Sampling lisbon: Kuduro and the lusophone imagination

Abstract

Beside Portugal’s iconic fado genre, recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2011, music scenes in Lisbon have diversified throughout the 2000s along with the affirmation of Portugal’s capital city on the stage of global attractiveness. This paper examines some music scenes in Lisbon in the late 2000s and early 2010s—especially hip-hop and Angolan kuduro played by the Luso-Angolan bands Buraka Som Sistema, and Batida, based in Lisbon. It discusses the ways in which the sampling technique has allowed for diverse forms of musical cosmopolitanism, performing connections with Africa, and the tentative affirmation by some Portuguese media in the late 2000s, of a musical Lusofonia.