Black Coffee Says He Aspires To Work With Kanye In The Future

The DJ/producer Black Coffee, real name Nkosinathi Maphumulo, is becoming one of South Africa’s most famous musicians: His latest album, Pieces Of Me, which came out in his home country last year, was recently released in the U.S. by Ultra Music — a label that has a knack for repackaging dance music from abroad for the cautious listeners that populate America’s mainstream.

But creating dance floor mayhem is not the end game for Maphumulo. “I want to be a producer, not a house music producer,” he tells Billboard Dance. “My next album, I want to be able to have Kanye, [but] not force Kanye on a house track.”

Maphumolo’s aspirations are reflected in his references — the artists he hopes to emulate are not just those who have achieved fame in the world of house music but those, even from other genres and art forms, who have acquired a larger cultural significance. “Look at French Montana,” he says. “He’s from Morocco, but it doesn’t even come up. He’s part of the scene.” Maphumolo fires off an example from his homeland as well: “Charlize Theron is part of the scene. She’s not, ‘oh, that South African.'”

Maphumolo has been fighting this battle for a long time. House music began to pick up steam in South Africa after the release of a compilation titled Fresh House Flavor Vol. 1 in 1998. As soon as Maphumolo started to make forays into the genre, he wanted to break into the international circuit. “A lot of DJs were compiling music,” he remembers. “But I felt we needed to up our game in production. Instead of sending money overseas, create our own music, license our music. It was a strategy for myself to get into that bigger house world.”