Shangaan Electro is a weird form of speed electro from Limpopo province, South Africa. “Shangaan is fast. While others play at 110, we are at 180, 182, 183. And when you hear those marimba beats and that live guitar through the keyboard, you know it’s Shangaan” says Nozinja, producer, engineer and composer of the Shangaan scene.
Shangaan is basically dance music – Honest Jon’s defined it New Wave Dance Music: “shangaan dancers, they dance, they can go on for almost an hour with that speed, without getting tired. When you see them dance you feel like they have got no bones. It’s similar to the Zulus, but faster and we put a lot of style inside. There’s disco in there, we use Pantsula moves.”
I asked a couple of questions to Mark Ainley, who curated the release with Mark Ernestus.
Why this image on the cover? Where does it come from?
Our cover image is a treatment of an image from the sleeve of a Tshetsha Boys cassette. This is how the Boys appear in performance.
Could Shangaan be considered a sort of contemporary form of soundsystem aesthetic? If so, how does it relate with the urban and social sphere in South Africa?
The music derives from outdoor dances, sure, and its character has to do with a set of ambivalent urban-rural affinities. (You can see the same dynamic in its musical influences and commercial artwork.) It’s up to you to determine a theory of its aesthetics etc.*
How did you collect the videos? Are they a sort of video clips?
The videos on our site were made by the same SA studio as the music (to help sales). There are many examples on YouTube, some with more than half a million viewings.
*It’s not my point to determine a theory, I’m just visually obsessed by the relationship between outdoor/yard and social/ritual/music practices, diffused via soundsystems culture. In this sense I can see a common aesthetic, such as between jamaican urban sounds and colombian picòs, or between Shangaan videos and this commercial indian condom advertisment.
