A major shift took place in the early 2000s in the Zimbabwean music industry, and it wasn't just organic, it was policy-driven. The Broadcasting Services Act of 2001 required that at least 75% of the music played on Zimbabwe's radio and TV stations be locally produced. That quota created sudden, huge demand for homegrown music, and a wave of new, hungry artists rushed to fill it, blending hip hop, R&B, reggae, dancehall, and kwaito with Shona and Ndebele lyrics. The genre that resulted became known as Urban Grooves, and it made household names of artists like Winky D, Maskiri, Roki, and Extra Large almost overnight.
In this documentary from Disrapt TV, our own Elliot Twist looks at the beginning of the genre, its mistakes, its wins, and where it stands today, from Urban Grooves' policy-driven boom to its evolution into what's now known as Zimdancehall.
Urban Grooves' dominance didn't last past the 2000s. Through the 2010s, Zimdancehall took over as the genre of choice for the country's urban youth, and a lot of the original Urban Grooves generation either relocated to South Africa and beyond or drifted out of the industry altogether. But its fingerprints are still all over Zimbabwean pop music today, since it was Urban Grooves that first proved local audiences would embrace homegrown music sung in Shona and Ndebele over imported hip hop and R&B, a template Zimdancehall (and its biggest star, Winky D) simply carried forward.
