Sungura

Sungura runs 110 to 130 BPM with arrangements built around interlocking electric-guitar lines — a lead guitarist plays melodic runs over a rhythm guitarist who maintains a steady ostinato — backed by bass, kit and occasional keyboards. The genre borrows the two-guitar architecture from Congolese soukous and Kenyan benga but slows it down and gives the vocal a more conversational role. Lyrics are sung in Shona (sometimes Ndebele) and treat everyday subjects: marriage troubles, work, AIDS, social commentary. Songs run six to ten minutes with multiple sections that include a long instrumental dance break in the second half.

Sungura emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s as Zimbabwean musicians like Ephraim Joe and the Sungura Boys, John Chibadura and Leonard Dembo adapted East African and Congolese guitar-band styles to Shona-language content. Independence in 1980 created an audience hungry for Black Zimbabwean popular music, and the Gramma Records label became the genre's commercial home. Alick Macheso took the form to its commercial peak in the late 1990s and 2000s with multiple platinum-selling cassettes and CDs. The genre has remained Zimbabwe's dominant pop format alongside Zimdancehall and gospel.

Listen for the two guitars: the lead guitar plays a melodic counterpoint while the rhythm guitar plays a repeating pattern, often eight bars long, that the entire song is built around. The bass plays a walking line that doubles the rhythm guitar at the octave, which gives sungura its distinctive low-end. Alick Macheso's signature is a quick bass-run lick at the end of each verse, which he punctuates with a vocal shout.

Alick Macheso's Simbaradzo (2000) is a canonical sungura album. Leonard Dembo's Chitekete (1991) is the genre's 1990s signature single.

Leonard Dembo's Chitekete sold over 100,000 cassettes in Zimbabwe in 1991, a figure that no domestic record matched for over a decade; he died of complications from AIDS in 1996 at age 36.