National Geographic Music (National Geographic)

It was just about two years ago that we first heard of Lisbon's Buraka Som Sistema and their raw, hyperkinetic take on Angola's kuduro dance music.

We had been sent a riveting promo video (embedded below) that was unlike anything we had seen before. Shot with handheld cams in the streets of Angola's capitol, Luanda, the video came on like a standard African poverty-porn documentary-until it exploded into a dance party featuring some of the wildest freestyle dancing this side of the equator (like krumping, but from the Motherland).

The track itself was irresistable, too; a murderous urban dance mashup - something like a collision between Brazilian baile funk and UK grime - with machine gun lyrics in Kimbundu and a schoolyard taunt from M.I.A. It was the first taste of kuduro that most Stateside music fans had ever heard and it left folks wanting more.

For those who don't know, kuduro means something like "stiff bottom" in Kimbundu, the language of Luanda's dancehalls, bars and markets, where the music is most likely to be heard. It takes its name from the women who drop it like it's hot when the kuduro beat drops-not unlike soca in Trinidad or dancehall in Jamaica. In fact, the sound owes its origin to soca, zouk, dancehall and other Caribbean music imported into Angola in the late '80s.

Angolans, who had endured one of Africa's longest running civil wars from 1975 until 2002, didn't have much in the way of a functioning entertainment industry at the time, so the stripped-down turntablist aesthetic of hip-hop and dancehall was the perfect blueprint to launch kuduro. Early pioneers like Tony Amado and MC Sebem provided the sound and vision, and
throughout the '90s and this decade the music expanded and mutated, keeping up with the latest Western electronic and dance music, while folding in more explicitly African and Angolan rhythms. With the ceasefire in 2002, and Angola's booming oil economy - not to mention imports of increasingly cheap digital music technology - kuduro went both global and viral; catching on first in Lisbon, and now, worldwide.

Buraka Som Sistema first came together in Lisbon, in the multicultural Buraca suburb of Lisbon-an area with a heavy Angolan population. The group was founded by Li'l John, DJ Riot, Conductor and Kalaf Ângelo, releasing their first "progressive kuduro" record, From Buraka To The World in 2006. That record was a European sensation, and won them two MTV Europe Video Music Awards, paving the way for this 2007 collaboration with M.I.A., "Sound of Kuduro". The track ended up on Buraka Som Sistema's 2008 album, Black Diamond, the group's fiercest disc to date.

So why are we shining the spotlight on a video that's already two years old? Well for starters, it's still pretty damn cool... but mostly because Buraka Som Sistema is making a rare New York appearance this week. And since we haven't been lucky enough to catch them at any of their U.S. festival gigs so far, we are very excited to finally see them live...