What’s the Woolies difference? The sound of South African silence…or not

UPDATE FIVE HOURS LATER — CURIOSER AND CURIOSER: Woolworths have responded to the multiple news reports discussed below as follows. To the Hiphop Africa site, they said: “We have confirmed with our music supplier that they absolutely still include South African music in our playlists, and there is currently no intention to change this (…)  said Woolworths PR Manager Raphaella Frame-Tolmie in a statement.

To a Tweet by my respected colleague Nothemba Madumo, the retailer’s PR responded:“We have supported local music for years and will continue to do so, next week we announce an exciting new partnership – watch this space. Our suppliers have been negotiating with SAMPRA on our behalf regarding license fees and we are waiting for that to be resolved.”

So what might be behind the conflicting accounts? Did the initial source of the media reports –  musicians including rapper Ginger Trill and The Kiffness – perhaps misunderstand the information they discovered? After all, most retailers get their sounds from a musak aggregating company (who may be based overseas) selling in-store playlist packages…

Or did the music supplier obfuscate its answer to Woolies? Because a number of those music aggregators supply packages “including South African music” that doesn’t earn royalty revenue for artists because the music is either a) not covered by copyright for age or other reasons, or b) a re-recorded cover of original SA music, where the composer may still receive a royalty, but the originating performer won’t.

Was this an attempt by SAMPRA to up the pressure during those negotiations? The Kiffness has been a vocal proponent of SAMPRA’s work in recent years. Was it a PR push by Woolies to create a buzz of excitement before their ‘watch this space’ announcement? In which case it may have succeeded…

So what artists and music fans need to know is:

Who is the Woolies music supplier?

Under what conditions do they incorporate SA music into their playlists, and can they list music played over a recent sample period, indicating whether these are original tracks or covers?

How much has been earned by how many South African artists from the arrangement over a representative recent period?

I’ll try to find out…

MIDDAY FEB 21: According to news sites including Jacaranda-FM and MusicinAfrica,  fashion and food retailer Woolworths has announced it will no longer play copyright music in its stores. It will instead source rights-free music from international musak suppliers. That means more international aural mush assaulting our ears, and – more importantly – South African artists who’ve registered their music with SAMRO, SAMPRA or the other rights societies will neither be heard nor receive royalty income.

It’s a shameful decision from a company whose advertising has bombarded us with various kinds of wokewashing for a long time now: South African-made; organic cotton; greener denim; cleaner packaging; and more ready-meals based around kale, lentils and quinoa than even the most flatulence-resistant diner could cope with.

If we had a Department of Arts and Culture (the “& Sport” bit is relatively well looked-after) worth the name, an official press statement condemning the move would already have been issued. Because it erodes not only South African livelihoods, but cultural identity. Our children need to hear our own sounds as they move around public spaces, including malls. And in the end, by weakening the national music industry still further, it could cost jobs. That’s not a good look alongside all those “dreamy dresses and romantic blouses…”

But wait a minute…Open your ears as you walk around. How many retailers still are playing South African music? How many hotels? How many shopping centres? How many conference venues or coffee shops? Those livelihood-destroying international musak streaming services are already thoroughly entrenched in South Africa; the Woolies difference is, it told us (or at least, it notified the rights societies; it has yet to respond to media questions). Other enterprises just did it.

But what can we do?

The reflex answer is a shoppers’ boycott. But boycotts, however well justified, if they are not underpinned by lots of information outreach and solid organising leg-work tend to be two-day wonders that fizzle out fast and are forgotten. If the capitalist boycott of copyright-protected South African music is as widespread as it feels, we would need to have a pretty big boycott too.

Silent, non-violent picket lines outside shops though…now that’s an idea. Silence, in this instance, would send a particularly apt message.

Such actions could form part of a bigger information campaign, so shoppers don’t swallow the justification that this is only a minor issue and that their benevolent retailer is actually motivated by a desire to save them cents at the till through this cost-cutting measure. (The PR agency is typing that very press release right now.) Royalties can be the most significant of an artist’s income-streams; and every worker in the national revenue-creating music industry is a shopper too – until they can’t afford to shop.

In the past, fashion retailers have often used music stars to model their seasonal looks. How about if music industry figures refused to be part of those campaigns when a retailer – any retailer – isn’t putting a little bit back by playing local music in their stores? How about if that refusal extended to everybody in the arts, and all those men and women talked loudly to the media about why they’re doing it? How about if a few politicians added their voices? How about if artists reached out to organised retail workers, established common ground, and mapped out future actions together?

Because this isn’t just about one retailer’s punitive decision. Royalties matter so much to artists because our societies fail to support the structures and platforms on which creative work can flourish. Instead, the fruits of musical creativity are commoditised within a system where the main revenues from their sale go to commercial entities that are, these days, huge anonymous investment monsters with profit-grubbing tentacles in music, shops and more. Royalties are the few cents or less from each transaction the system permits to trickle back to creators. Royalties matter, because they’re all musicians have – not because they’re the best system.

Exploitation in creative work is real, historic, systemic and pervasive. So it is too among all other workers. We need to be developing forms of solidarity that link artists with the rest – which existed in South Africa in the 1980s – to respond swiftly and together when meagre livelihoods are further threatened like this.

Honouring Joseph Shabalala 1941-2020

Much more than a Grammy-winner

The most fitting tribute to Ladysmith Black Mambazo leader Dr Bhekizizwe Joseph Siphatimandla Mxoveni Mshengu Bigboy Shabalala was the one he received, wholly unprompted, from millions of South Africans after his death aged 78 on February 11. No critical evaluation can — or should even try to – supersede the massive and merited wave of popular love for the man and his musical achievments that social media, radio phone-ins and more immediately expressed.

So let’s reflect, instead, on what the South African commercial media did (and didn’t) say in immediate response. Striking in those early media stories were the other names news-writers and TV stations coupled with Shabalala’s: Paul Simon and Dolly Parton (plus possibly a few other Americans). It’s certainly cool when accomplished South African musicians work with their overseas peers. But that’s what Simon, Parton and the others are: just other musicians. (Shabalala noted that Simon approached him “like a child wanting to learn”; the latter certainly acknowledged the presence of a master.) The black axes swinging in from Ladysmith were not great because they sang with Americans. They were great before those occasions and after them. They were great before their five Grammies.

But in South African newsrooms today, obituaries are often compiled from web content . Thus the priorities that make sense for informing international readers – who might well know a South African best by musical association with one of their own – get reflected back at us, as though they should be our priorities too.

Mainstream media tributes covered the facts of Shabalala’s life and career efficiently; those are now well enough publicised to bear no repetition here. What they didn’t talk about were two key things: exactly why Shabalala’s musical thinking and praxis were so great, and why that music was so beloved.

Those omissions again reflect current newsroom conditions. Arts coverage is so little respected that specialist music journalists rarely sit in newsrooms to write on the day. (No doubt by the time the weekend papers appear, something more considered will have been commissioned.***) And if there’s any construct less respected than ‘arts’ in those same newsrooms, ‘class’ would be a good contender. Shabalala’s music was beloved because it was and is (with all the nuances, contradictions and complexities that entails) one highly expressive music of South Africa’s black working class.

Music first. The first key innovator in isiZulu modern popular music was Tshabalala’s most nationally famous predecessor, Solomon Linda, who led the Original Evening Birds. You know him today for the 1939 track iMbube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrrQT4WkbNE and the sad story of record-company greed that accompanies it. After Linda, Zulu choirs eager to further modernise a music format they found they could record, earn from, and win contests with, perfected isicathamiya with its softer choral voices and smoother, slicker dance routines. But it was Shabalala, emerging from family and community musical traditions he both respected and was dissatisfied with, who moulded the isicathamiya we recognise today. He took even more risks with the dynamics – the louds and softs and the fasts and slows – of the music, creating sonic excitement that appealed to all ears. That excitement was vital, to underpin his other key contribution: dramatically foregrounding the music’s narrative element, crafting lyrics that married modern, urban as well as rural, experiences with the layered poetic metaphors of deep Zulu tradition. Audiences within that tradition heard themselves in his stories; audiences outside it may not have understood the multiply allusive words, but the music stirred their hearts.

And then there was the matter of giving voice and agency to working-class experience. Unjustly, isiZulu traditional and neo-traditional music was co-opted by the apartheid government for its retribalisation project, and by apartheid’s reactionary loyalists in ethnic political factions. Musicians often saw it very differently – “isicathamiya was our way of attacking with song,” one singer asserted – but that co-option sometimes led to anti-apartheid activists shunning it and discounting its power. But at the same time as city activists were migrating to Soweto Soul, Zulu-speaking factory workers from trade union cultural locals were adopting isicathamiya as part of their struggles, donning trade union regalia to sing mzabalazo (workers’ songs) in style at both strike meetings and choral contests. Choirs like Clover and the Sizanani Lucky Stars survived murderous attacks, occasionally won those contests, and drew other workers to their cause.

Whatever the personal politics of LBM members at various times, Shabalala’s musical innovations made him the chief architect of the space in which all that was possible.The millions of working people here who loved and mourn him do so because he made it possible for their lives to breathe through song.

His music trod softly between regional nationalism, working-class pride, urban struggles and rural loyalties: it was, in the phrase of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, the kind of “ground on which transformations are worked.” That’s a massive intellectual contribution no obituary to date has considered, one far more significant than those Grammies or singing with Dolly Parton. To a giant: lala ngoxolo.

** UPDATE Feb 14: As I predicted, the first of the weekend papers (and one that still does keep specialist arts writers in its newsroom) the Mail&Guardian, has come up with the best evaluation of Shabalala’s life you are likely to read anywhere. Make this your weekend must-read: https://mg.co.za/friday/2020-02-12-how-joseph-shabalala-mambazo-chopped-the-competition-down/

 

 

Amanda Tiffin is Facing South, but not everything’s sunny in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Latin jazz has long fascinated South African fans. In particular, the marriage between the laid-back, cafe sounds of Brazil’s bossa nova and the laid-back seaside sounds of Cape Town’s resorts is very easy to understand. Jonathan de Vries’s award-winning 2003 documentary about late Cape saxophonist Robbie Jansen in Cuba, Casa de la Musica https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJOpcMKjUqI, explored some more complex historical reasons for the affinity. For Jansen, slavery and the resulting heterogeneous mixes of sonic and human heritages, racially structured oppressions and powerful liberatory visions in both Latin America and on the Western Cape coast provided common ground far more solid than Ipanema’s promenades.

Shared Southern musical perspectives are also invoked by the title of vocalist/pianist/composer Amanda Tiffin’s new album, Facing South, https://music.apple.com/pe/album/my-own-song-feat-amanda-tiffin-hein-van-geyn-guilherme/1471160701?i=1471160718 , which features two South African musicians, Tiffin and guitarist David Leadbetter, an SA-resident Dutch bassist, Hein van de Gein, and Brazilian accordionist Guilherme Ribeiro, and featuring 11 compositions contributed by everybody on board. (A special mention should also go to bassist Romy Brauteseth; she doesn’t play on the album, but provides lush, leaf-strewn, album art.)

In character, it’s a very Cape Town album: reflecting a mix of diverse musical influences with a deceptively easy feel that could put it on the playlists of every seaside café in the Mother City . But, also like much of Cape Town’s music, the easiness really is deceptive. The tracks on this album deserve to be much more than background music, with some technically tough playing lurking under the catchy hooks. Highlights include several captivating musical conversations: between bass and accordion on Waiting for Stillness; voice and accordion on Akkerman; guitar and everybody on Leadbetter’s Hidden Eye of the Sun; and between an astoundingly subtle bass and voice on Tiffin’s My Own Song. That last demonstrates how much van de Geyn will have to teach young bassists when he runs the National Youth Jazz Band at Grahamstown in June.

Female samba singers inevitably risk comparison with the first one most of us outside Brazil heard, Astrud Gilberto. In terms of the light, airy quality of her voice, Tiffin fits right there. However, you’ll hear a more modern and adventurous harmonic imagination in her performances; even on a classic samba such as her own Happy Samba, her vocal sensibility belongs to tomorrow, not 1965.

From left: van de Geyn; Leadbetter; Ribeiro; Tiffin

The same is true of Ribeiro’s accordion. The instrument has been a mainstay of northeastern Brazil’s forro music, and on Happy Samba he gives it that impressively fast, agile, popular feel. But elsewhere, it’s lyrical, yearning, even abstractly edgy; we hear all its possible voices. (We might wonder why our own accordion music, Lesotho’s famo, is so little represented in modern performance arenas. I can think of only Morena Leraba who’s doing anything right now with famo roots – without accordion – but I hope I’m wrong.)

Brazil is one of the Souths on the album; Mzansi is the other, and is most explicitly detectable in Leadbetter’s compositions. This is the second of the guitarist’s projects with ‘South’ in the title; the other is his collaboration with Ronan Skillen on Deep South. He has told AllaboutJazz that he’s a ‘melody man’, and his compositions here reflect that: his road-trip composition Desert Road is instantly hummable; dangerously close to earworm.

Tropicalia veteran Caetano Veloso

Yet, delightful and entrancing though the samba influences and South African accents of Facing South are, this is also a week to recall another Brazilian musical movement besides samba: the tropicalia of the late 1960s. Tropicalia asserted Brazil as a country with multiple heritages and challenged the ultra-nationalist dictatorship of the times. This week, two thousand-plus Brazilian cultural figures – academics, writers, film-makers, musicians and more – issued an open letter warning that the censorship imposed by the authoritarian regime of Jair Bolsonaro suggested their country was headed down the road towards fascism again. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/07/democracy-and-freedom-of-expression-are-under-threat-in-brazil. Among them were two veterans of tropicalia music: Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso. Veloso told the Washington Post in 2018: “I was forced into exile once. It won’t happen again. I want my music, my presence, to be a permanent resistance…” Let’s think of Brazil as we groove to Facing South, and reflect on what solidarity we can offer to its musicians today.