeat, after the successes of Burna Boy or Wizkid. It was super fresh, new and it came from Africa. »
“In the evening, when you play amapiano, it instantly gives a very positive vibe. The piano chords are very gospel and I have the impression of hearing the voice of my ancestors. » Anaïs B, DJ
South Africa has always been at the forefront of electronic music, especially house music, whose beat is reminiscent of certain traditional Zulu and Xhosa rhythms. At the end of the 1990s, DJs and producers offered a first version, the kwaito, then another, the gqom, from the Kwazulu-Natal region. The amapiano is the one that dominates today.
The Parisian Anaïs B, organizer of the Spiritual Gangsta evenings, was one of the first DJs to broadcast it in France, offering her community, which has more than 50,000 members, a mix of this African dance from 2020. She heard the first sounds a few years earlier in the streets of Johannesburg, the economic capital of the country. She follows her friends to the open-air restaurants where, while the hosts bustle around traditional barbecues, the DJs play the local house, which takes up Zulu polyphony, the whistles of the dancers of Soweto, the war songs of the anti-demonstrations. – apartheid of the 1980s.
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