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    The Long Wave: How Juls journeyed the Black Atlantic to curate his sound

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    Hi everyone. The first thing you’ll notice about this newsletter is that I’m not Nesrine. But don’t worry, we don’t need her to have a good time. I’m Jason, the editor of The Long Wave, and I’ll be writing the newsletter this week and occasionally in the future.Last month I attended a pop-up in London for the pioneering British-Ghanaian DJ and producer Juls. If you’re a fan of African music, like me, you’ll know that when a track opens with “Juls, baby” you’re about to hear straight fire (for the uninitiated, start with Wizkid’s True Love and Wande Coal’s So Mi So). So I was very excited to meet the man himself as he celebrated 10 years shaping modern Afrobeats, and the launch of his most recent album, which takes listeners on a journey through the sounds and traditions of the global Black diaspora. First, here’s the weekly roundup.Weekly roundupView image in fullscreenRacist texts after Trump’s win | Black people across the US have reported receiving racist messages telling them they have been selected to “pick cotton” and need to report to “the nearest plantation” in the aftermath of Trump’s election win. The president-elect’s campaign has denied any association with them.Big oil payouts in Guyana | Hundreds of thousands of Guyanese citizens at home and abroad will receive a payout of GY$100,000, as the country attempts to redistribute its oil wealth, Natricia Duncan reports. Since Guyana began crude oil extraction in late 2019, its economy has enjoyed incredible growth.Buz Stop Boys sweep Ghana’s streets | A group of young professionals and tradespeople are “driving a new wave of civic responsibility in Ghana” cleaning and sweeping away rubbish in Greater Accra, as well as clearing gutters and cutting overgrown grass. The collective hopes to inspire environmental consciousness and investment in proper methods of waste disposal.A toast to Abidjan cocktail week | Ivory Coast’s drinks festival, founded by the doctor turned mixologist Alexandre Quest Bede and “Afrofoodie” blogger Yasmine Fofana, is encouraging Africans to embrace their roots. Eromo Egbejule reports that “due in part to colonial-era stigmatisation and bans, local gins and other alcoholic drinks have long been seen as unsafe [and] inferior”.London Rastafarian HQ revived | A new exhibition will tell the story of the temple at St Agnes Place in London, which became a focal point for Rastafarian religion after a takeover in 1972. As Lanre Bakare reports, Echoes Within These Walls hopes to “dispel myths about the religion, which continues to be a big influence in popular culture”.In depth: A cultural odysseyView image in fullscreenWhen Juls conceptualised the album Peace & Love, he envisioned a cultural odyssey that drew on Black traditions, sounds and instruments around the world. Much of the album was made in Jamaica and Ghana, where he would create beats on his mother’s balcony in Esiama, or rent a beach house in Kokrobite so he could hear the ocean. But to finish it off sonically, Juls headed to Brazil in the summer of 2023, where he added further details to his tracks. “On the album we’ve got a song called Saint Tropez, which has elements of amapiano and highlife, but then there’s some triangle sounds that I got from Brazil. There’s a mix of different sounds I’m hearing as I’m going on these trips.”These trips were also an opportunity for Juls to enrich himself culturally. In Jamaica, he visited Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong Studio in Kingston, where he made beats. “I was just connecting with a lot of people who are deep in reggae music history. We spoke a lot to the Marley family, and we spoke to Bob Marley’s engineer. It was a real music journey. I got to meet Augustus Pablo’s son – we went to his record store and bought some vinyls as well.”In Salvador, home to Brazil’s largest Black community, he was reminded of Yoruba culture – “they still practise a lot of rituals over there”. He made similar observations in Jamaica: “When you go to the Accompong [Maroon] village, they practise a lot of the Ashanti rituals from Ghana. So there’s a lot of similarities between parts of the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa that I found interesting.”Juls was also struck by the use of instruments in the places he visited and how similar percussive sounds were transformed in new contexts. A staple of Afro-Brazilian music is the agogô, a bell with origins in Yoruba and Edo traditions. “But we don’t call it that in Ghana, we call it Gan Gan,” Juls says. Where Ghanaians use the kpanlogo drum, Brazilians may use the atabaque.For Juls, the Black diaspora’s use of drums gave him an opportunity to “play with all of these sounds” and provide a deeper layer of meaning to his music. On the opening track of his album, Leap of Faith, featuring the British artist Wretch 32, Nyabinghi drums are played, “these drums are used by Jamaicans and Ghanaians as a form of communication, celebrating their ancestors and showing praise. And they were also used to communicate in the village back in the day. In the beginning of the song there’s a guy from my father’s home town, Jamestown, who says: ‘Everybody gather around and listen’.”‘I like to bring people together’View image in fullscreenJuls is considered a maestro of Afrobeats, evidenced by the long list of artists who bring him on as a collaborator, but his curiosity stretches far beyond whatever limited perception people have of the genre, as he explores the interconnectedness of the diaspora. He loves mixing African and Brazilian music in his sets. He recounts performing in São Paulo, where the Brazilians were pleasantly surprised by his extensive knowledge of their genres.That passionate embrace of similarities and differences is something he literally wears around his neck. He shows me his chain, which he tells me is “an Adinkra symbol called Funtunfunefu Denkyemfunefu, which means unity and diversity. And that’s just something that I live by – I just like to bring everybody together from different tribes.” But in African music, there has at times been backlash over incorporations of different genres into a broader Afrobeats sound – there have especially been concerns around Nigerian artists “appropriating” amapiano music, which is native to South Africa.But for Juls, this melting pot of African genres can be embraced so long as what is produced is always in dialogue with its originators. “I’ve tapped into amapiano quite a few times but I always make sure I’m doing it with a South African artist or producer,” he says. “There’s a song on my album called Muntuwam, which has an element of amapiano, and on there I have Nkosazana’s Daughter. She listened to the song and loved it, which made me feel great because that’s coming from a South African who’s deep into that sound. It means you’re on the right path.”Juls also sees this as something that charts the progression of Afrobeats from its birth in the early 2000s DJ sets – “data, internet, structure”. There’s an ability to authentically tap into genres around the world, from fújì to highlife and kwaito to soukous, because you’re able to readily access information about this music. Afrobeats is thus less a coherent genre and more a label used for convenience. “If you really want to tap into the proper sound, you have to travel to these countries specifically, and do even deeper research.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis curiosity is evidently booming for Black artists. He cites Asake’s collaboration with the Afro-Brazilian singer-songwriter Ludmilla – Whine (one of my most played tracks from Lungu Boy) and even Tyler, the Creator’s sampling of the Zamrock band Ngozi Family on NOID from his latest album, Chromakopia, as some of his favourite recent Black Atlantic link-ups.It’s clear Juls is ready for his sound to enter a new chapter, bringing the Black diaspora with him. “The first 10 years have been about putting people in a good mood; the next 10 years, I’m trying to make people dance.”What we’re intoView image in fullscreen

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played Tyla’s Push 2 Start music video – that song! That choreography! Her performance at the MTV EMAs on Sunday was electrifying. Jason

    One of the advantages of living on the African continent is all the African content on streaming platforms. This week, the most watched movie on Netflix is the South African Umjolo – the Gone Girl. It is tagged as “Steamy. Quirky. Dramedy”. I’ve heard enough. Nesrine

    I’m obsessed with Toyo Tastes, a British-Nigerian food blogger and cook who makes everything from plantain and efo riro croquettes to gizdodo vol-au-vents. Jason

    I am a tragic cyclist, in that I love it but am not gifted at it. (And all the kit puts me off.) There may also be a cultural element – which is why I’m excited to dig into my copy of New Black Cyclones – Racism, Representation and Revolutions of Power in Cycling by Marlon Lee Moncrieffe. What a title. Nesrine
    Black catalogueView image in fullscreenAbi Morocco Photos, the Lagos photography studio operated by husband-and-wife John and Funmilayo Abe, captured portraits of Nigerians from the 1970s to 2006. A new exhibition at Autograph in London focuses on the studio’s formative decade in the 1970s, showcasing Lagos street-style and the characters who made up the every day hustle and bustle of the city.Signal boostLast week we wrote about how Nigerians have responded to Kemi Badenoch’s rise to the top of the Conservative party in the UK. Here, a reader offers their response:“I’ve always maintained that people who expect Kemi Badenoch to be different don’t understand anything about her background. Her education and exposure would also have imbued her with a certain amount of intellectual superiority.“As a fellow Nigerian who also spent her formative years in an upper middle class family steeped in academia, nothing about her surprises me. I just wish we would all stop identifying with people simply because they are black/African/Nigerian etc. She is her own person and this so-called achievement has no bearing whatsoever on the issues faced by black and brown people in the UK.” Kan Frances-Benedict in Kent, UKTap inDo you have any thoughts or responses to this week’s newsletter? Share your feedback by replying to this, or emailing us on thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue. More

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      in US Politics

      A small town in Jamaica watches Harris campaign with pride – and wariness

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      Brown’s Town, in the Jamaican parish of St Ann – where as a child, Kamala Harris spent many holidays with her family – has the unmistakable atmosphere of a close-knit rural Caribbean community.Narrow roads, cocooned by bowing trees and lush vegetation, wind past concrete houses and the rolling hills of the Dry Harbour mountain range.It gets busier in the town itself, where vehicles toot their horns as they manoeuvre past colourfully painted shops and the local market that a young Kamala used to visit with her parents.The town of 6,000 inhabitants is named after an Irish enslaver, Hamilton Brown, who is believed to have been an ancestor of Harris’s paternal great-grandmother Christiana Brown, known in the family as Miss Chrishy.Heading out of the market area, the road arrives at the Harris family estate in Orange Hill, where Harris’s 86-year-old father, the distinguished economist Donald Harris, was born in 1938.The estate now has a quarry and some family homes. But it was once a place of adventure and delight for Harris, recalled her first cousin Sherman Harris, as he pointed to the areas where they used to play together.View image in fullscreenOnly a few days younger than the vice-president, Sherman remembers the Christmas holidays Harris and her younger sister, Maya, spent with their family in the Caribbean.“Maya was a little quiet, but Kamala was like a tomboy, running, jumping and leaping around the mountain areas. Miss Chrishy had to call her and tell her to ‘get inside now, it’s dinner time – come and stop the jumping over those places’,” he said.“And she would just do it for the better because her father encouraged her,” he added.Even as a child, Sherman said, Kamala asked questions that belied her age and demonstrated “a deep level of intelligence and a mindset far above what we were accustomed to as little kids”.When she could not get answers from her peers, she would turn to her dad, he said.Harris has spoken fondly about her parents – Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan, a biomedical scientist who was born and grew up in India – describing “a home filled with laughter and music: Aretha, Coltrane and Miles”.She paid tribute to her father for believing in her, saying: “At the park, my mother would say: ‘Stay close.’ But my father would say, as he smiled: ‘Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.’ From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless.”The New York Times reported this month that relations between father and daughter grew strained after her parents’ divorce in 1972. The relationship worsened over the years, according to the article, which claimed that Harris had been upset when her father did not attend Gopalan’s funeral in 2009.Sherman dismissed the reported rift as “total rubbish”.“We know that, but we don’t fight issues with people because it’s a losing battle. People have all kinds of different views. I even saw [people] on social media saying her father said he is not going to vote for her, but it’s not true. He is in full support of her, and he is happy for her,” he said.After her parents’ divorce, Harris’s childhood was mostly split between Montreal, where her mother taught at McGill University, and California, where her father taught at Stanford University.“My father, like so many Jamaicans, has immense pride in our Jamaican heritage and instilled that same pride in my sister and me,” Harris told the Washington Post in 2021. “We love Jamaica. He taught us the history of where we’re from, the struggles and beauty of the Jamaican people, and the richness of the culture.”View image in fullscreenDonald Trump has sought to question Harris’s mixed heritage, falsely claiming that she had only identified with her mother’s ethnicity. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went – she became a Black person,” he said.But Sherman Harris said that the connection between his cousin and Jamaica has always been strong: “Jamaicans are indeed proud of her, and Jamaicans ought to be proud of her,” he said.Certainly, in St Ann parish, there has been strong support for the Democratic candidate. Mayor Michael Belnavis told CNN: “You have to recognize individuals who come from humble abodes and really excel … Coming from Brown’s Town is as humble as it gets.”Harris’s achievements – as San Francisco district attorney, California senator, vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate – have inspired Jamaicans across the island.“It says to me that it doesn’t matter your race or your background. As long as you hold your head up high, know what you want and go for it, you can be whatever you want to be,” said Alexcia White, a journalism student in Kingston. “She just makes me proud to know that she is of Jamaican descent and making big waves in the US.”Others question whether a Harris presidency would actually bring any concrete benefits for the country.“Will she do anything that will improve our economy? I don’t see how her becoming president will affect Jamaicans,” said architecture student Dana McCallum, who expressed hope Harris could make US visas more accessible for Jamaicans if she won.Marlon Hill, a Jamaican-American lawyer who served as an elector for Florida for Barack Obama in 2008, warned about overstating Harris’s connection to Jamaica, adding that “Kamala’s immigrant story is unique, and we should not draw a straight line to it being exactly the same as our own experience”.He said: “Jamaicans want her to say more vocal, visible things about their connection. And I don’t know if we’re going to get that in this campaign because she’s running to be the president of the entire United States of America, and not just for Americans of Jamaican descent.“What I would say, though, is that when she wins, it’s going to be up to us, as Jamaican Americans, to hold her accountable to have a keen interest in her heritage and in how that experience can be leveraged for the benefit of Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean.”Not all Jamaican Americans are Democrats: Commonwealth Games gold medalist Claston Bernard, who ran for the United States House of Representatives as a Republican in 2021, said that, notwithstanding Harris’s Jamaican roots, he could not support her policies, citing his views on religious freedom, abortion and wealth taxes. “Jamaicans should be very cautious about getting behind socialist policies that do not support wealth building, are a threat to religious worship, or attack the rights of people to bear arms to protect themselves and their properties,” he said.Whatever their views, the elections on 5 November are expected to be a historic moment for Jamaicans at home, in the US and around the world. In the small community of Brown’s Town, Sherman and other residents will be looking forward to the moment Kamala is declared president of the US.“I have no doubt that the American people will favour her because she is getting good support,” Sherman said, adding: “She is going to make history, and Jamaica’s name, its flag, is going to fly high once more!” More