Skip to main content

DJ TuneZ VibeZ

Thirteen tracks from a Nigerian-American DJ and producer who has been one of the connective figures between Lagos, New York and the wider Afrobeats world.

DJ Tunez

Michael Babatunde Adeyinka was born in Nigeria and raised largely in the United States, and built his reputation as a DJ before moving into production. His most consequential relationship is with Wizkid, for whom he has served as tour DJ and frequent collaborator, and that association has placed him at the centre of Afrobeats' international expansion.

What he does well is assembly. A DJ Tunez record is typically a collision of people who might not otherwise be in a room together — a Nigerian singer, a South African vocalist, an American R&B artist — over a groove built to work in a club anywhere.

What to listen for

"PAMI" is the biggest and the best demonstration of the method: Wizkid, Adekunle Gold and Omah Lay on one record, each doing something different, and the whole thing held together by the beat rather than by a shared style.

"Iskaba" with Wande Coal is the other essential — a genuine Lagos anthem, and Wande Coal is one of the most gifted and least internationally recognised singers in Nigerian pop.

"Cool Me Down" with Wizkid is the smoothest thing here, and "Get Up" with Sarz and Flash the hardest.

"Energy" pairs Ashanti with Adekunle Gold, which is exactly the kind of transatlantic combination he specialises in, and "Majesty" with Busiswa brings South Africa in.

His remix of Robert Glasper's "Better Than I Imagined" with H.E.R. and Meshell Ndegeocello is the most unexpected credit on the list — taking a Grammy-winning jazz-soul record and putting an Afrobeats rhythm under it.

"Today" and "Lullaby" are the deeper cuts.

Go deeper

Wizkid's Made in Lagos is the essential context, and Wande Coal's Mushin 2 Mo'Hits is one of the foundational Nigerian pop albums of the 2000s.

For the DJ-as-curator tradition in African music: SPINALL, DJ Maphorisa, DJ Neptune and Juls all work the same territory, assembling records rather than performing them.

And Busiswa is worth following independently — a formidable South African vocalist who has appeared on some of the biggest records of the amapiano era.

One last note on the DJ as author. In African pop the DJ is frequently the person who commissions a record, assembles its cast and shapes its arrangement — a role closer to a producer-impresario than to someone playing other people's songs. DJ Tunez's catalogue only makes sense read that way, and it is a model with almost no equivalent in American pop.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more