Amapiano’s Second Wave: How innovations emerge from Black South African culture

When he was 15, a friend he rapped with gave Kiddyondebeat FL Studio, and he started building beats for his rap group. When you listen to production mixes like ‘Mnandi Mculo’, it’s hard to believe he hasn’t had any formal music education. “Most of this stuff I learned by myself. If I don’t understand something I just go to YouTube for reference,” he tells me. His friend taught him to play piano using only the black keys (which together form the pentatonic scale) and he took it from there.

After apartheid ended in 1994, Black South Africans were granted freedom to move between physical spaces. But material conditions have not improved dramatically for many, and the country is still one of the most unequal in the world. Economic security and educational attainment are largely determined by family background. Social mobility, at best, advances slowly and tenuously over generations.

“There’s not a lot of jobs out there, there’s not a lot of access to anything,” Golden Lady tells me. She moved from South Africa to the UK as a teenager. As amapiano has become popular across the world, she’s concerned its youngest and least privileged innovators are being left out of the story. Many of these producers are either under- or unemployed. “They choose music and they stick with it, and they just produce, produce, produce. Because that’s something you can do on your own time, it’s not like you have to go apply somewhere and be accepted or anything like that.”

“When I ask these people, ‘how did you get into music?’,” she says, “I’ve come to understand that it’s when they realise that music is the easiest or fastest way they can put bread on the table. And when I say ‘bread on the table’ I mean actual bread on the table. That little 15 or 20 rand for bread, where they had nothing, nothing – that’s why they’ve stuck by music.”

There is a strong gifting culture in South Africa, which arises from township poverty. Golden Lady credits “ubuntu,” the Southern African concept of common humanity and community. “Whatever little we have,” she says, “we share.” In the days of apartheid, “most Black South Africans were poor and had nothing. They would share what they had to try and bring the whole community together.”

This culture lives on in townships post-apartheid. It’s what allows new genres to thrive in places where most people live below the poverty-line. The open availability of amapiano sample packs – in which sounds are curated from other genres like EDM, gqom and house – have enabled its rapid growth. “I don’t even know who makes them or where they come from,” Kiddyondebeat tells me, “it’s just a matter of getting my hands on them. I get them through someone, someone else got them through someone. It’s a matter of sharing, we just pass them around.”