Kwassa kwassa (otherwise known as soukous) is a style of music born in the Congolese Basin, evolved from Congolese rumba, and deriving from Afro-Cuban influence—eventually inspiring many guitar styles we hear all over the world today, including Vampire Weekend’s “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.”
Since the inception of She Shreds, we’ve been exploring how music education plays a role in our understanding of how to play, who decides what that looks and sounds like, and the ways in which music education raises a certain culture in that generation of players. There is such a rich history to the development of contemporary guitar music, often used as a tool to voice resistance and resilience, and almost always (whether conscious or not) the foundation of that influence is African. And yet, I was only ever given the option to learn from The Beatles, ZZ Top, or Joan Jett when growing up It makes me wonder what we, as a culture, would be like if we normalized learning and teaching the sounds of African joy, resistance, and revolution. We’ve always known that if we want change of any kind—particularly as it pertains to decolonization—we need to change the process and practice of our education system that too often neglects the needs of women and BIPOC.
Learning about international styles of music and their origins through physical practice and dedication to their specific sounds is an amazing way to broaden our understanding of what “guitar music” sounds like. It’s also important to continue to find and give credit back to those who originally founded some of the sounds we love today. In this lesson, I’ll be teaching what I’ve learned so far from Diblo Dibala’s “Super K,” off his 1989 album, Super Soukous.
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Below is a backing track I created to practice with once you feel ready to take the song on at 135 BPM! If you’d rather follow along with the TAB only, feel free to download it here: temple run 2
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Comment by Georgia on October 23, 2020 at 6:30 pmThis lesson is great. Thanks so much! I got a little tripped up reading the tab for phrase 2. After the slide to fret 10 on the 4th string, it’s written as fret 7 but should be fret 9 on the 3rd string–it sounds good as written but its too much of a reach. After paying attention to your fingering I saw its a typo.
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Comment by leilei on January 25, 2021 at 1:53 amThis is awesome!
Comment by K on April 15, 2021 at 3:36 pm