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seen/heard ° listen ° buy
Uyimbube (53 Reasons to Hate Vampire Weekend, Pt. 2 of 4)
(BACK TO PART ONE - CONTINUE TO PART THREE)
"At the end of one show, two men come to see me. I can tell right away by their Dutch looks, and by the way they look at me as if they own me, that they are Afrikaners. The two men from South Africa do not seem happy. One of them says, ‘We came here because we thought we'd hear music from home. Why don't you sing any lietjies?'
"A lietjie is a white folk tune in Afrikaans. I could say to these men that I do not know Afrikaans. That would not be unusual for a native. But, as I say, I am getting a little bit bolder.
"‘When you start singing in my language,' I tell them, ‘I will start singing in yours.'"
You shouldn't hate Vampire Weekend (myspace) because they're rich white boys playing African music. If all you hear everywhere, as Angelique Kidjo says, is African music, what choice do they have?
There are legitimate reasons people react strongly when pale faces spew music associated with folk other-than-white. One, sure, is authenticity; if unable to find effective common ground with the material, an act sounds forced and phony. More important are the nasty contexts and consequences of appropriation. Syntheses might have proven important. To get rock and roll, as Sam Phillips once said - or, um, as some guy playing Sam Phillips in some movie (authenticity, smauthenticity) once said, "You take a white right hand and a black left hand." Problem is that one of those hands has historically gotten the upper.
White musicians started professionally mimicking black musics in this country in an arena designed to mock black culture. And while The Fucked-Over Musician is hardly a role exclusive to any race, record companies and music publishers weren't owned/fronted by a particularly well-integrated lot, and many happily took advantage of people for whom educational and legal resources were scarce. Let your reverence slip, you're performing cruel parody; slack on responsibility, you're a thief.
Even if you're comfortable pretending this country's become a more level playing field, how do you approach Africa without letting liberal outrage straitjacket you? After centuries of carving up their continent, stealing their families, robbing their natural resources and throwing gasoline on any politically favorable fires, you want at their tunes, too? Our pop culture has a lousy history with the continent, painting it with fear and condescension. Jungle drums and Tarzan's bug-eyed headhunters; "exotica," which whited-down the complexities of an entire world to conform to predisposed notions of postcard primitivism (savage this, motherfucker); the view of the continent as nothing more than a perpetual series of tragedies (or, for that matter, the view of the continent as a single distressed entity instead of diverse cultures made up of individuals). Much easier to record a charity single or stay away altogether.
Solomon Linda's Original Evening Birds - Mbube (mp3) (buy)
Solomon Linda's 1939 cattle herding song hit so big in his native South Africa they renamed a whole choral-call genre after it. It sold 100,000 copies there, though it earned its creator less than two dollars - royalties and rights were taken by the record company after a single session payment. Here, it was fished out of the garbage by Alan Lomax and gifted to Pete Seeger.
Seeger mistranscribed "Uyimbube" ("You're a lion" - the original goes something like "Lion! Ha! You're a Lion!") and in 1951 his Weavers recorded their hit "Wimoweh." In 1961, Brooklyn doo-woppers The Tokens took a version with rewritten lyrics to the top of the charts. A year later, still half a world away, Linda died, leaving a family too poor to afford a headstone for his grave.
The song has been recorded over a hundred times, has generated an estimated fifteen million dollars in royalties. A good chunk of that came from this:
Linda's family had gotten the occasional personal check from Seeger, though his instructions to his management company to redirect residuals toward them went unobeyed. Before a Rolling Stone article about the song's history was published in 2001, the family had received roughly $12,000 in royalties. It wasn't until 2006 that Linda's family reached a settlement with the company that had licensed "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" to Disney.
[Better info: An expanded version of Rian Malan's acclaimed article (pdf), a summary of an Emmy-winning documentary about the song, an NPR story about the legal settlement. Irony in posting an mp3 and whining about artists' royalties noted.]
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The first cover of "Mbube" recorded in America that credited Linda (though, apparently, "J. Linda") came from fellow South African Miriam Makeba. A performance from Webster Hall in May of 1960 appeared on the singer's self-titled American debut. (The video above is from Switzerland in 1966; she also sang the song for JFK at his last birthday party.)
Championed by Harry Belafonte, with whom she shared a Grammy, Makeba had a rare mixed-language hit here. "Pata Pata" (also spelled "Phatha Phatha," it translates as "Touch Touch") originally recorded in South Africa in 1956, made her the first African to break the Billboard Top 40 (it got to #12 on the pop chart and #7 on the soul chart) eleven years later. Naturally, she made no money from it: "I have never had one cent from ‘Pata Pata.' I should be a millionaire."
Miriam Makeba - Pata Pata (mp3) (buy)
If you're not strapped down, that track's going to shuffle you right out into the street. How much fun the hostess has at her own party! The room's got bounce, the beat, that piano riff, the guests, but she out-exuberates everyone. Makeba !!!'s in her native Xhosa, pulls you aside twice for a courtesy introduction.
Makeba sings freedom. Not just the what of freedom, not just about freedom. Freedom's in her how, in the phrasing, which is loose and assured and wonderful. She drops lines and picks them up with such grace, like she's keeping a feather from the floor with her breath. That voice could knock you through a wall if she wanted it to - sometimes she does, and it does, but only when things need the knocking (the wall was wrong, should have been a door). But she knows the power of understatement.
Miriam Makeba - Khawuleza (Hurry, Mama, Hurry)(mp3) (buy)
When she sings traditional songs, she doesn't feel the need to sound traditional. It wouldn't make sense. Almost a century's worth of American musics had been banging together in South Africa by the time she was born. Wealthy urban areas had drawn U.S. musicians to Cape Town since the 1840s; African-American minstrels and vaudevillians and ragtime pianists all checked in before World War I. Rural cultures experienced intratribal evolution; the Zulu, Sotha, Shangaan, Pedi, Xhosa each culled different bits of western approaches and instrumentations, produced a variety of "neo-traditional" offshoots.
Makeba's jazz-inflected style grew through experience with the Manhattan Brothers, a South African Mills Brothers-inspired vocal group (one of their songs on which Makeba sang, "Laku Tshoni ‘Ilanga," was the first single from their country to enter the Billboard Top 100; under the title "Lovely Lies" it reached the mid-40s in the mid-‘50s) and her own gal group, The Skylarks. A New York Times review of her biography (from which the anecdote at the top of this entry is taken) noted that Makeba "takes music virtually for granted, whether she's singing a Yiddish song with Mr. Belafonte or African songs with a Brazilian guitarist. While she brought up her daughter in contact with South Africans and traditional culture, she seems unconcerned about keeping her music intact or in some sense authentic."
"When people ask me, ‘What do you sing?' I say, ‘I just sing. I sing music.'"
Miriam Makeba and the Skylarks - Ndamcenga (mp3) (buy)
Gosh, that's fun.
She was huge in her homeland, earning the moniker "Mama Africa" (it's to her Angélique Kidjo had us singing in "Afirika"). So huge she wasn't allowed back for more than thirty years. After appearing in an anti-apartheid documentary in 1959, the South African government took away her passport; after testifying against apartheid in front of the United Nations in 1963, her citizenship was revoked and her records banned. Settling in the United States, she fell in love with Black Panther Stokely Carmichael. When they married, her new country unofficially blacklisted her, concerts were cancelled, contracts dropped. "I'd already been in exile for 10 years," she said, "and the world is free, even if the countries in it aren't, so I packed my bags and left."
They moved to Guinea, she continued to tour Europe and other parts of Africa. She played a single acclaimed date in New York, at Carnegie Hall, in 1981, but America didn't open their arms to her again until Paul Simon brought her back.
[Makeba tribute site, unofficial myspace, at AllMusicGuide, Wikipedia. Her home page seems to be down.]
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Three years before Graceland - also three years before "Walk This Way" and Licensed to Ill - warily regarded obnoxio Malcolm McLaren released an album called Duck Rock. Exhilarating and insulting, purposeful and irresponsible, the record works overtime at suggesting a grand unification theory of popular music; the only thing that keeps it from succeeding is the name above the title and his unwillingness to pay time-and-a-half.
McLaren had been introduced to hip-hop at a block party in the South Bronx in August of 1981 and appreciated not just its vitality but its post-modernism. A form that was "making music out of other peoples' music" allowed the piling together of cultures and eras. Duck features musicians found on the streets of Soweto, a pair of NYC rappers/late-night radio hosts (The World Famous Supreme Team), and the Brit Pistol-pusher himself in the role of MC Square Dance Caller. The first single, "Buffalo Gals," married a traditional American song originally associated with minstrelsy to the new sound of scratching (post-"The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel", but pre-"Rockit").
Recorded in bursts and patched together by producer Trevor Horn and some folks who would go on to form Art of Noise, Duck also tosses in synths, violins, Peruvian pan flute, a mariachi band, meringue, mentions of cocaine.
Malcolm McLaren - Double Dutch (edit)(mp3) (buy)
Silly strings. A thirty-seven year old Brit sex shop owner recites names of New York City female jump rope squads. He does dosado, play-by-play, leering color commentary ("dark and lovely skippers?"). Helpfully explains that "the skip they do's the Double Dutch - that's them dancing!" As if these girls aren't able to actually, y'know, dance. Hey Ebo-, Ebonettes!
It's a great song, form=function. So much flying around: Over the metronomic beat and the smoov bass groove there's the whirwhirclickclack of the ropes, the female chorus, that basso profundo, a jumpy little synth line that emulates steel drums; the string orchestra first underlines the chorus, then plucks under the bassline, then offers thick, quick fills and sweeping swells. And that guitar! Go back and just listen to the guitar part, all the way through. It's alive! All the elements - with one exception - feel so effortless and are so cleanly delineated that the thing comes just short of floating. It could skip like that all day.
The exception, of course, is McLaren's tangled, tripped delivery. If he has any saving graces they're that there's more the stink of ham than the stench of irony to his forced sunniness, and his overall oddness. Also, the lack of a cuddly-wuddly white frontdude helps you side more strongly with the music. But mostly the man's a distraction, he doesn't really belong here, even if he wrote the thing.
Which he didn't, not totally. The track is credited to McLaren and Horn, but the tune around which everything's cut and pasted ("Puleng") is from Boyoyo Boys, the same group that would first inspire Paul Simon. McLaren, naturally, refused to pay them any royalties until ordered some years later by the British High Court.
What? Did you expect him to behave himself? He'd rather order the nice black people to drop and give him twenty.
Duck wasn't the first time McLaren had toyed with African tunes. In 1979, after the Pistols meltdown and Sid Vicious' overdose, Barclay Records offered him work soundtracking softcore porn using the label's library of African music. Inspired, he borrowed Burundi beats for the sound of new project Bow Wow Wow. And then he borrowed a bit more:
The Mahotella Queens - Umculo Kawupheli (No End to Music)(mp3) (buy)
Bow Wow Wow - See Jungle! (Jungle Boy)(mp3) (buy)
The first song is a 1974 South African hit from one of the most popular mbaqanga groups (some history here). The second is the first track of Bow Wow Wow's 1981 full-length; its writing credits acknowledge members of BWW and McLaren and... no one else. "A lot of the ideas are ours," said the group's guitarist, "and they're brand new, a lot of those chants. You know what I mean? They're not stolen from some poor tribe in Africa. It's just like the influence is there, and we'll use it."
The last words on Duck Rock are "Thank you, partners!"
McLaren had turned to African music as a primal ingredient to rough up polished pop, but once someone showed him hip-hop he heard the future. His singles weren't the first to expose Britain to rap; "Rapper's Delight," and Blondie's "Rapture" and Tom Tom Club, novelties like "Ant Rap," "Wham Rap," and even BWW's own McLaren-penned "C30 C60 C90 Go" had all made rounds. But the Duck stuff managed to be nominally British and seem authentically NYC, white-brought and black-based. They were very popular; both "Buffalo Gals" and "Double Dutch" went into the UK's Top 10, both placed on the US dance charts, both would go on to be quoted long afterward (e.g. Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance," Eminem's "Without Me," Liz Phair's "Whip Smart"). McLaren would go on to do more work with the World Famous Supreme Team ("Hey DJ" "D'ya Like Scratchin'") and would make at mashing hip-hop and high cultures (opera in "Madame Butterfly" and "Operaa House," Shakespeare in "II Be or Not II Be" and "Romeo and Juliet").
Hip-Hop was young, it was progressive, it was dangerous. Africa was stock footage over which McLaren had already narrated. Forced into a dialectic, Africa would be old, regressive, safe. Let someone old and safe have at Africa.