Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

African ChillZone 11

Thirty-eight tracks that treat the whole continent as one radio station. Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and the diaspora, sequenced for a long evening rather than a short party.

The chill end of the African wave

Most playlists built around African pop go for the peaks — the biggest choruses, the loudest drops. This one does something more useful: it selects for atmosphere, favouring the mid-tempo, melodic side of Afrobeats and its neighbours. The result works as a sustained mood rather than a series of moments, which is much harder to build from music this rhythmically busy.

It also captures a specific moment in the continent's pop economy — the point at which Nigerian, Ghanaian and South African artists had stopped seeing each other as separate markets and started collaborating as a matter of course.

What to listen for

Asake's "Joha" is the standout for anyone new to him: fuji vocal tradition, amapiano log drums and a choir, all in one record. He is the most distinctive Nigerian artist to emerge in years.

Omah Lay's "HOLY GHOST" and Ruger's "Asiwaju" anchor the Nigerian side, with Victony, Crayon and Bella Shmurda teaming up on "OHEMA." Davido's "KANTE" is the biggest room-filler here.

The Ghanaian entries are worth flagging: Joey B and Odunsi (The Engine) on "Exopa," and Sarkodie — Ghana's most decorated rapper — with Ruger on "Till We Die." Stonebwoy brings Oxlade and Tiwa Savage together on "Therapy," a genuine pan-African summit.

AKA and Nasty C's "Lemons (Lemonade)" represents South African hip-hop, and carries extra weight now given AKA's death in 2023. Reminisce, BNXN and D Smoke on "Hustle" is the transatlantic one — D Smoke is from Inglewood, and hearing him over a Nigerian beat is a small thrill.

Mannywellz's "Everything" and Yarden's "SUNSET IN PARIS" are the deepest cuts and the most atmospheric.

Go deeper

Follow Asake first — Mr. Money With The Vibe is the album, and it is one of the most confident debuts of the decade.

For the roots underneath all of this: Fela Kuti for Nigeria, Ebo Taylor and Pat Thomas for Ghanaian highlife and Afrobeat, Brenda Fassie for South Africa. Modern Afrobeats is often described as if it appeared in 2016; it did not.

And for the diaspora conversation, Odunsi (The Engine) and Amaarae are the two artists doing the most interesting work at the edges of the genre.

A closing note on the "chill" framing. It would be easy to hear a playlist like this as background music, and it works that way. But several of these records are doing something harder than the big club singles — holding a groove at a lower energy demands more of a singer, not less, because there is nowhere to hide. Asake's fuji phrasing, Omah Lay's behind-the-beat drift and Mannywellz's harmonic choices all reward a second, closer listen once the evening has quietened down.

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

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

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more