Cool Affair: The New Age Fela

“Our music is a gear of the warrior” - Itu Neter on D.E.T.O.X by Cool Affair

I know what you’re thinking, and what you’re thinking is not what it actually is.

He doesn’t play the saxophone, he does not sing in pidgin, and he certainly does not have many wives. Sibusiso Ntombela aka Cool Affair is a young South African music producer, sound engineer and DJ based in the South of Johannesburg. He makes broken beats, Nu Jazz and Afrobeat, and has collaborated with various African thinkers, scholars and Black Power activists such as David Letsoalo, Tehuti Itu Neter, Azah, Dr Baba Buntu et al to further disseminate important messages pertaining to Blackness, Whiteness, masculinity, violence, death & immorality within the African context. Conscious, awake, bold in his lyricism, passionate and a true African patriot, Cool Affair channels the spirit of Fela Kuti in that he sings and speaks to power.

As a fan of his music as far back as the early 2010s, I have watched Cool Affair transform from being just another musical genius (we have plenty of those in Africa) to being one of the most important thinkers/speakers of our generation. When I first encountered his music 11 years ago, it was simply because I was a staunch house music head and I was particularly interested in South African music producers’ take on this style of music I grew up listening to, thus I interacted a lot with his music and many other compositions by his contemporaries like Nini Maluks, Clere Soulful, Griffith Malo, Louis Lunch and many others. This period (2010 - 2012) in South African dance music history is arguably the impetus to the rise of the Amapiano movement as we know it today, and Cool Affair is arguably one of the founding fathers of this style of house music fused with instrumental melodies dominated by the piano (or keys). Music producers like Brazo Wa Afrika and the late DukeSoul reached celebrity status as the purveyors of this style of house music, and for the first time in South African history we witnessed young black house music producers gaining respect and relevance as composers rather than as compilers and DJs.

One of Cool Affair’s classics titled Blue Note 1 from his Blue Note EP, which was a take on traditional jazz notes against the backdrop of Bruk beat, is an example of where the Amapiano sound started, before Kabza de Small, before the log drum and way before amapiano beats were accompanied by vocals. Music producers like Louis Lunch and Tekniq Ntuli followed suit borrowing from that Cool Affair sound to formulate and popularise what people eventually dubbed “Broken Beat Ya Mamelodi”, and boy did we have some mighty good times with those sounds in clubs and at kasi festivals. Fast forward to a couple of years later, Cool Affair is still the Prince of Broken Beat, but it seems to me that it wasn’t registered just how much he contributed to a style of music that many are now celebrating and building music careers on.

Needless to say, it is not his pioneering spirit that reminds me of the late great Fela Kuti.

The year was 2020, like many others, I witnessed Cool Affair going through a rebirth of some sort during that period. While many of us went back into writing and starting businesses we were initially too afraid to start, Cool Affair went back into himself to gift us with music I believe was more intentional and far more radical than pioneering a music style. With countless official and unofficial releases under his record label, Cool Affair Records, it is the year 2020 that I first saw Cool Affair taking on what he called “a robust approach to music” in that he began to boldly address matters of Black importance through lyrics, vocals and speeches by Black thinkers in his Oedipus Complex EP released in May 2020. It didn’t end there. By the end of 2021, Cool Affair had transformed into the kind of musician people would love to hate but couldn’t. By 2021 the same Cool Affair who had been educating us on groove theory and breaking beats was now urging us to think, to detoxify our minds, teaching us things about ourselves as a Black nation, as Black women and most importantly as Black youth. Self-transformation, Truth To Power, Divine Frequency, Bantu Intelligence, Black Femininity & Black Masculinity, Mind Control, Spiritual Power are some of the themes (read: track titles) Cool Affair now explores through his music.

In the words of Tehuti Itu Neter Makale, the first volume of Cool Affair’s Detox, Give The Enemy Back His Bullshit (2021) series “is the musical heralding of Afrikan-centred restorative voices that mainstream media maligns and occludes. It is an ensemble of Afrikan-centred scholars and Black Power activists who have positioned themselves to use their voices to call the Black Race to a place of self-reflection and introspection, and to create an energy space that will help the race reinvigorate itself by ridding itself of all forms of alienation resultant from a long psychohistory of consciousness falsification and cultural misorientation exerted by the invader race enemies of Mama Afrika and Her children. Along with these voices, Cool Affair muses over the losses Black people have endured over the centuries and urges us to think anew and to fight against neoliberalism. He urges us to awaken to things we have been sleeping on, to love ourselves as divinity intended, and to use this love for self and thy neighbor as a weapon of mass destruction.

Cool Affair is currently still in the South of Johannesburg working as a community leader, sound engineer, music producer and DJ. As a community leader he has founded VukaSouth which is a community organization aimed at unifying the Johannesburg South Populace. He is also a community developer at Afrikan Ubuntu Institution.

In August of 2023, Cool Affair assembled an array of exceptional musicians to bring us the Cool Affair Band Experience at Untitled Basement in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.