NEW MUSIC CRAZE SWEEPS EAST AFRICAN ISLANDS OF ZANZIBAR

NEW MUSIC CRAZE SWEEPS EAST AFRICAN ISLES OF ZANZIBAR

Move over Reggaeton! Ringitone is here. Or at least that is what they are saying in the East African islands of Zanzibar. Whereas the former grew out of the increasing popularity of dancehall reggae en Espanol which came from the decendents of Jamaican migrant workers in Panama in the 1990's and became a huge international dance craze earlier this decade, ringitone is only similar in its African roots.
Listening to the hit "Njoo Mpenzi [Babangu Kasafiri]" by one of ringitone's most celebrated vocalists Ali-Z and you'll see why. If the backing track sounds uncannily like 50 Cent's "Windowshopper" that's because it is actually a polyphonic ringtone of the song downloaded onto a Siemen's 255 cellular phone at Zanzibar's number one studio Hooney Toons. I spoke to maverick ringitone producer Hassan Makame Mtwana, known to all as H-Ditty after waiting for him to stop talking over his bluetooth mouthpiece for over half an hour. "Alot of niggaz want to hate cos' we got the flyest beats around. Matta fact we was first to go polyphonic," he explains in stilted Swahili with a distinctly African American inflected slang, "but now everyone is logged on to passionup.com and freeringtones.co.uk trying to be down. We from the old school. I started out with just one raggedy second hand Ericcson that I bought for like 20,000/tsh [about $18] way back in October 2005. Now all I can tell them is 'How you like me now!'"
H-Ditty and his partner Jamal Dupree initially faced alot of opposition from Zenji Flava purists. Post-modern taarab or Zenji Flava as its called, is a spicey mixture of Shaggy, Kevin Lyttle, and T.O.K. riffs which are found freely in the tutorial sections of some learners edition studio software. I spoke with one his detractors who preferred not be named, "Basically they are ruining our culture, we have a long history in Zanzibar of using Frooty Loops and pre-packaged hooks from Cubase that goes as far back as 2003."
Some decry what they view as a lack of real of musicianship, I heard one unemployed Zenji Flava artist saying, "They just calling up shorties on the phone and begging them to sleep with them and playing some appropriate ringtones to show their love. That's not music. Back in the day we used to take the tunes from the qasidas we learned in Quran school and turned them into sexy r'n'b songs with actual pre-programmed Cubase loops from a T.O.K. song, and then we would put California Love on the voice to get, you know, pitch correction, cos we couldn't sing, because most of us got kicked out of Quran school for trying to touch the honeys they had up in there. You know what I'm sayin? This stuff they doing today; it lacks originality. And even that song, that was my song, I sang "Njoo Mpenzi [Mamangu Kaenda Kuhijji]" back in the old school, like were talking 2004. These are just new jacks trying to cash in on the trail that we blazed for them."
Judging by the amount of prepaid scratch phone cards littering the ground outside of Hooney Toons Records studios it would seem that Ringitone is here to stay. I had to wade through a crowd of Fair'n'Lovely bleached out teenage groupies in transparent bui-bui's to get inside Hooney Toons studios. What I was delighted to see was the lack of clumsy recording equipment. Aside from some red Italian leather couches giving it a distinctly Urban Contemporary feel, there were just a couple of guys with heavily gelled S-Curl hairstyles deeply engrossed in seductive conversation on some of the hottest cellphones out of Dubai. Another was using a cameraphone to film the whole thing. This was an actual Ringitone video shoot in progress!
Impressed by the minimalism of Ringitone, I later went and talked to ex-pat ethnomusicologist Jennifer Blousenstern, at the offices of the American cultural NGO, EWOC [Enablers Without a Clue].
I found her twirling her hair around an index finger chatting away comfortably in Swanglish, slightly flushed, in a seeming sililoquoy to no-one in particular. It was only when she signalled that I sit down that I noticed the hands-free headset dangling around her collar.
Waiting for her to wrap up her conversation I perused her extensive anthropological library. A p.H.D. in African Studies from Barnard hung on the wall. In the corner were three cellphones being charged in an overloaded electrical socket, their wires draped over an elaborately carved ebony wood fertility statue from the Makonde tribe of Southern Tanzania. After exchanging pleasantries Ms. Blousenstern needed no prodding to discuss her own ringing approval of the ringitone movement.
"When jazz came along people said 'That's not music!' Hip hop, the same story. Now you see rap music in advertisements for soda and everything else. Ringitone is going through that same initial Eurocentric reluctance now. If we look at it from a cultural perspective, its really quite African. I see the ringitone caller [as ringitone artists are known] as akin to the griot or the praise singer. But instead of singing to praise a chief or to recount the oral history of great kings of their clan, they are trying to convince underage girls to come over to their parents' unsupervised air-conditioned mansions and have pre-marital sex with them."
When Kool DJ Herc used two turntables and a mixer in the 1970's South Bronx, he was recontextualising the available modern technology into a unique new-world African form. According to Blousenstern, Ringitone takes it one step further.
"Another thing I find intriguing about Ringitone is its implicit Pan-African thrust. The callers are coupling African-American slang with call and response. The phones themselves have the mineral koltan in their circuitry. Its a well known fact that the only source of koltan is in the Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo." She draws a perfect circle in the air, "So they are bringing it back home to your Motherland and keeping it real at the same time!"
"So there is this whole defiant subtext in which the ringitone caller is saying to the Western World, 'You might deny me the right of a visa to live and work in the UK or the US because of the color of my skin or maybe because there are purported members of al-Qaeda who share my surname, but you cannot keep me from talking over the telephone in an African-American slang or listening to Shania Twain, Beyonce, or Fabolous.... and liking that shit!'"