In an excerpt from the 33 ⅓ title “South African Popular Music,” the author breaks down house music offshoots gqom and amapiano.
There’s no formula to emerging from the seemingly endless sea of available music in the past twenty or so years — and yet from kwaito on, South African electronic music has done just that, both directly and indirectly. In the past five to ten years, two offshoots of house music have dominated South African airwaves: gqom and amapiano. The former, pronounced by replacing the “gq” with a…
