2012 was a year in a pivotal era in African music, and just music in general. It was a time marking a great shift in the mentality of musicians across the world. They had finally come to terms with the fact that the big dogs that they were had very little bark against the piracy and large scale copyright infringement that had started plaguing the music industry since Sean Parker introduced the world to Napster in 2002.
Musicians understood that they either had to embrace technology or get obliterated by it. For the struggling African musical composer, the technological boom of the early to late 2000s was manna from heaven. The price of personal computers was falling, and bootlegged music production software like Fruity Loops was widely available.
Students in their dorm rooms started trying their hand at these software programmes and began composing beats. In Buea, music acts like Dr Kapt, Fluri Boyz, Sango Edi, and Denzyl (now Ambe) were born from these experimentations. This snowballed eventually into the neo-urban music that eventually took off in 2013 when Stanley Enow loudly announced its arrival with “Hein Père” and which we live in today. Everything changed after that.
By 2014, TRACE Africa, the music channel, had become largely popular. Smartphones and 4G were not in the common man’s vocabulary quite yet, and so to have your song featured on the channel was to be sure to have a large audience across Francophone Africa watching you. Competition was minimal, many people were still trying to refine their sound and so if you released a musical project that was of decent quality and had good visuals, you were almost sure to have your song featured in their lineup.
Today, you will have to work 5 times as hard to get that opportunity. In the meantime, the popularity of TRACE has waned as falling data costs and greater access to smartphones have pushed many musicians to rely on their personal digital channels and social media to build their own communities and market to them directly. Having a video on TRACE Africa today is still considered prestigious but certainly does not hold the sway it once did.
And what about the audience? Those born from the early 80s to the mid-90s will gladly tell you about how channels like MCM and Channel O greatly shaped their musical ear. These two channels were for a long time what this generation was exposed to in terms of musical import. And these two channels put rap and RnB on heavy rotation; and the influence of this was very, very heavy on this group of young Africans. And so when the people of this generation thought about music, rap and RnB were often the very first musical genre they thought of. No doubt they wanted to look as cool as their idols; LL Cool J, Nas, DMX, Mc Solaar, Kool Shen etc
And so some rap acts from the early 2000s like Zomloa Familia, XLM Squad, VBH and Big Bizzy showed a heavy influence from American hip hop. Their mannerism, dressing, accent, rap style, and especially their sound were heavily reminiscent of that.
Meanwhile, hip-hop acts like Krotal and Ak Sang Grave who started out with that typical American style branched out to incorporate a more traditional Cameroonian sonority into their rap sound. Krotal in particular helped shape and popularize this sound. It can be heard in songs like Jamais, Vert Rouge, Koppo‘s Hommage à Foe, Bantou Posi‘s “Jameyi” and even in Jahmissa‘ “K-meroun kel image.”
For a short while, these two worlds co-existed, but things eventually gravitated towards the Krotal sound; and Camfranglais rap, made popular by Koppo also greatly helped shape and define what could be called the Cameroonian rap sound and identity.
This was between 2004 and 2010. Cameroonian rap could be said to be doing well especially given the difficult creative environment the country was giving these rappers. Rap-focused programmes grew on popular media channels. Canal 2 had its programmes headed by Tony Nobody. On STV, Tito Valery helped to push the genre. On FM105 in Douala, Nabil Fongod was also doing his part. A soft drink company organized rap and RnB competitions on TV. The urban music industry did its best to thrive and survive in the era of piracy and strong competition from Coupé Decalé from Ivory Coast.
It was tough, very tough. But the urban music industry that was driven by rap and RnB (remember Franky P?) was able to hold its head above water thanks to the 80s and early 90s kids who had grown up on hip hop and RnB via Channel O and MCM. They provided a strong audience on which rap could count on. They consumed rap music, both imported and homemade. They knew quality rap music and could look at Cameroonian rappers and could easily identify quality over noise.
And it was this crowd that provided the first audience and the driving force for an unknown emcee who had just returned home from India.
In the midst of all the turbulence that the 2010s spelt for music worldwide with falling album sales and decreased revenue for music labels, Jovi released H.I.V. For the first time, Anglophone Cameroonians discovered...