So I was listening to France Culture, as one does, and they were speaking about Angolan history and music in the 20th Century. Long story short, they played this song:
They played it after telling a certain anecdote on why, the creator of the dance, decided to dance like this. Now, I'm going to straight up copy from wikipedia because, they could have also mentioned the next paragraph because it goes hard, in many senses:
According to Tony Amado, self-proclaimed creator of Kuduro, he got the idea for the dance, which predated the music (making dance the foremost part of this genre and something Amado frequently emphasizes),[4] after seeing Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1989 film Kickboxer, in which he appears in a bar drunk, and dances in a hard and unusual style.[6][7] As Vivian Host points out in her article, despite the common assumption that "world music" from non-Western countries holds no commonalities with Western modern music, Angolan kuduro does contain "elements in common with punk, deep tribal house, and even Daft Punk."[8] And although Angolan kuduro reflects an understanding and an interpretation of Western musical forms, the world music category that it fits under, tends to reject the idea of Western musical imperialism.[8] DJ Riot of Sistema said, "Kuduro was never world music… It wasn’t born on congas and bongos, as some traditional folk-music. It was kids making straight-up dance-music from, like, ’96. Playing this new music, this new African music, that feels straight-up political in itself."[9]
Kuduro also was birthed out of the political climate that was taking place at the time of its origins. When looking at certain dance moves within the Kuduro genre, one can notice that the moves emulate that of a disabled person and their stature or movements. Given that there was a civil war taking place during the birthing of Kuduro and there were actual mine fields that blew off people's limbs, it is discernible to see why Kuduro dance moves mimic an amputee's movement. Kuduro as a dance genre is different than most in the fact that expands it inclusivity to disabled bodies and rewrites notions and narratives of Black disabled sexuality, given the erotic heteronormative nature of the dance moves.[10]
