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.

long time - still hanging in there

It has been a long time since I've updated. And while I don't like blog posts that are excuses for why one hasn't posted in ages, I kind of think I have a good excuse: Comprehensive Exams!!!!
I wrote them last weekend (Friday to Monday), and am waiting to hear my results. But they are done, and out of the way, and now I have three pieces of writing to complete in lieu of finals, and then my parents arrive on Saturday next week for a three week visit. It has been so long since I last saw them, and I'm really looking forward to having them here. I'll try to keep this blog regularly updated then with our doings.
In the mean time, though, here is a nice little documentary on the Stonewall Chorale, that gives you a taste of one of the things I've been up to this year.
I cannot believe the academic year is practically over! One more year of course work left. That's a scary thought.

Something sounds a little fishy

When I was in high school, my music teacher kept me in stitches with his "mishearings" of song lyrics. My favourite was the "elephant ear song", though God's invitation for a cuppa ("come for tea, my people") is also pretty funny. I didn't ever think it could go this far, though! Thanks, Lou, for passing this link on.

It might as well be spring

Spring is here! It has been pending for a while, but today New York seemed to blossom with it. We hit temperatures of 23 degrees centigrade, and I had a wonderful time sitting on my balcony feeling the sun on my arms and legs. The daffodils are in full bloom, as are the magnolias, and I'm skipping around and singing like a character in a 1940s musical.

Reasons to be happy!

Julie Andrews is going to be at the Union Square Barnes&Noble tomorrow!

And I just received word that a book I wrote a chapter for has finally been published. It's on page 18 of the publisher's catalog, with the rather generic title Music and Identity: Transformation and Negotiation.

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!

What not to wear

There's too much troubling news coming out of South Africa at the moment. Last month, a young woman was stripped of her clothing and assaulted at a Taxi rank near Johannesburg. The reason: she was wearing a miniskirt. Because apparently wearing miniskirts is unAfrican.

And the only reason this has come to public attention, it appears, is because a group of women wearing miniskirts marched to the taxi rank where the incident occurred. Police claim that this is the only incident to have been reported, despite the fact that women are regularly harassed in these locations. Of course, if the police would actually take down reports made by people, there might be more record of them.
It seems women can't win, either. I remember women being stripped not too long ago for wearing pants. Seriously, we are not living in the Victorian era, and men behaving like animals unable to control themselves at the sight of female flesh just doesn't fly. Or perhaps these really are men who belong behind bars, like animals at a zoo.

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