Who sings the nation state?

If you haven't already heard the rendition of the South African National Anthem currently getting a lot of online attention, listen to the video below. But be warned: your ears may bleed.
I am currently working on a paper on the musical marketing of the upcoming soccer world cup in South Africa, and while this incident isn't directly related, I think I may try to find some way to work it in there. Funny and scary all at once.



Here is the Mail and Guardian report on current responses

links for a guest lecture on my work

Did I mention before that I put together and taught a course this past summer called "The Music of New York"? If not, I should blog about that sometime.
Right now, though, that is long over, but I've been asked to do a guest-lecture for my friend Rachel's Art of Listening class on Thursday, and so this post is just to gather in one place some of the videos and etc that I plan to use.
World Map
Drakensberg Boys' Choir

Lebo M Rainmaker

Lebo M Power of One

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Paul Simon

Paul Simon Father and Daughter (from the Wild Thornberries movie soundtrack)

Johnny Clegg and Juluka Impi

The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Tokens)

Solomon Linda's Evening Birds Mbube

Pete Seeger and the Weavers

Freshly Ground I'd Like

Karen Zoid Kaapstad

Karen Zoid Small Room

The Parlotones Colourful

Bok Van Blerk De La Rey

Klopjag Nie Langer (for the students who asked about this, this is an angry post apartheid song. I couldn't find the angry apartheid-era song I played in class today online, but I'll keep looking and post it, or something similar, when I find it.)

OppiKoppi

Once again it's been too long since I last blogged. I sort of think I have an excuse this time, though. Since my last post, I successfully defended my dissertation proposal, taught a 6 week summer course on the "music of New York City" (that was such fun, and I really hope I have an opportunity to revise and reteach it), presented a paper at a conference in North Caroline, and another at a conference in Durban, visited my parents for several weeks, renewed my visa and began my fieldwork. I also, sadly, played the piano at my grandmother's funeral. It was really sad saying goodbye to her.
But this blog post is to be about happier things. Or funnier things, or something. As part of my fieldwork, I attended OppiKoppi from the 7 to 10 August. For those of you who don't know what OppiKoppi is, think hot, dusty farm, colonized by 15000 campers, and 4 stages hosting almost non-stop South African music for three days straight. OppiKoppi means "on the hill", or, with a little creative mishearing, "on the head". I got home very dirty, and sick with flu, but having heard more terrible, mediocre, and superb live music than I normally hear in a year, even here in NY. The highlights for me were Karen Zoid's superb show (the main reason I went in the first place), the Parlotones, who I'm now a serious fan of, after having listened with half an ear to the little bits they have on myspace up until now, a woman called Andra from Namibia, who has the most enigmatic and fascinating voice, and an intriguing group called the Arrows, who have a really cool female drummer. The festival would like to present itself as more diverse than it actually is (it's primarily white and Afrikaans), and the unavoidable clouds of cigarette smoke and drunk, high and crazy revelers who really couldn't care less about the music will probably discourage me from going again, but I'm very glad I did it at least once. The music was completely worth it, and I doubt I'll ever see so much representative South African rock in such a short space of time, again. There really are some great SA bands out there, and even if I'm way out on the periphery of the "scene", I'm falling more and more in love with the music the more of it I hear. Thank goodness for the internet, and the opportunity to hear so much of it here in steamy, summery New York.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that OppiKoppi was declared a national monument, and, more relevant to this blog, and I think more interesting overall, the plaques that make the declaration include Karen Zoid's lyrics "Ons Soek Rock n Roll Om Aan Vas Te Hou" (we want rock 'n roll to hold on to).

So here are a bunch of reviews of OppiKoppi
And some comments from revelers the day after.
Also some free mp3s (not, imo, the best, but fairly representative nonetheless).
And the festival's official website.

Funny business

The publicity which the Nandos ad featuring a puppet named Julius is receiving seems to have eclipsed the attention which this, much funnier ad deserves. I really love Evita Bezuidenhout. Perhaps when I finish my dissertation (and the subsequent book) on Karen Zoid, I should write a book on Evita.

Wits Choir

I just got a new link from the Wits Choir for their website. It looks great! I sang with them between 2002 and 2004, and it was a super experience. Our tour to Argentina in 2003 was a real highlight.

Making contacts

Today has been a really exciting research day. I got in touch with someone offering a course I am interested in taking, and he put me in touch with some really exciting contacts in the South African music industry. And these contacts opened up others, and suddenly I have a whole world of resources I wasn't expecting. How happy am I.
So here are a few of the highlights:
Rhythm Records Online is a resource I have been using for a while to purchase South African music I have difficulty acquiring here in the US. This is also a great source for news on the SA music industry, and my source for a few tracks that are otherwise only available on vinyl.
A promotional trailer for a recently aired TV documentary called Johnny en die Maaiers. I am attempting to procure a copy of the documentary itself. I also came across this review.
A trailer for a forthcoming documentary on Fokofpolisiekar. This looks like it will be super! I'm afraid you have to have a facebook account, and have videos installed to view this. I'm looking for another link, though.
Masizakhe. I can't remember whether I blogged this when I saw it last year, but it is a super documentary, and worth seeing, if you can. There are some good clips here.
MK. Afrikaans television channel that features a lot of music.

family

Today I got one of those emails I have been dreading. My great aunt has died. I know that sounds like a distant relative, but in many ways she took on the role of grandmother to me. I'm incredibly grateful that the last time I spoke to her she was telling me that she was proud of me for doing well, and for coming here and studying, and experiencing things she could only dream of. And I am really grateful to be doing this, and so I can't really justify wishing I was closer to home right now, even though I do.
So in addition to that special little legacy, I thought I'd just record a few of the things I will always associate with my great aunt are my memories of her beautiful garden, which was a wonderland to me as a child: labyrinthine, filled with the biggest nasturtiums, robust agapanthus (offspring of which now reside in my garden in Johannesburg, and my parent's garden in the Drakensberg), a huge gingko tree, a sweet-scented Jacaranda, the flowers of which she would allow to stay on the driveway as they fell, because she loved the colour, violets with leaves that covered my two hands together, and a statue of Wendy; the beautiful wedding cakes she used to decorate, with brightly coloured icing flowers she once showed me how to make; enourmous, rich, desperately unhealthy, and completely irresistible meals that we always left loaded with take-home leftovers. I think in her home I experienced the style of hospitality and family-centered sociality that I most strongly associate with Afrikaner culture.

Umshini Wami

It's perhaps too easy to simply blame the outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa last week on people's being riled up, and finally provoked to action by war-songs. It just sounds too much like the contact-era fantasies of European explorers encountering "fierce Zulu warriors" gaining strength from "savage songs and dances" to be really something one can take at face value (Christine Lucia's book The World of South African Music: A Reader reproduces some of these early writings on first contacts between Africans and Europeans in South Africa). And of course, the history of the song in question is much more complicated than the title alone, or it's connection to Jacob Zuma makes clear. But my interest was peaked when the Mail and Guardian yesterday drew the apparently obvious connection between xenophobic attackers singing Zuma's signature tune, and the ANC president's comments about dealing with the influx of foreigners. And no one even mentions the sexual suggestiveness of a song in which the "machine" in question is overtly phallic, and representative of the type of masculine aggression and power that got Zuma into trouble not too long ago.

Comps reading

I'm reading at the moment. Reading nearly every second. And when I'm not reading, I'm listening to every piece of South African music I own. But mostly to Karen Zoid. I finally own Chasing the Sun (courtesy of iTunes), and I keep discovering new things that fascinate me.
Have you ever heard "Danville Diva"? I can't find it in preview anywhere online, so my suggestion is that you listen to it on iTunes. There is a wonderful moment in that where Karen imitates an Afrikaans Diva accent (I think I prefer "princess" to "diva", because of the connection between "diva" and camp sensibility, but they mean roughly the same thing). I spent several hours listening to that today, thinking about how I might describe that sound, specifically to a non-South African. And then when I was searching for the song on YouTube for the purposes of this blog, I came across the wonderful recently added video from Karen's February performance in London.

The accent imitation is fascinating, but I'm also delighted by the moments of what Gary Tomlinson would call (if I remember the article I studied years ago correctly) "signifyin(g)", where she sings a fragment of a Malaika number (the final moments of "Destiny"), and Mary Mary's "Shackles". I have heard both songs often enough (if you have watched South African television station SABC 1 after about 23:00, you have probably heard them too), but don't know much about these groups. Whenever I hear the name Malaika I'm reminded of the Kenyan song by the same name, though I would hesitate to suggest that the group are deliberately referencing that. It is, however, interesting to me to hear Karen Zoid singing a gospel number about slavery in an RnB style within a "Kwaito style" (as she says at the beginning of the video clip) song. There's so much going on there!

My most recent intellectual obsession has been with describing vocal timbre, and in a recent writing exercise for Suzanne Cusick's 'Feminist and Queer Musicology' class, I discovered that language and accent are particularly good areas from which to approach this task. So that delightful litttle Karen moment got me very excited.

Then earlier I read an article by Cornelia Fales that Jason Stanyek recommended to me (if you have access to JSTOR, the link above will work, if not, you won't be able to access this particular article, and will just have to take my word on it). It's on timbre alright, and is a concerted effort to write (ethno)musicologically about timbre. But while I think the author's attempt to focus strongly on timbre rather than other aspects of music analysis is interesting, I was a bit disappointed by what I read as a collapse into references to the strongly visual. She uses spectographs to represent much of what she describes, and in the end doesn't really achieve much. I agree that the lack of vocabulary makes it impossible to talk directly on the topic, but I think that a more productive strategy, and one that I think Louise Meintjes exercises particularly effectively in Sound of Africa involves listening to how musicians (in her instance, studio technicians) talk about the sounds they're working with. It works, I think, because the writing focuses on a purpose beyond itself. She isn't writing about timbre for its own sake. She is writing about it to explain how a particular set of South African identities are constituted musically, and it works. I'm not entirely uncritical of her broader project (I think the collapsing of Zuluness, South Africanness and Africanness is the most troubling fault) but I do think she is doing the most exciting work of this nature I have encountered yet. Other related projects include Gage Averill's Four Parts, No Waiting and Aaron Fox's Real Country.

I love having an excuse to do all this good reading and listening!

disbanding

Of more interest than the scathing review of two new South African albums in today's Mail and Guardian is the news that fokofpolisiekar have amicably split up. Perhaps that is a good move for a band who formed as distinctly subcultural, but are now becoming pretty mainstream, before their momentum fades.

It isn't over till it's over.

Hey, it's the Christmas season after all, and miracles can happen. But in the mean time, I'll let Zapiro, eloquent as ever, comment on all that is wrong with this....

De La Rey's Girlfriend

Dare I call this a feminist take on the De La Rey debate? (do keep your volume up when you click the link.) A little girl by the name of Son-Isha has recorded a song called "De La Rey Moet 'n Meisie Kry" (De La Rey must get a girlfriend).

Happy days

I had yet another amazing weekend. Is one person really allowed so much happiness? Saturday was full of particular high points, as NYChoirgirl and I hiked from Walhalla (!) to Pleasantville (!!) via an incredibly beautiful reservoir. The leaves have turned just enough that everything looked beautifully autumnal, and yet the weather was comfortably warm, with only the slightest hint of rain that never quite caught up with us. It was the perfect way to spend a beautiful day. And the day ended on a particularly high note with South Africa winning the Rugby World Cup!!!! Well done Bokke. You make us proud.

Lucky Dube was shot and killed by hijackers yesterday

This is such a tragedy. South Africa has lost yet another music legend. Thank you, dad, for passing the article on.

Singing politics

The Mail and Guardian reported on the ANC Youth League's comments on Mosiuoa Lekota's suggestion that the singing of struggle songs outside parliment and court is a bad idea. While I have a huge problem with the vindictive and immature way that the ANCYL comments were made, I must admit to agreeing with their stance. People have a right to be heard, and singing is a wonderful way of getting a message out, as I keep telling my students. There is something very visceral and positive about expressing political will through singing. I may disagree fundamentally with the message of the song in question "uMshini Wami", and with the cause that it is in support of, but sensorship is not an option in a democracy, and especially not in South Africa, where singing has played such a critical role in our long-term social and political engagement. Singing politics is what South Africa is known for!

Former classmates going places

My former classmate, Dillon Davie, has had a review published on ZA@Play, an online source linked to the Mail and Guardian. Well done Dillon! His writing is really good, and the performance he is reviewing sounds really special. I hope it comes to New York eventually.

South African Music Day

In the midst of a crazy busy new term, I spent a little time in South African space on Sunday. Kathy Tagg put together a wonderful day's activities revolving around South African music at the Manhattan School of Music, and while I didn't get to attend everything, or even as much as I would have liked to, the two concerts I saw were fabulous! Around lunch time, there was a program of South African vocal music, with two soloists performing song cycles (one in English and one in Afrikaans) a third soloist singing an arrangement of a Xhosa bow song (The cello made an amazing substitute for a gourd-resonated bow), and an ensemble singing traditional choral music. You can guess what my favourite was! I was really impressed with the vocal sound this group, in particular achieved, even with a very thin bass section. The soprano sound was wonderfully full.
The evening concert was of chamber music, and as a fan of, in particular, Peter Klatzow, and more tentatively, Kevin Volans, I really enjoyed this. The performers were not universally capable during this concert, and one of the string ensembles reminded of how critical it is that the instruments are properly in tune when the music is not conventionally tonal (!), but the absolute highlight of the evening, Kevin Volans' percussion composition Chakra, performed with great flair by three percussionists (one of whom was not listed in the program) from the MSM, swept away any lingering doubts some of the earlier pieces may have raised about my devotion to this type of music.
Well done on a resoundingly successful event, Kathy, and thank you for googling this blog!

Street performance, and the Drakensberg Boys' Choir

I had the craziest day today, running around town from one end to the other (literally: Brooklyn, Harlem, NYU, Harlem, Union Square, NYU, and finally, Harlem again), but quite abruptly earlier this evening I was stopped in my tracks by one of the best street performances I have yet seen in NYC. Three guys were playing drums using a combination of two upturned buckets, a barrel lid, and two of the plastic containers that hold newspapers on street corners around NYC. They were doing some pretty elaborate stuff, and it was really nice to have an excuse to stand still and just listen for a bit.

Also, one quick note. I noticed through my blog stats this week that someone has been searching repeatedly for "Drakensberg Boys' Choir lyrics "I wish I were"". This is one of my absolute favourite of their recently programed pieces, and can be heard at their website or via this link (the recording quality isn't great, and doesn't do them justice, but it should at least give you an idea of what they and the piece sound like. The full title of the song is "I Wish I Were a Punkrocker", and the lyrics are available here.

Ubuntu, individualism and crime in South Africa

I have yet to read the full text of Mbeki's speech yesterday on Steve Biko, as the transcript is not yet up on the ANC website, but I must admit an ambivalence to the current reports on it. The Mail and Guardian headlines "Mbeki: Crime a symptom of 'rapacious individualism'", a sentiment that I agree with in spirit if not letter, but the calls it thereafter reports for "moral regeneration" trouble me. Morality is such a slippery space, bounded as it is by essentially individualist religious constructs and conceptions of the "normal". A clash of moral sensibilities led to several acts of voilence against women during the time I was back in South Africa, and debates about morality are heavily implicated in almost all terrorist and geanocidal actions. Even the current war in Iraq is justified on a moral premise, despite the various ecomonic issues implicated.
And I don't want to get into word games about the difference between morality and ethics, either. I do think that is a useful way of framing this, but really it's just too abstract for the current circumstances.
Crime is, I believe, more about an inability or unwillingness to see the humanity in others than about a lack of moral compass, because when you can't see how your actions hurt someone else, you can't see the immorality in them. I always have believed that everyone wants to be good, or at least to feel good about themselves, and that knowing that you are hurting someone else doesn't feel very good. That is why child molesters tell themselves that the children they interact with actually want, or enjoy, what is done to them. And the idea of "for the good of the community" becomes an excuse to ignore individuals who are hurting. The apartheid government believed that it was acting for the good of the country, but it had to ignore the humanity of black people to do that.
I'll read the speech fully before I comment more on this, but I just wanted to put that out there, as my initial response to the reports I've been reading.

brain drain

The Mail and Guardian online presents an interesting, and more nuanced, view on this thing popularly called the "brain drain", then what I have hitherto read. Well worth a read.