Tyson Sybateli Wants You to Step Out of the Algorithm

Sometime in 2023, a veteran colleague popped up at the studio where South African rapper Tyson Sybateli was putting finishing touches to his mixtape, Present. As is customary, Sybateli played the older artist some songs off the project, but the feedback he got was confounding. “It’s not that he said the songs were bad, he was just saying stuff like, ‘You have to be adaptable,’ because I was doing a lot of rapping on the tape,” Sybateli tells OkayAfrica.

At that time, Sybateli had just gotten signed to Sound African Recordings, a division of Sony Music Entertainment Africa, and Present was his first release on that deal. For an artist who had been grinding independently for years prior, working within a major label system exposed him to how much commercial expectations dictated creativity. Sybateli’s colleague, signed to the same label and with several big hit songs to his name, believed he was giving the best advice in a terrain where rap artists often need to lean into amapiano or whatever’s popping for crossover appeal. Perhaps the message would’ve been better suited for another artist.

Tyson Sybateli is not a hip-hop purist. The way he sees it, making music that’s true to yourself is a noble pursuit, an ideal north star for artists and a touchpoint more listeners should embrace. “We all need to have some dignity,” he tells OkayAfrica.

That commitment to artistic dignity is evident on his recently released sophomore LP, Amehlo, a thematically loaded project that rails against our collective acceptance of society’s dysfunction. Sybateli isn’t on a soapbox, he’s like everyone else, fighting to live within the morass of economic instability and sociopolitical failures. He’s in the matrix, figuring out his personal values while critiquing a system where consumerism is the widely prescribed remedy to cope with these issues.

Also, the music is a visceral trip. Intro track “The Program” opens on a grungy note before shifting into a boom-bap bounce, setting the tonal range for an album that features the propulsive rock rager, “Green Room,” as well as the soulful lilt of “Humour Me” with velvet-voiced singer Filah Lah Lah. The production on the diatribe-driven “Two” is riotous, with booming bass, rapidly ticking hi-hats and a repetitive siren melody animating righteous bars like “monthly payments stressing the lot/you tax the flock and stack the odds.”

“I’ve only worked retail,” Sybateli tells OkayAfrica, adding that the profoundly relatable moments in his music come to him easily because he’s lived that life. “I’ve mostly experienced taking taxis and buses but I’m driving now, which is cool but I’m no different than anybody else. So the music has to be bigger than me—and we need more of it, especially documenting the times we’re in where the economy is going bad everywhere for most of us everywhere. I’m just being honest about the human experience.”

Amehlo is titled after a fictional advertisement firm where a fictional Tyson Sybateli works. It’s within this loose conceptual framework that the rapper connects the generic nature of ambition and material success, particularly as it is amplified by digital algorithms and represented in music. Most people believe they can curate their own utopia amidst all the dysfunction, in the same way artists are the cultural leaders of a society crazed by money worship.

“At some point in the 2010s more artists began treating music as an entry to get access to a higher lifestyle,” Sybateli says. “It became, ‘I’m coming from a background where we don’t have much and music is going to be my way inside, I’m going to be a household name and I’m going to be rich. I don’t know about everybody else.’ And that became a problem because artists are [purposely] out of touch with the times.”

Sybateli doesn’t believe the times are so dour that artists can’t be entertainers. On this album, there’s “Cheers,” a glistening, kwaito-influenced jam inspired by his adolescent years as a big fan of Kabelo, the iconic South African artist from the seminal trio TKZee. However, he also concedes that being able to make pop-leaning songs doesn’t mean it has to be his identity, hence his decision to leave his former label and continue on the independent route.

“The perception of who I am as an artist was being dominated by commercial expectations, which is you need to have a hit. You need to dominate radio. You need to have these kinds of appearances,” he says, while namechecking South African indie rap titan YoungstaCPT and the late Nipsey Hussle as templates for the path he’s on. “Now it’s about my definition of what success is, instead of what somebody else or a label wants. Can I earn off my music? Yes. Did I get to tell the story I wanted to? Yes. Did I drop when I wanted to? Do I have control this time?”

Amehlo is packed with moments of introspective admission that highlight just how aware Tyson Sybateli is, with respect to being in control of his career. “I never had desire/'cause fame’s not a goal when you came from a home where your clothes had wires,” he raps on “New Man.” Meanwhile, on “Humour Me,”  he admits that “to be selfless you gotta live comfortably.” These are hallmarks of an artist that isn’t posturing like he has it all figured out.

Sybateli is grounded enough to know that this album won’t appeal to everyone; what he hopes for is that it leaves a profound mark with the thousands that listen. “I used to only make music just to prove that I can rap really well,” he says. “So now, it’s not so much that I want more people to hear this message, it’s just that my job is done. If it reaches more people and leads to discussions, good. But if not a lot of those happen, that’s still okay. I really made something that it’s either you hear the message or you don’t like the message, and I made peace with all of that.”