Zed Beats: how home studios reinvented Zambian pop music and gave young people a voice

Zed Beats is a music movement that evolved in the late 1980s when young producers started using computers to blend western music with local languages and flavour. Today it’s an umbrella term for popular urban music in Zambia. Musician and academic Mathew Tembo is a Zed Beats specialist. His PhD is on its history, production and musical labour from 1986 to 2024. We asked him to tell us about the music and how it shapes the country. What is Zed Beats? Zed Beats takes its name from the “Z” in…