kwaito

Noun

kwaito (uncountable)

1. (South Africa) A style of music featuring words chanted over house music, originating in Johannesburg during the 1990s.
   • Kwaito is a genre-defying style blending the programmed percussion and vibrant call-and-response vocals of 1980s bubble-gum with British garage, American hip-hop and the new Jamaican ragga music; this inter-cultural mix, in turn, is framed by laid-back bass lines that can sound like Chicago-based...2005, Martin Scherzinger, “The Globalisation of South African Art Music”, in Christine Lucia, editor, The World of South African Music, Cambridge Scholars Press, →ISBN
   • The residue of this otherworldliness is still audible in contemporary kwaito, which consistently thwarts any simple identification with ethnicity, language, or social position.2016, Gavin Steingo, Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 43
2. (South Africa) The meme or milieu associated with the music style.
   • Sivuyile is part of the kwaito generation.