Abstract
This chapter aims to think about sampling, space, and temporality, starting from the metaphor of beat making as a space journey. The notion came up during an interview the authors conducted in Chimoio, a city also known as Vila Perygoza, which is a vibrant city of Hip Hop in central Mozambique’s hinterland, less than 100 km from the Zimbabwean border and 192 km from Beira, another city of Hip Hop. With a nickname that literally means ‘a dangerous village’, it has a distinct sound in the Mozambican Hip Hop movement. While producers in Chimoio as much as anywhere else are sampling elements from all continents, particularly diasporic expressions of jazz, funk, progressive rock, and soul, some artists have preference in sampling local and regional music, to create fragments of music to use in the process of beat making, thus paying tribute towards the music from the hinterland and lands by the Indian Ocean. The method of research is listening to the local Hip Hop beats and related music, reflecting and drawing from our Hip Hop activities and experiences, particularly Milton Conqui’s sampling as well as learning from other local producers; and thus centring artists’ point of view aligned to hiphopography. Because listening is a highly personal state of being and acting, essential also in beat making, this chapter is as much about Hip Hop’s classical quests about ‘who I am’ and ‘where I am’ as it is an ambitious academic quest about sampling.
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Notes
- 1.
We mean here with ‘Hip Hop producer’ beat makers who are also involved on the tracks’ and sometimes albums’ final sha**, to different extents. All of the producers discussed here are both composers (beat makers) and contribute sha** the final product after recording vocals. Most of them are rappers as well.
- 2.
Interview with Imbelogik conducted by Janne Rantala, 18 July 2018, Chimoio.
- 3.
‘Eu Já Vivo Enjoado’ (Ladainha) in Mestre Pastinha e Sua Academia. 1991. Capoeira Angola (LP). Philips, 1969.
- 4.
Parliament, Mothership Connection (LP Casablanca, 1976).
- 5.
The title plays with the Portuguese name for the sunflower, girassol.
- 6.
Kau is a small lake in Chimoio.
- 7.
Following Jaap Kunst’s original evolutionist hypothesis, Jones (1960) assumes that the origins of Chope Timbila’s scale must be originating from Indonesia, which these ethnomusicologists considered a more evolved culture, and not the other way around. It’s not, however, necessary to be specialised to African musicology to see that their assumption is rather based on obsolete colonial theory than valid empirical evidence.
- 8.
The beat, which this fieldnote describes, was different to the final one with rapped vocals. One of the biggest differences are the much more chopped and shorter fragments of the original song’s vocals.
- 9.
Same can be said about sampling indigenous instruments such as mbira, which is not unique to the African ‘Mbira belt’.
- 10.
As in YoungstaCPT’s (2019) album 3t. Cape Town: Y?Gen and Nomandla.
- 11.
A vocalist, Freddie Mercury was born in Zanzibar and grew up in London, and he is from an Indian-Parsi family. Queen has several songs with references to Islam, although not in this song.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the following Chimoio producers who generously provided their instrumentals and their wisdom for this study: AZ Pro, Serenga, Africano, IMBLGK, MD Akas, Iv Pro, Babilônico Prod, EO, and Dedecco. Rantala’s contribution is partially supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement number 101033296 (Performing Political Memory as Hip Hop Knowledge in Mozambican Rap).
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Conqui, M., Rantala, J. (2023). ‘My space trips from Chimoio’: Notes About Space and Temporality in Sampling. In: Williams, Q., Singh, J.N. (eds) Global Hiphopography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21955-9_17
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