A Love/Hate Letter to Afroswing
A love/hate letter to a subgenre that captured and coloured much of Black British youth in the 2010s.
Kwesi Sekyi
While I stumbled through the last stages of my adolescence in the mid to late 2010s, the UK music scene was having its own awkward but fruitful growth period, and from this growth came Afroswing. It was a melodic blend of Afrobeats, Grime, Dancehall and UK rap that soundtracked my late teens and snapshotted Black Britain in a moment in time. J Hus, Mostack and Lotto Boyz were the sounds of my first brushes with freedom and adulthood—from uni pre-drinks and sweaty house parties to riding Boris Bikes through central London on hot summer nights.
Like many subgenres that briskly burned bright, it developed a repetitive, formulaic quality that woefully saturated itself into self-parody. People clamoured for producers to leave that xylophone plugin alone, and I’ve jokingly called it “clink clink” music amongst my friends for years. Yet still, for the way it united diasporic sounds and captured not only my youth but the feeling of youth with its breeziness, it’s a genre I can’t bring myself to hate.
Growing up as a Ghanaian Brit, in my early childhood, I’d found it hard to bridge the gap between the music I listened to on my own and the music I felt was for “back home”. I’d started secondary school at the turn of the 2010s, at a time that felt like a rough transitional period for UK rap, when our grime stars were either making confusing Ibiza floor fillers or 808s and Heartbreaks-inspired pop-dance-rap. At the same time, new internet platforms like SBTV were populating the underground with a form of slower, more hardcore UK road rap heavily influenced by American hip hop. With both these movements failing to move me, I largely became an Indie kid for a few years. This was a world away from my parents’ music—anything that wasn’t Magic FM was either Ghanaian highlife or its rap-infused cousin Hip-life (although mostly the former, it was a clean and Godly Ohemaa Mercy house more than a Castro D’Destroyer one— “whatsoever things are pure”, my mother would say).
Before some of Afroswing’s predecessors, from a cultural point of view, “Black British” hadn’t always felt like a title I could comfortably claim over just "Ghanaian". Even with many of the scene’s big hitters being of African descent, like the Adenuga brothers, Lethal Bizzle and Dizzee Rascal, I felt like I couldn’t feel much of that in their output. From jungle to garage to grime, UK Black sounds had always borrowed heavily from Jamaican sound system culture. This bled into a wider narrative of Black People's history in the UK solely focused on Windrush-era West Indian migration from the 1950s onwards. However, it was the growing influence of the coming-of-age millennials from the African migration boom, the "Black African" portion of the population went from 0.8% in 2001 to 3% in 2011 - and their musical outputs that showed me that artistic inspiration was not only a one-way street here.
Before Afroswing, a movement changing the face of Black Britishness was UK Funky House. Something about late-stage Funky sounded so distinctly Ghanaian to my young ears, and some of the music coming out of Ghana at the same time sharing Funky’s quirky percussion and synth strings only confirmed that. Donae’o, of African Warrior fame, said of the Funky classic—“I wasn’t trying to be like ‘I’m African and proud!’ No, I just am African; that’s how I see myself.” While Funky house was entering the same awkward period of novelty singles and dance trends that Afroswing would go on to endure—the Swine Flu Skank’s lost some of the shine it had when I was 10—its infusing of a new, unabashed Africanness into UK music laid vital groundwork for what Afroswing was about to do. It also perfectly overlapped with the floodgates for West African Music was opening simultaneously. One moment, Taio Cruz has swapped out the Y from “Tayo” for ambiguity; the next, Kanye’s in a D’banj video, Arsenal’s Lukas Podolski is singing Wizkid lyrics, and Fuse ODG’s Antenna is in the UK top 10 (if the Antenna “Afrobeats remix” with Sarkodie, Wande Coal and R2Bees isn’t in your life yet, then it should be).
Out of the ashes of the Aznonto era, and in this more diverse phase of British Blackness in music, I saw Afroswing become the melding cultural power it was. Mover and Timbo’s 2014 song Ringtone, a pivotal early-stage Afroswing track, is a perfect example of the genre’s unifying ideology from the start. Cheeko, the manager claiming responsibility for linking the two together for the track, acknowledges capitalising on the Afrobeats wave in uni raves at the time, “this is what’s gonna happen, this is the new ting…if you can put bashment and rap [together], why can’t you put Afro and rap?” But the Caribbean lineage of the track is still so clear in Ringtone’s simple, bright keys and Mover’s laid-back flow, reminiscent of the kind of road rap laid over Dancehall riddims and titled unofficial “remixes” that was already popular in the scene.
Afroswing had landed, and it felt like a truly Black British genre—a perfect hybrid that couldn’t arise anywhere but out of our unique experience. At its best, it was a direct split down the middle of its influences from both African and Caribbean Diasporas - from Afro-pop-inspired rhythms to songs like Dun Talkin’s mixing of slang and dialects across Black borders that had fans scratching heads over artists’ lineage for years - for a while, Afroswing sounded exactly how Black Britain looked. While it would be a stretch to claim Afroswing made me feel “seen”, watching kids who might’ve been considered too “aff” or “fresh” just a few years prior, making stuff that was unanimously cool was pivotal in my self-expression.
J Hus, an artist who has surpassed Afroswing to almost represent Black Britishness itself, used Afroswing to become a quiet revolutionary—subverting tropes of anti-blackness through the genre. Hus is constantly preemptively reclaiming the word "ugly" - he calls himself ugly in Friendly, Good Time and Common Sense, to name a few, and his Instagram handle is even @theuglygram—in a way that makes us question featurism and wonder the teasing he may have endured for his distinctively West African features to feel the need to shape his “ugliness” into armour. And while his famed lyrical references to juju prove controversial (controversial for some, there's a knowing wink to lyrics like “we buss guns, buss juj, then we buss case” that's bypassed some more alarmist listeners in the Hus discourse), they’re always thought-provoking. If mentioning West African spirituality makes listeners uncomfortable—why? What was the reason we were taught to be scared of it? When a genre so accurately depicts an image of a people, it becomes not only a portrait but a mirror.
When Afroswing peaked in my late teens, and I finally had the opportunity to switch out my leafy London borough for the clubs, it felt like romance. But the music itself was romantic, too. There was an airy lightness to Afroswing's sound and lyrics that felt just like flirting does. Kojo Funds uses the whole of My 9ine's runtime to equate his sweetheart with a gun, and it doesn't feel ham-fisted once, and Yxng Bane's Fine Wine is less bragging about a girl he's already won and more an acknowledgement of their mutual hunger for each other. "She wanna take me away", "she wan' feel me", but crucially, she hasn't yet. Good Afroswing lyrics crackle with potential and sexual tension—it's the feeling of hitting it off with someone at a party bottled in 3 minutes, and it actively soundtracked many of these exact moments for me.
There, of course, was no lack of darkness or more violent themes—integral producer Steel Banglez cited “dark chords” that “make you feel a way” as a key feature—but I enjoyed the flippant nature of it. In what felt like a tradition held over from grime, Afroswing artists played their violence almost tongue-in-cheek, fully aware of the juxtaposition of singing about shootings on instrumentals made for warm bodies getting to know each other in the quiet corner of a loud motive. The beats, almost mellow in isolation, worked as a canvas for whatever the artists’ influences were. Artists like the aforementioned Kojo Funds focused on melody—his interpolations of older songs like Snow’s Informer furthering Afroswing’s hybrid mission statement—while Mostack had a 50-Cent-esque lyrical slant, taking not-a-funny-rapper-but-a-rapper-who’s-funny cues from JME, and finding ever creative ways to apologise for cheating on the women in his life. Afroswing didn’t intentionally try to be subversive or satirical, but as a kid enthralled by TV satire but craving my reflection in it, I took the genre in as such. In the Afroswing world, Super Soakers could be gun shorthand just as easily as they could be actual Super Soakers, to be filled with liquor and sprayed into the mouth of someone who took your fancy. Compared to the street rap before it and the drill after, Afroswing slotted into UK musical history as a light reminder to not take oneself too seriously, a reminder I needed as exams piled on, the parties dried up, and life began to feel more serious.
At some point in the late 2010s, perhaps due to Stateside social movements or simply the way white hegemony treats Black coolness as a pendulum swing, youthful Blackness was once again granted legitimacy by mainstream UK outlets, many too scared to touch the K Kokes and Skrapz’s of years prior. As Nella Rose and Yung Filly became quick go-to’s for companies looking to get in with a young Black audience, Afroswing became a formula for outsider success—queue its use in ads and TV, a slurry of throwaway meme hits, and the record label trend of one-single deals. The simplicity and malleability I'd found beauty in had made the sound easy to imitate—find the right xylophone melody and loose song concept around a London region or popular brand, and you had yourself a top 20 hit and a Boohoo Man collab. Of course, no genre is immune to the novelty single, but with the low level of entry that can sometimes come with a “vibes”- based genre, it’s hard imagining so-called “Fraud Bae” Michael Modern, or the Why You Coming Fast Guy milking their 15 minutes on anything other than a tinkly, club-ready Afroswing beat. By earliest 2019 and definitely by the 2020s—as I graduated from university and entered some version of adulthood—it felt like the wheels might be coming off.
In the same way, BBK were done playing with Funky and returned to grime after Too Many Man, artists who’d put their stocks in Afroswing at the start of the wave were starting to liquidate and move on. By mid-2020, Tion Wayne was making the commercially attuned drill he continues to make today—a not-inconceivable move but still a far cry from the Tion of Gone Bad or Can’t Go Broke fame I’d treasured in my uni halls all those years ago. Others floundered between styles—a confusion probably confounded by the pandemic—seemed to have a crisis of identity after their meal ticket disappeared without leaving them a core fanbase or aesthetic without it. Some faded into irrelevance if they weren’t already one or two-hit wonders.
Now, it feels like some diasporan artists have largely returned to their respective corners. Once-leaders like NSG, while maintaining verse-chorus pop-rap structure, often angle towards more singularly Nigerian and Ghanaian soundscapes, and much of the Spotify “Afro Bashment” playlist—half of the Afroswing era was spent arguing over what to name it—is now mainly straight Afrobeats. Its shadow lingers in melodic artists like Eric IV, but it feels like UK culture missed a vital unification opportunity here.
Afroswing, at its best, was romantic by just being itself and by the promise of what it could mean for the diaspora. Whether through violence, sex or love, it revelled in play, lightness, and an explicit desire to be played at kickbacks and barbeques. Its lifespan, and its final period of microwave stars, further prove that it was music for the frivolity of youth—to do pre-club makeup, drop friends off, twirl your hair or touch someone’s arm. It’s a frivolity you realise matters more and more the further removed you become from it. We can now stand over Afroswing’s bloated corpse, laughing at ourselves and the acts we allowed to cut through in its later stages. Stilthere'se’s a reason I hold it in higher regard than that contemporary grime resurgence—nothing captured what it was to be young, British and Black in the 2010s with an emphasis on every word like Afroswing did.
