What is Ghetto Zouk? What is the connection to Kizomba and Zouk?

Summary: Ghetto Zouk is the name that the boys band “Quatro Plus” from the Netherlands gave to their music in the late 90s. The band dissolved in the 2010s and the singers moved on, but the “kiz” world keeps the name alive and use it for other slow / low-energy music, even if other similar styles exist.

Confused? I sure was! So remember that, to dance, you don’t need to know any of this. Just stop thinking and feel what the music asks for – and it’ll be OK 😊

From the Antilles to Africa

As we commented in another post, Zouk was huge from the beginning of the 80s in the Caribbean. Soon, Kassav’s own high-energy party music turned softer and more romantic (which got called Zouk Love), and lots of countries had lots of bands playing local variations: in the mid-90s, about 250 albums were published each summer!

Zouk Love music has its own dance in its native Caribbean. It’s danced differently to Kizomba (barely stepping), closer to Tarraxinha, which is a big hint towards how to understand the music. See the demo by the great Amaryllis Ag and Miguel Wawasse:

African countries in particular developed various flavors of Afro Zouk, which is Zouk influenced by each country’s local music. And music also moved through colonization links: artists from the French Antilles published music in France, and even represented the country in international competitions (like Zouk Machine’s Joelle Ursull in Eurovision 1990).

So, is Kizomba a kind of Afro Zouk?

Meanwhile, Zouk also had a huge impact in Angola (like in the rest of Africa), and Kassav’ toured there in 1985. The only museum of Zouk in the world is in Luanda!¹ For a long time, this impact was said to be the seed for Kizomba: the Afro Zouk from Angola, infused with Semba.

However, Eduardo Paim (“the Father of Kizomba”) has repeatedly said in interviews (including his interview with University of Kizomba) that actually the music that later would be called Kizomba started around 1979. By then, there was no Zouk yet! Paim mentioned that the influences came from Haitian music like Konpa and Kadans.

One jump further: Cape Verdeans in Europe. Ghetto Zouk.

As another example of local Afro Zouk fusions, Cape Verdeans mixed their Coladeira with Zouk to get Cola Zouk / Cabo Zouk / Cabo Love. But they went further.

In the late 90s, a group of 5 singers of Cape Verdean descent in the Netherlands (Nelson Freitas, Nilton Ramalho, Nelson Oliveira, Adilson Ben David and Edson Freitas) created a boys band named “Quatro Plus”. Together with Johnny Ramos, they named their music Ghetto Zouk at the turn of the 21st century. ²

Interestingly, they published their music in France – where African and Zouk music already had publishers and public. And they were just in time to ride the incoming wave of Kizomba (and Brazilian Zouk) dancing! So, for a few years around 2010 it was hard to hear anything other than Ghetto Zouk and Zouk Love in European “Kizomba” classes and festivals.³

Eddy Vents‘ theory is that Ghetto Zouk was so successful because of its proximity to R&B, which makes it easier to understand and like for Westerners. However, Ghetto Zouk is just one of many fusions of Zouk and R&B – more about that in a moment. Ghetto Zouk is also rather slow and simple, so it made life easier for Western dance instructors and DJs.

Why “simple”? Because typically there’s one very dominant voice, very few instruments and a rhythm box with a rather bare beat. In fact, in the video above you can hear that many times there are moments of actual silence between beats! If you wanted a song to make things easy, you couldn’t ask for much more than that. Compare to any other dance music styles, from kizomba to zouk to salsa to bachata: it’s rather threadbare.

And why “Ghetto”? Johnny Ramos explained in his interview that it was a fashionable word in the 90’s hip hop culture, so they just went with it.

Is Ghetto Zouk still produced in the 2020s?

Quatro Plus used the name Ghetto Zouk as their brand, and their music remains memorable today. However, a couple of the singers have commented in interviews that they are happy to move on from that era, and even get annoyed when people think that all their music was (even in that golden era) just Ghetto Zouk.

So it’s probably fair to say that Ghetto Zouk was a fashion that came and went, just like the music of other boys bands. For example, in 2017, a famous organizer created an online petition for a Quatro Plus revival concert. It only got 55 signatures.

For comparison, Kassav’ original Zouk still fills stadiums today – 40+ years later.

However, while Quatro Plus were producing Ghetto Zouk, various other singers created similar music and started their own music styles. Almost 10 years earlier there were already big hits of Zouk Love, like Jean-Michel Rotin’s.

Rotin is particularly interesting here because soon he started mixing his Zouk Love with R&B. Around ’96, Kaysha (back then still relatively unknown) rapped and danced for him, for what they called Zouk R&B. Later, Kaysha moved towards the Zouk Love side; he first used the name Candy Zouk and eventually turned it into his current label SushiRaw.

Similarly, the singer C4 Pedro has its label BLS (Blue Light Song). And yet another label is M&N Pro. These singers/producers typically whisper their names and labels in the lyrics, so probably those names ring a bell! But at the same time they all collaborated with each other, and/or made remixes of Western music, so a lot of their music has a pretty similar feeling. In fact, much of what people today call Ghetto Zouk was actually the other brands.

Ironically, those labels are still active… except for Ghetto Zouk, which seems to be commercially dead. For example, if someone published a song as “a SushiRaw song” or “a Blue Light song”, probably the label owners wouldn’t be happy! In contrast, Quatro Plus have moved on, so no one seems to care when people randomly use the name Ghetto Zouk as a generic term.

So maybe that is the reason why Ghetto Zouk keeps being mentioned in the world of “Kizomba-inspired” dance styles (“kiz fusion”, etc). And well, when Urban Kiz got its name around 2015, the Ghetto Zouk brand was so omnipresent that maybe it just stuck. But as of 2024 it looks to me like Urban Kiz dancing has evolved in such a direction that Ghetto Zouk no longer really works for the style, so at this point maybe it’s more like a tradition for them.

And so, as of 2024, when a party plays Ghetto Zouk, my observation is that not only it doesn’t really work for Kizomba dancers, but now it also doesn’t for Urban Kiz dancers. It only remains an option for Tarraxinha… and for Brazilian Zouk dancers.

So, can you dance Kizomba with Ghetto Zouk music?

Sometimes people ask this kind of question, and I think it’s important to unpack the various ways it can be understood.

For starters, in a party, you do you. Parties are to have fun! You can dance Kizomba to Ghetto Zouk music, just like you could dance Salsa to Ghetto Zouk music if you really wanted to. No one will stop you. There is no Kizomba police to take you to Kizomba jail.

Having said that, consider what would happen if you actually ask a Salsa dancer to use Ghetto Zouk music: surely they won’t be happy. The music might be beautiful, but its energy just doesn’t work for that kind of dancing. So either the music changes, or your dancing changes. And the same happens when trying to dance Kizomba to Ghetto Zouk music. That is musicality, after all: a good dancer will adapt to the music.

And so in Ghetto Zouk we have slow, simple music that is easy to listen to and to understand for beginners, but at the same time doesn’t give you much to work with. Tarraxinha is then the simple, natural option, but Westerners / beginners don’t feel comfortable getting so close! In my observation, that’s how you end up with “kizomba fusion”: people trying to dance kizomba with music that doesn’t give them enough raw material, and then trying to pimp the result up with … whatever else. But the “whatever” has to be something that is easy to teach, because we’re talking about beginners / Westerners: so everyone ends up with body rolls, simplified tango moves, easy hip hop isolations. Which is just the “kizomba” that most of Europe did until around 2015, when actual “kizomba umbrella” music started to spread.

OK, so what exactly is the musicality difference? The obvious answer is to check what Angolans do in Angola: do they listen to Ghetto Zouk in Angola? Do they dance to it?

What about Ghetto Zouk in Angola?

Ghetto Zouk has/had a huge following in Angola. For example, C4 Pedro had lots of prizes there! But Angolans rather listen to it, not dance Kizomba to it. In fact, as an European, I was surprised to find that in Angola it was very rare to hear slow, Ghetto Zouk-like music in a party; it was rather for an “end-of-party-dance” – where actual couples might stay for a last close dance (Tarraxinha!) while the rest get the hint that it’s time to go home.

I think this contrast is very interesting because it helps understand the musicality of those who grew up with this music: Ghetto Zouk is generally too low-energy to sustain the walking feeling of Kizomba, but it’s great for a “huggy” or “floaty” feeling – like that of Tarraxinha. So, if you don’t feel like walking to Ghetto Zouk and Zouk Love, don’t worry – you’re on the right track .

1. A short documentary on the museum is available in Youtube. ↩︎
2. Many more details in University of Kizomba’s interview with Johnny Ramos. ↩︎
3. Cape Verdeans are said among PALOPs to be good musicians and businessmen. Both are on display here ↩︎

Expanded from a Facebook post published originally on April 7, 2021