'This cuts across society': how singeli music went from Tanzania to the world
On a neon-lit jetty overlooking the River Nile, a young Tanzanian DJ called Sisso is playing a bracing barrage of blips, bells and breakneck beats that could blast apart a heart-rate monitor. We are at Nyege Nyege, a pan-African festival in Uganda that curates contemporary club music from across the continent, and it’s the first time so many musicians from Tanzania have made it here. Sisso and his peers have taken a 30-hour bus journey and crossed two borders in order to play at the event. Their sets are being streamed live to the world via Boiler Room.
The music these Swahili speed freaks make is a street-level sound known as singeli. It has been ricocheting around the ghettos circling Dar es Salaam for almost 15 years, with unbridled synth lines, percussion pitchshifted up to alien frequencies and super-speed lyrical flows.
It isn’t as underground now as you might expect. In Tanzania, singeli has become mainstream, like music by Drake or Kendrick Lamar. There is the poppy singeli of artists such as Msaga Sumu and Man Fongo, whose music is slower and more similar to bongo flava, the last big sound to sweep the country. Sisso Records, however, has an uncompromising style, with rapping instead of singing.
The latter has since spread to Europe, championed as one of the most exciting emergent strains of dance music in 2018, thanks to the Sounds of Sisso compilation, released last December. This summer, various singeli stars have played festivals such as Unsound in Poland and at Berlin’s Panorama Bar, and their EP releases have been ramping up. Nyege Nyege co-founder Arlen Dilsizian was struck by singeli’s punk energy – which is not unlike gabba – and says that what sets it apart is its “unrelenting” composition, “mainly relying on highs to drive the music forward rather than bass”. “It’s pretty wild,” he says.
Driving through Dar es Salaam days
later, I hear singeli rippling from motorbike cab and roadside food stalls. Abbas Jazza manages Sisso Records and is also, conveniently, a taxi driver. He takes me to the label’s HQ in the suburb of Mburahati. The snug studio is down an alley, nestled between grey brick houses with corrugated metal roofing. Sisso’s mother and baby live next door. Eight or so artists and producers, including Sisso, Jay Mitta, MCZO, DJ Longo and DJ Bamba Pana, cram in and pass round a bag of crisps. There are young women in the scene, too, including MC Card Reader and MC Memory Card, though they can’t be here because they are still in school.
Sisso, 24, looks sheepish at answering questions, with Jazza translating for everyone, but when he speaks he has the rhetoric of a rap superstar. “This is the new tradition, the new culture of Tanzania,” he says of singeli, pointing to its sponge-like approach to older Tanzanian music. Unlike other previously popular sounds here, singeli has absorbed vernacular styles such as taarab, vanga, mchiriku, sebene and segere, along with hip-hop and South African kwaito.
The relative ease of rudimentary software program Virtual DJ, which is used to cue singeli’s turbo-fast interlocking loops, means that there are hundreds of producers in Dar es Salaam and countless bedroom studios like Sisso’s. Later, around the corner, we visit DJ Duke’s Pamoja Records, where he bangs out nosebleed singeli that makes Squarepusher sound like Dido. Duke and MCZO show me videos of their performances on YouTube at an outdoor venue called Bagamoyo Place, where thousands of teens turn the event into moshing madness.
“It’s the music of the youth,” says producer Mitta, 28. “They like to dance to it, and also many schools get us to DJ if they have a party.”
It’s surprising to imagine singeli soundtracking a school disco when you consider that Sisso and Mitta make music at a melon-twisting 200 to 300 bpm, but the sound was derived from the dance music that was pumped out at weddings and social gatherings in the ghetto. Mitta says singeli’s pace arose from a desire to be different when resources, such as musical instruments, were limited. “We didn’t have ways of making music,” says Mitta. Instead, in the early days, they took the instrumental sections from taarab, a coastal music with Swahili lyrics and an Arabic influence from Zanzibar, then loop and speed them up. They would record MCs – whose lyrics are about street life and issues that affect young Tanzanians – using mobile phones. Bamba Pana says the result is that singeli “feels local, like it’s our music”.
At 32, Makavelli is an elder statesman of the scene, whose guttural voice is often sped up to chipmunk effect in his tunes. Sisso fires up a dizzying tune and Makavelli starts freestyling with MC Sudi, a pop singeli artist. Afterwards, the rapper tells me that their freestyles usually last for 30 minutes during a performance. “I remember once at a Brussels show,” he says, “a mzungu[Swahili slang for “white person”]told me he would choose to go and see me and not Jay-Z. He was impressed with my music.”
Singeli’s freestyles are often socially conscious, sometimes humorous and usually aimed at younger Tanzanians. “I rap about the problems happening in my area,” says MC Muchi, who is 18. But he says he has to defy expectations that he isn’t a good person simply because he is from the hood, so his lyrics are an attempt to be educational, telling other younger people who “are not going to school, not doing any job, they stay in the street where they smoke and are thieves” to try and make something of their lives.
Makavelli adds that singeli “cuts across society” in his homeland – “even the politicians have used this music in their election campaigns”. But despite being such a localised genre, its makers consider it a global prospect, a dance music genre that has the potential to become as ubiquitous as house. “Singeli,” says 19-year-old MCZO, “is for the whole world.”
• The Sounds of Sisso is out now on Nyege Nyege Tapes; Jay Mitta’s next EP will be released on Nyege Nyege Tapes in January.
• This article was amended on 17 December 2018 to remove an incorrect reference to Dar es Salaam as the capital of Tanzania.