Song · Jain
“Makeba” by Jain
From the EP Hope (2015)
“Makeba” by Jain appears on 2 radio countdowns from 1 station between 2017 and 2025. It was first released in 2015 on the EP Hope. Its best result is #5 on The Current Top 89 Songs of 2017. In the combined RockLists rankings it is the #117 indie & aaa song of 2017 and #3,532 indie & aaa song of all time.
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Video from YouTube (JAINVEVO). Pressing play loads YouTube's player. Watch on YouTube
French singer-songwriter Jain wrote "Makeba" herself and put it out in 2015, on her Hope EP and then on her debut album, Zanaka, and it's a joyous tribute to Miriam Makeba, the South African singer and anti-apartheid activist known as Mama Africa. Yodelice produced and arranged it and played guitar and bass, Jain handled keyboards and Stéphane Montigny's trombone adds brassy punctuation, while the refrain leans on a sample of Hamilton Bohannon's 1978 cut "Me and the Gang".
It reached number seven in France and picked up a SNEP diamond award, then simply refused to go away: it became the intro for Australia's I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! and, from 2019, for Amazon Prime Video's Premier League and Ligue 1 coverage. In 2023, eight years on, TikTok handed it a second life.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
RockLists rankings
Indie & Adult Alternative
All Rock Formats
Year-end countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 5 | The Current Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN | The Current Top 89 Songs of 2017 | 89 |
All-time and decade countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 213 | The Current | 893 Essential Songs of The Current: 2005 to Now | 893 |
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