Lewisham
No one type of music ever holds London in its grip for long. There are too many competing motives at work for it to be any other way, too many vying histories: rave memories bleeding through the windows of Kiss FM-powered white vans in Friday twilights; soft power guitar relics clogging up the city’s culturally institutionalised spaces; sodcasted road rap staking out territory on top decks and street corners; hegemonic American pop leviathans stalking department store radio and closing time chain bars like pick-up artists in bootcuts and shutter shades. In London, music is made to measure moments – the many billions of them that take place per person in the year or so that any scene or style or genre can justifiably claim to have soundtracked. The era now is one, we’re told, of grime, the second wave music of Skepta and Stormzy and Drake’s dodgy accent; of Jeremy Corbyn proselytising in fields and People Just Do Nothing invading reality like Goldie Lookin Chain for a generation who don’t remember life without contactless. But move around the peripheries of the city for any sustained amount of time and it might surprise you to hear another beat holding sway; one collecting converts and pushing its way out ahead on a swell of diasporic enthusiasm. It’s Afrobeats, not grime, that lords it over these parts of London in 2017. Mista Silva is a South London MC of Ghanaian heritage who’s done more than most to further its cause.
“It’s dominant – I think that’s the truth, really and truly,” he says. “But it’s what the media project that sets the precedent. If you actually come to the ground, you’re gonna find it’s not grime that’s blazing. It’s what’s getting pushed out there on the main front but on the actual ground it’s Afrobeats that’s making a movement right now, and it’s been doing that since 2011, I feel.”
Relentlessly upbeat, club-ready and full of personality and poise while not – generally speaking – getting too deep in terms of lyrical subject matter, the UK Afrobeats scene is largely built upon the efforts of the children and grandchildren of West African immigrants. Drawing influence from the pop styles dominant in countries like Ghana and Nigeria, Afrobeats – alternatively known as Afrowave, Afroswing or Afrobashment – also stirs in inspiration from Western rap and grime, while in terms of vibe it picks up where UK funky left off: melodic, sunlit; masculinity and aggression reined in in favour of unchallenging, compulsive rhythms that fill dance floors with girls, smiles and lust rather than screwfaces and moshing roadmen.
“It’s a sound that will bring joy to you, to your soul,” says Mista Silva, birth name Papa Kwame Amponsa, when asked how he’d describe Afrobeats to someone who’d never heard it before. “If you take it in – no judgement, actually take it in for being music – it will bring joy to you.”
Its euphoric potential hasn’t gone unnoticed by those operating a few tiers above in the pop stratosphere: Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You”, one of the year’s biggest hits, owes an obvious debt to Afrobeats, and when the Suffolk-born singer-songwriter invited scene pioneer and collaborator Fuse ODG to support him at the O2 Arena in June it was one of the biggest hat tips that Afrobeats has received to date. While it’d be a shame if recognition for the sound was limited to applauding megastars for their ability to rip it off, Afrobeats does seem set to replace tropical house as a hi-vis influence on bankable modern pop – a process that would surely cause some kind of trickle down.
If the right artists are given the push they deserve, then Afrobeats can go to that next level,” Mista Silva reckons. “For instance, this year J Hus has charted, and even though they’re saying he’s grime he’s actually from an Afrobeats background – I featured on his first mixtape. Like I said, Afrobeats has a happy vibe, a vibe that everyone can get down to. That’s why I think it just needs a push from significant people to grow.”
J Hus’s circuitous journey to wider appeal isn’t uncommon in London, and is one as well that Amponsa can empathise with. Music moves so quickly in the capital that those with the requisite amounts of talent and discipline often end up working across two or three different scenes before finding the niche that most suits and can bring acclaim. Before he was Mista Silva the UK Afrobeats torchbearer, Amponsa was Mr Silva the UK funky MC. Before that, he was a first-wave grime rapper who went by the name Crafty – an avenue curtailed by his parents when they sent him to live in Ghana for 18 months at the age of 17. (“It was my behaviour, man. Just being in Brockley, growing up, getting into trouble with police… My parents felt the environment wasn’t good for me, so they gave me another look at life, another experience. Shook me.”) When he returned to London, grime had surrendered the threat that made it such an exciting and alien prospect to begin with, so Amponsa started toasting at funky bashments for DJs like Marcus Nasty, Pioneer and Lil Silva. Then the stars aligned and Afrobeats became the logical way forward.
“When I was doing grime in Brockley as a teenager, everyone used to call me ‘the African kid’,” he explains. “West Indians were more dominant in Lewisham at that time and it wasn’t cool to be from Africa – the banter growing up was, ‘Ah, look at you, African batty-scratcher.’ I was prideful back then but when Afrobeats was coming through in 2011, everyone was like, ‘Rah! Let’s take some pride in being African – we’ve got music as well, we’ve got good vibes.’
“People were like, ‘Why don’t you do Afrobeats?’ At first I was sceptical – how can someone from the UK do Afrobeats? But I realised that all this time I’ve been repping it, and when I tried it, it just blew up. For me, it set a trend around London and it started breeding this whole Afrobeats thing we see today. The likes of J Hus, Kojo Funds, etc – all these guys you see now, they’ve been inspired by what we’ve been doing through the years and they’ve been able to take it to another level.”
This is where Afrobeats finds kinship with every other dance scene that London is famous for birthing, from acid house to UK garage, jungle to rave – though it may lack the menace lurking in all of those, at its heart Afrobeats is similarly about identity and rhythm, not just a music to go out and listen to at the weekend but something that starts to shape who you are and the choices you make in life. Amponsa is proud of where he’s from – not just in terms of the African bloodlines that inform his music, but his London roots in Brockley’s Honor Oak Estate. His start with a mic came at the local youth club, when the DJ from grime crew Regal Players would roll through and spin tracks for him and his friends to MC over. He talks with warmth about the formative nights he’d spend at house parties and the days passed playing football on the grounds of Honor Oak crematorium, or hanging around outside Lewisham McDonald’s with kids from “Catford, Brockley, New Cross, Deptford – there was no beef; my generation in Lewisham was together”.
It’s a modern London experience that informs his new mixtape, Out of the Darkness, which is due to arrive in November and later in 2018 his Album Living The Dream: “It’s not just club music; it’s got different vibes. I don’t just wanna give you club bangers, ‘cos after a while you’ll get tired. I wanna give you tunes that you’re gonna always listen to, and that you’re gonna love after time. I’m trying to tell stories. I want Afrobeats to go far, not just be a thing that came and went.”