Clubhouse hosts French discourse on African media going global

Refreshing perspectives on afrobeat-brunches and amapiano heat

This week I spent some time on Clubhouse, the audio-based app advancing social media’s evolution as users seek out unfiltered interactions over hyper-curation. I was quickly exposed to prescient viewpoints on the future of media and entertainment.

Clubhouse is built around “rooms” that host a spectrum of conversations and audiences. In room one, a panel of moderators answers questions about the future of tech and entrepreneurship from a crowd of several hundred driven professionals. In room two, stoners discuss the future of tech and entrepreneurship with other stoners.

Taking place in real time, unable to be heard or accessed again, these conversations are undeniably alluring. Although the room I had joined was only mildly interesting, I found myself wondering what insightful comments and thought-provoking questions I was missing when I closed the app to take a shower. The ability to chat with complete strangers felt refreshing—even more so during the pandemic. Listening to podcasts, at times I have wished it were possible for me to pose a question that had not been asked of that week’s guest, or offer an idea that could further the conversation.

So far my best experience was in a French-speaking room that was discussing the entertainment industry in the Francophone world. A woman (who I’ll refer to as “Ana”) was speaking, so I checked out her profile: spoke four languages, educated at Hopkins and Berkeley Law, worked at Lagos Fashion Week and Microsoft. Have you ever met a polyglot-tech-lawyer? Yeah, me neither.

She posed a question to “Jay”, an actor, producer, activist and pan-African ambassador to Haiti: “What do you think of Netflix’s role in African entertainment?” Possessing only a decent grasp of French, I managed to jot down mostly accurate highlights of their exchange.

“C’est bien que Netflix puisse donner une vraie visibilité à Nigeria,” Jay said, “mais faut faire attention.” Though he positively viewed Netflix providing global visibility to Nigerian entertainment, he urged the room to be vigilant of the firm’s presence, which he argued was a threat to the viability of iROKOtv, the premier licensor and distributor of Nigerian movies online. iROKOtv’s website describes its streaming service as “the most comprehensive look into what it means to be African today.”

Jay sheds light on the larger context of African media’s dissemination. John McDermott, chief Africa correspondent at The Economist, recently cited male Nigerian artists Burna Boy, Davido, and Wizkid whose music last year led charts from Montréal to Melbourne and everywhere in between. Their ascent has led to a growing concern that “overseas audiences will come to think of African popular music as exclusively Nigerian.”

“C’est bien que Netflix puisse donner une vraie visibilité à Nigeria, mais faut faire attention.”

We saw this play out last summer. At brunches in Brooklyn and parties in Palo Alto, the DJs got lazy, and one song became inescapable: Drogba (Joanna) by British artist Afro B, featuring Wizkid. I have a theory that Soulection, the Los Angeles-based music collective, opened the floodgates with its April 13th radio show devoted to west African sounds.

To date the episode has amassed 168,000 plays on SoundCloud alone. Broadcast as crisp spring mornings melted into boozy summer nights, the show introduced masses of DJs, socialites and Internet personalities to the same three songs that probably originated in the same Lagos zip code. Commenting on one of Soulection’s Instagram posts, I wrote I was convinced ever since episode 403 had aired, afrobeats was all over my social media. A dozen people liked my comment, adding credibility to my theory and inflation to my ego.

Although reaching overexposure in some corners of the Internet, the diffusion of afrobeats alludes to a larger cultural renaissance. “African-made content should help update Western views of the continent,” wrote McDermott, citing a March 2018 study of American television that found, in 700,000 hours of shows broadcast that month, only 25 significant storylines about Africa. Even worse, half of these storylines concerned crime. “In 2021, these stereotypes will be increasingly—and belatedly—challenged.”

McDermott convinced me he was edgier than his Harvard diploma led me to suspect when he noted the growing popularity of South African strains of house music, including gqom and amapiano. I was first introduced to amapiano by Soulection DJ Andres Javier Uribe, whose taste in music is as eclectic as his personality is charming. A few years ago I had a brief chat with him back stage after a gig in New York, and having enjoyed his set, thanked him for putting me on to the genre.

Much like waves that originate in New Zealand and create storms off the coast of California, foreign music can taste salty, even sour to the listener with an unaccustomed palette. In September I challenged my househead friend group to find and share a new track every day for the entire month. In my quest to find the best chunes, I joined “Chineurs de House”, a Facebook group moderated by French-speaking, crate-digging old-heads. I was disappointed—but not surprised—to discover the tentacles of M. Macron’s bureaucracy had extended all the way to this dorky vinyl enclave. On its homepage, the group administrators listed five-too-many rules for all members: near the bottom, amapiano not welcome.

To be fair, “Chineurs” is mostly for old-school, deep, classic cuts; there are other groups for other tastes. But what amapiano lacks in historical roots, it makes up for with the devotion of its fans. Watch any video taken at a South African gig and you’ll see what I mean. They’re vibing. Many gigs in the west, even some of those hosted by prominent platforms Boiler Room and Mixmag, seldom contribute the same energy. It’s a shame to see amapiano dismissed in certain spheres, considering how well it upholds the philosophy of unfiltered self expression that house music pioneers—predominantly black, LGTBQ communities—defended in their plight to establish the genre.

If given the opportunity to speak with Ana, the polyglot-tech-lawyer, or Jay, the actor-activist-ambassador, some westerners may be tempted to demonstrate their familiarity with African culture: they’ve heard the afrobeats single topping the charts, watched the hottest “African Original” making waves online. Rather than hating on rising artists, actors and directors for going mainstream—that’s the task of pretentious hipsters, and they’ll have it covered—we should appreciate their global recognition and, like Jay advised, scrutinize what is being spoon-fed to us and check out what else is on the menu. Below the glossy surface of Netflix and Instagram, where the acting is a little less polished, the beats a bit more eccentric, we see the nuances of the continent’s cultural landscape—which will only get harder to navigate as we gain effortless access.