The Ghost in the Sample: Arbantone, Futurefunk, and the Art of Cultural Restoration
Listening to Soundkraft’s Tiktoker feels like catching a glimpse of a ghost. I see it as I sit with my fifteen-year-old cousin scrolling through a YouTube playlist whose name I have since forgotten. It appears when he stops scrolling and selects the video featuring an image of a man in a green-and-white hoodie, flanked by women on all sides. The ghost appears the moment my cousin presses play. It is familiar but unrecognisable at the moment, and then it fades away and becomes an itch in the back of my mind.
The song plays for a few seconds, and suddenly it is 2007, and I am in the backseat of a car on the way to Nakuru, dreading my return to boarding school, as a song I love plays loudly through the speakers. Except for the fact that school holidays are over and I am going back to school, this is a simpler time, a time I would pay anything to go back to.
And so as the man in the video says, “ati black chocolate ni fine melanin…” I do not recognise the words, but I do recognise the melody. The sample, cut from Jua Cali’s Bidii Yangu is what takes me back in time, back to 2007, a year after the song was released on the album JuaCaliSekta. And it is this sample that creates the bridge spanning 20 years to this moment when my fifteen-year-old cousin sings along to a song, oblivious to its roots.
To understand this ghost, we have to go back in time, back to the early days of sampling, to the early 20th century, when Jazz musicians would take recognisable sections and work them into their performances as a nod to their peers’ skill and prowess. Later, in the 1940s, two sound artists both by name Pierre – Schafer and Henry – came up with Music Concrète, a style of music that experimented with found sounds, the likes of trains, machinery, nature, and urban spaces, and layered them on audio tapes, editing and looping them while changing the tempo and pitch to create a sound that had been unheard of. A great example of this is the song Revolution 9 from The White Album by the Beatles.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the development of the Mellotron, an instrument that improved on the existing Chamberlin, further advanced sampling. Tape loops were triggered when the keys of the Mellotron were played, playing pre-recorded sounds or samples. The Mellotron was also used in another Beatles song, for the flute sound in Strawberry Fields Forever.
It wasn’t until the latter half of the 1970s and the early 1980s that sampling became what we know today. New York DJs would make samples while they played live shows, by manipulating vinyl records to identify drum breaks from notable jazz, funk, and RnB tracks of the time. These drum breaks were known as break beats, which could be rapped over to create new songs.
Soon, commercially available synthesisers became more accessible, which led to an increase in sampling. Samplers from the 1980s, such as those by Akai and Korg, introduced sequencing, which allowed artists to easily arrange samples to create entire tracks. Sampling became an essential part of Hip-Hop and the foundation for other genres of electronic music, ranging from Techno to House, to Drum’n’Bass, and eventually, if you fast forward long enough, Arbantone.
For Pan African Music, Tela Wangeci describes Arbantone as a genre “constructed as a combination of old Kenyan genge samples and gengetone and Jamaican riddims.” She adds, “While Arbantone is a gengetone successor, its sampling, delivery and colloquial language set it apart.” At its core, Arbantone takes the music that defined Kenyan urban life in the 2000s and early 2010s, Calif Records’ Genge, Ogopa Deejays’ kapuka, and early Jamaican Dancehall and refuses to let it fade quietly into ‘old-school’ status. By sampling these songs, Arbantone preserves our collective memories.
During the protests against the Kenya Finance Bill 2024, Anguka Nayo by Wadagliz became the unofficial anthem of the movement. Kenyans called for the government to anguka nayo, which literally translates to ‘fall with it’, a call that demanded an end to the punitive finance bill. Anguka Nayo samples Creme De La Creme’s 2018 hit Kufa Juu, which features Tribeless and Kansoul. If you follow that thread, it will lead you to Kansoul’s Nyongwa, whose video starts with a header that says, “Let’s take it back to 2004” and plays snippets of songs that appear as fleeting memories: King Georges’ Unanijazz, Nononi’s Manzi wa Nairobi, Jaguar’s Furaha, before the song starts.
Arbantone refuses to forget. It demands that we pay attention, truly listen. It reminds us of simpler days when listeners would huddle up next to the radio and wait for their favourite shows, Hits not Homework or Rick Dees’ Weekly Top 40, or when we would rush home to make it in time for Jimmy Gathu’s magazine shows Rap’Em, Jam-A-Delic, Rastrut, KassKass, and Rhythmix on KTN, or years later, NTV’s The Beat. It reminds us of times when we would be patient in our media consumption, waiting until the end of the week to tune in to The Homeboyz mixes on Kiss 100, armed with a cassette ready to record our favourite songs. And for younger listeners, Arbantone introduces them to a time when we didn’t have (pointless) conversations about a “Kenyan sound” to a time when we knew what we sounded like. When my cousin listens to Tiktoker, she has a chance to discover Jua Cali’s debut album JuaCaliSekta, which is really a chance to discover a piece of Kenyan musical history.
Beyond archiving, sampling does the work of reaching into the past to imagine a future. Take Future Funk, for instance: a genre that takes 70s and 80s Japanese City Pop, selects the best portion of the song (the butter notes), increases their tempo, adds some drums, loops them, and splices the vocals from the sample. The accompanying video or imagery is usually a GIF of an anime girl or commercials (preferably Japanese) from the 80s. Future Funk seems to be more interested in imagining a past lost to time, and the more we listen, the more we long for a past that mostly does not exist. As Michael Lee writes, “Future Funk revels in the affective imagery of nostalgia. In this respect, the genre lives up to the ‘future’ moniker, in that it is removed from any historical sense of time and only exists in a digital future that can be forever extended, so as to always remain out of reach.” In a way, closer home, Future Funk is more reminiscent of the works of artists like Just A Band, whose remixes, for example, on Kudish! The Sound of Soup might make us nostalgic for a time that really never existed, a sort of invented past.
But there's a crucial difference between the two. If Future Funk exists as a way of reimagining the past, Arbantone feels more immediate, more urgent, like a continuation, a bridge from then to now. Future Funk is an artist's rendering of the past, while Arbantone is a photograph.
That continuity matters because of what that earlier era contained. When we listen to Anguka Nayo and follow the threads all the way to Manzi wa Nairobi, we situate ourselves within a specific moment. Manzi wa Nairobi takes us back to the Kibaki years in Kenya, when Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi’s 24-year rule had ended, and Kenyans were drenched in optimism, when Ogopa Deejays and Calif Records created the soundtrack of the time, and there was a creative renaissance where expression was no longer in the shadows but shining in public light. The country wasn’t perfect, but there was a feeling that things could get better, that the days of Moism were over and that the sun would shine on us again. And so listening to Anguka Nayo reminds us that better days are possible, but it also calls for us to examine how we ended up here (back to Moism).
Arbantone and Future Funk invite us to reconsider our notions of originality in music production. There's an assumption that new music has to break completely from the past or be a completely new composition to be acknowledged as ‘good’. The Grammy Awards, for example, did not allow samples or interpolations for songs nominated for the Song of the Year category until 2014. Using this logic, Soundkraft’s TikToker or Night Tempo’s Plastic Love would not be considered original songs. These genres argue the opposite. They argue that culture survives through reuse, through conversion and reinterpretation. Sampling, here, serves two different roles for two different groups, allowing one to look back wistfully while giving the other the opportunity to build something that moves forward.
But there’s a glaring problem that cannot be ignored. Sampling, for all its cultural richness, exists in a legal grey area, and despite the rise and importance of Arbantone, there is still the issue of copyright infringement. When a sample is used, especially without permission, the revenue has to go to the copyright owner. If the sample is cleared, the revenue that normally goes to the artist, producer, or label would have to be split to include the owner. In an interview with The Africa Report, award-winning producer and Arbantone pioneer Motif Di Don said that the first group of Arbantone artists did not do it for the money, “That was just a way for us to attract attention, and now that we have it, we’re doing everything from scratch, including producing fresh beats.” But intentions aside, while these seem unimportant to the nascent genre at the moment, they reveal a problem in the Kenyan music industry. Many of the songs being sampled exist in legal limbo, with their rights unclear and their original artists potentially unaware that their work is being used, let alone compensated. It may be that Arbantone’s act of cultural preservation sometimes happens at the expense of the very artists being preserved.
In a digital world that moves fast and forgets even faster, Arbantone and Future Funk slow things down just enough for us to listen back. To pull something old into the present and let it breathe again. When my cousin hears the same Jua Cali melody, sampled into something new, she's not accessing my memories of moments when I listened to this song. She's building her own. The song becomes hers, attached to her own moments, her own car rides, her own feelings. That's what the ghost in the sample does. It doesn't just haunt, it multiplies. It takes one person's past and turns it into many people's present.
As long as artists keep sampling, and listeners keep recognising themselves in those sounds, the ghost in the sample will linger forever.
