Peter Holslin is in the running for the next next host of The Daily Show.
For all the hand wringing that’s been going on lately over the idea of “cultural appropriation,” it’s easy to forget that music has always been a malleable, transportable product. Instruments and records cross borders. Beats and riffs get borrowed, stolen and refurbished. The process is accelerated and amplified thanks to the Internet, but it’s been going on in one way or another for ages. And if sometimes the result is a poseur act like Iggy Azalea or Yung Lean, other times all of this mixing-and-matching yields bold results, like those you’ll hear on Strut’s new compilation, Next Stop Soweto, Vol. 4: Zulu Rock, Afro-Disco and Mbaqanga 1975-1985.
The 15-track collection compiled by Duncan Booker is the latest in a series on South African music from the U.K. label. The first installment focused on the glory years of mbaqanga, a roots-y jazz music (named after a Zulu cornmeal bread) that emerged in townships like Soweto in the 1960s. But on this new one, the bands build on and depart from the mbaqanga sound, creating their own versions of American funk, soul, rock and disco. On “Give,” Harari takes off on a sexy disco strut. In “Ain’t Sittin’ Down Doin’ Nothing,” the Drive explore moody jazz-funk harmonies. “Kokro-Ko (Hide and Seek),” one of the most purely joyful tracks on the set, finds The Actions get down with tom-tom grooves and party-time chants.
The ’70s and ’80s were a tumultuous time for South Africa, as people across the country were engaged in a protracted struggle against the country’s white supremacist apartheid government. The African National Congress was advocating (sometimes violently) for change, the activist Steve Biko was mobilizing fellow Africans under the banner of the Black Consciousness movement, and in 1976 students in Soweto rose up en masse to protest government policies imposing Afrikaans as the primary school language. The authorities often responded with brutality (arresting, torturing and killing many and murdering Biko in 1977), but the country nevertheless inched closer to true democracy.
The guitarist Saitana captures the hope of the times in “1, 2, 3”; over a three-chord riff fit for a jaunty love song, he and his band deliver what seems to in fact be a defiant chant for change: “1, 2, 3 / your turn is over! / 4, 5, 6 / our turn is started!” Other tracks appear apolitical on the surface, but in an interview from 2007 with the website Afropop.org, the South African anthropologist Louise Meintjes argued that black musicians’ very embrace of African-American music served as a subtle form of protest.
By embracing “girl group” tropes, Hammond organ tones, Afros and platform shoes, Meintjes says bands were able to get around radio censors and step out of government-imposed isolation, “to make a very local sound, but a local sound which said, ‘We are urban, we are modern, we are tied into the larger world, and we also celebrate ideas of being black.’ ”
Probably the best thing about this comp is the way it lets you examine exactly how some South African bands give this music their own spin. In “Soweto Disco,” The Movers bring the rustic, brawny feel of mbaqanga to the disco format, whipping up honking sax and sunny-day organ riffs over a beat that ambles like a minibus taxi down a potholed road. Isaac & The Sakie Special Band, on the other hand, go off on a more psychedelic route, coloring their tune “Get Down” with dreamy synth washes. Perhaps the most surprising track is “Manano” by Xoliso—crossing prog-rock with Afro-jazz, they almost resemble Fragile-era Yes with their harmonious keyboard drones and intricate drum solo opening.
In his 1979 novella The House of Hunger, the Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera gave readers a sense of how it feels to live under an apartheid government. The way he described it, the worst part wasn’t the political marginalization or the police oppression—it was the way racist society rotted everyone from the inside, turning people into brutes and shriveling their minds. In Zimbabwe (South Africa’s northern neighbor, then called Rhodesia), Marechera writes, “Life stretched out like a series of hunger-scoured hovels stretching endlessly towards the horizon.” Listening to Next Stop Soweto, one gets the impression that bands like these helped make such a hard life that much more worthwhile.
Read full review of Next Stop Soweto (Vol. 4): Zulu Rock, Afro-Disco & Mbaqanga 1975-1985 – VARIOUS on Boomkat.com ©
