Jose Mc and Juicy Landy - Kumbaya

Topic: Hip Hop
Hip hop developed outside the established channels for music promotion in the United States. DJ Kool Herc said they were too young to enter the disco clubs and gangs terrorized those that did exist in the Bronx, so they created their own venues. [1] Radio stations didn’t play their records,[2] and in fact, no one recorded hip hop until Sylvia Robinson organized the Sugarhill Gang in 1979. Its "Rapper’s Delight" [3] was the first record noticed by Billboard. [4]

Grandmaster Flash made one of the first popular videos for "The Message" in 1982, [5] but MTV didn’t show videos by Black artists until pressured to include Michael’s Jackson’s "Billie Jean" [6] in 1983. Once MTV began playing rap records in the mid-1980s, [7] videos became the medium that spread the genre outside the United States.

In Uganda, nearly 25% of the population lived in poverty in 2009 [8] and the electricity needed for radios and television was scarce or unreliable in rural areas. [9] According to Hendrik Rood, "more than 95 percent of internet connections are made using mobile phones." [10] It’s not even clear if Jose Mc and Juicy Landy’s 2013 version of "Kumbaya" was ever a record rather than a tape made for use in clubs that was turned into a video. [11]

The video had absorbed the aesthetics of MTV. It had two components that were cut into small segments and intermixed in a fast-paced montage. One followed two young men who met some women with whom they flirted, then danced. The other showed Jose and Landy individually singing and together in changing positions.

Like African-American hip hop, "Kumbaya" used drums as the primary accompaniment. Jose and Landy were from Masaka in an area that once was part of the Buganda kingdom. Alfdaniels Mabingo said drum ensembles composed of drums of different sizes and timbres were used in the court and villages. [12] Jose and Landy had drums playing different tones in separate rhythmic patterns.

Many American rappers adopted a verse-chorus refrain with one or several artists chanting the verses. In the latter half of "Kumbaya," Jose and Landy added a native flute [13] to the drums during the verses. They used a synthesizer [14] with the drums in the chorus.

Jose and Landy different from African American rappers, because Landy sang his verses and the chorus, while Jose’s raps were melodic. I don’t know if they were using Swahili or Luganda; the one was an official language for the nation, but the Baganda language was the lingua franca in the capital of Kampala. Jude Ssempuuma said television, radio, and other entertainment forms were "engineered by the Baganda and their performance is in the Luganda language." [15]

The difference between the languages was Luganda was tonal and Swahili was not. The one would have lead to raps that had melodic traits, and might have created an aesthetic preference for musical speech even for chants in Swahili or English.

The word "kumbaya" was heard in the sung chorus:

"Koom-bye-ya
Koom-ba-ya ah baby"

Since the video dramatized courtship rituals, one could assumed the word was used to describe events when men and woman came together to enjoy themselves. One person wrote on YouTube "Kumbaya" was a "NYC song children set." [16] Given the vagaries of Google Translate, this could have meant it was specifically a children’s song brought from the United States, or that it carried connotations of playtime.

Performers
Vocal Soloist: Jose Mc, Juicy Landy
Vocal Group: not identified
Instrumental Accompaniment: flute, synthesizer
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum ensemble

Credits
"Juicy Landy rose to fame in 2013 with the song Kumbaya, which he composed with Jose MC Da virus in Masaka." [17]

Notes on Lyrics
Language: Bantu
Pronunciation: koom bye ya

Basic Form: verse-chorus
Chorus Length: four lines
Chorus Rhyme Pattern: ABAB (unday-ally-bye ya-baby) [18]
Chorus Line Repetition Pattern: four lines repeated

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: CVCV₁C

Singing Style: one syllable to one note. A group joined Landy on the repetitions of the kumbaya chorus.

Vocal-Instrumental Dynamics: drums, flute, and synthesizer were softer than Jose, Landy, or the vocal group.

Notes on Performance
Location: the video was shot outdoors on a dirt road beside a tall stone wall.

Microphones: unlike rappers in this country who always appeared with microphones in videos, none were shown in "Kumbaya."

Clothing: Jose wore tee-shirts with logos and blue slacks. His hair, which was in corn rows, was often covered by a baseball cap. In some sequences, he was wearing oversized glasses. Landy wore a white tee-shirt and jeans. He had short hair and a small chin beard.

The girl who danced with Landy was slender with straight hair. The one with Jose Mc had a normal build and natural hair. Both wore long shirts that covered their shorts and left their legs bare.

Notes on Movement
Jose and Landy adapted many of poses used by African-American rappers. They sat side by side on low bicycles and back to back. In both positions they moved their arms from the elbows. When they were standing, they bent their knees as they talked or sang.

The dancing was similar to the simplified jitterbug we did in junior high in Michigan in the late 1950s. The couples faced each other, held hands, and moved toward each other and back. Sometimes, the girl turned under the upraised arm of the boy. In this video, more intimate steps were suggested by close ups of the couple’s knees and feet.

Notes on Audience
"Kumbaya" was nominated for the Best Southern Region Song for the HiPippo awards in 2013. [19] Landy remembered "the ladies loved that song a lot." [20]

Notes on Performers
Landy was born Frank Walugembe "in Kibinge Village, Masaka District," and went to high school in Kyotera, some 25 miles away. He started writing songs when he was in Kyotera, where he organized entertainment for his classmates. At the time he was interviewed by Brain Mugyenyi, he was 23-years-old and owned a bar in Masaka. [21]

Jose became a solo performer in 2015 [22] using the name Jose MC Da Virus, and had a song nominated for a HiPippo award in 2016. A spokesman for the music promotion group said Jose had "managed to spill a song that is fresh and beautiful, exactly why he probably got nominated by the fans and other stakeholders." [23] A gossip website confirmed he was from Masaka. [24]

Availability
YouTube: uploaded by tamjoe7 on 18 July 2013. Other versions were uploaded; one was cropped and edited.

End Notes
1. Davy D. "Interview w/ DJ Kool Herc." His website.

2. Richard Simmons said "Black radio hated rap from the start and there’s still a lot of resistance to it." He attributed their reactions to a preference for songs that fit western musical aesthetics. He thought they saw "assimilation as the best way of becoming successful in a white culture and that means emphasizing things that are white. Rap is a return to black culture, a step back from that assimilation." Quoted by Robert Hilburn. "Rap—The Power and the Controversy." Los Angeles Times. 4 February 1990.

3. Sugarhill Gang. "Rapper’s Delight." Sugar Hill Records SH-542. 1979.
4. Wikipedia. "DJ Kool Herc."
5. For more on "The Message," see the post for 26 March 2018.
6. Michael Jackson. "Billie Jean." Epic A13 3084. 1983.
7. Wikipedia. "MTV."
8. Wikipedia. "Uganda."

9. Alfdaniels Mabingo. "The Drum of the Black Africans." 2012. Revised and translated by Hermelinde Steiner. Face Music website.

10. Hendrik Rood. "Uganda – Mobile Market – Insights, Statistics and Forecasts – BuddeComm – BuddeComm." Stratix Consulting. Citation and quotation from Wikipedia, Uganda.

11. No record details were given on YouTube or in the HiPippo publicity for the song.
12. Mabingo.

13. "Traditional Instruments of the Uganda People." Revised by Hermelinde Steiner, perhaps from Mabingo. Face Music website.

14. It might have been a local instrument, but did not sound like a xylophone or thumb piano.

15. Jude Ssempuuma. "The Emergence of an Indigenous Language as Lingua Franca: The Case of Luganda in Uganda." 119-142 in Postcolonial Linguistic Voices. Edited by Eric A. Anchimbe and Stephen A. Mforteh. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. 131.

16. Rahmah Leilah wrote "NYC song abaana beka" on YouTube. September 2017. Google Translate indicated the language was Swahili. Since if did not have a Luganda option, I don’t know if the text was similar in both languages.

17. Brian Mugyenyi. "Bad Management Killed My Music – Landy." 26 August 2017. Sqoop and other websites.

18. This was a transcription of the sounds I heard, not the actual syllables sung by Landy.

19. Mugyenyi. HiPippo awards were given by a social media company of the same name located in Kampala. (Wikipedia. "HiPipo Limited.")

20. Juicy Landy. Quoted by Mugyenyi.
21. Mugyenyi.
22. Mugyenyi.

23. Mohamed Kimbugwe. "HiPipo Music Awards 2016; Best Regional Song Review." HiPippo website. 1 May 2016. The song was "Omukajanga."

24. "Sheilah Don Zella now Bonking JOSE MC DA VIRUS." Ki Gossip website. 5 April 2016.