Why churning out music ‘content’ isn’t music journalism

Burnout at the freelance desk

We talk a great deal about the snags musicians encounter trying to earn a living online. What’s discussed less is the equally tough world of online music writing. Look closely, and you’ll see the same issues, the same patterns – and the same tendency for music writers on the periphery of the global industry (for example, in Africa) to fare worst of all. This very comprehensive report – some of whose writing team are South African – spells it out: https://geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/new-report-the-risks-and-rewards-of-online-gig-work-at-the-global-margins/

UPDATE: See also this Africa-specific study: https://theconversation.com/for-workers-in-africa-the-digital-economy-isnt-all-its-made-out-to-be-176724

The LinkedIn algorithm sent me a vacancy ad the other day for what it described as ‘online music journalism’. It made horrifying reading. But let’s be clear, that ad and that platform represent a global trend – they’re by no means the worst out there. I know people who’ve written for them, and at least they keep their promise and do pay the advertised rate.

For me and most music journalists I know, writing one decent music story demands at least a week’s work. You listen to the music, usually several times. You research the artist, the project, the background and context. You interview at least the performer and often other role-players too. You think, plan, draft and re-draft the text, shaping the information to suit your platform’s style and the needs of its readers.

You could do less – but the story would get progressively worse with every nip and tuck.

So what was the job this ad described?

You’d be writing “8 articles a day (a mix of original, exclusive and rewritten/aggregated news” You’d also be sourcing all the images and multimedia for those articles (in newsrooms, the responsibility of a production staffer), and doing the accompanying Facebook social media.

That’s 240 articles every month. Your fee would be between $450 -$650 per month. Correct me if my maths are inexact, but assuming a 30-day month that’s below three dollars (ZAR48 a story).

In order to qualify for this payment, you need a formal journalism qualification, experience, industry contacts, “a good laptop/PC” and a “stable reliable internet connection…Cellphone data is not acceptable”.

(That last provision, of course, excludes most township-based community journalists, who already do brilliant work tracking and documenting majority activities on their cellphones – and who are probably the most financially in need of this kind of work.)

To achieve that target of 8 stories a day, most of them can’t be original journalism. (Not to mention when do such writers get to sleep or eat properly? https://time.com/4972787/death-overwork-japan-heart-stress/ ) They’ll be “rewritten/aggregated news”. In other words, picking up whatever is already out there and cobbling it together in a slightly different form.

If you’ve ever wondered why so much online music content is just a set of refracting mirrors of itself, cravenly throwing back at us Western cultural hegemony, individualism and obsession with showbiz trivia and ‘personalities’, that’s why.

As we’ve noted before, if you throw nothing but that stuff at readers, they – and many non-specialist editors – will assume that’s all there is and that it defines the genre of music journalism. You can only select differently if you know about other choices.

Creating ovoid content: the business model

Because content-creation is atomized: each person sitting at home in direct contact only with the boss, there’s no opportunity for peer learning (one huge potential strength of newsrooms, though not always built on) or for peer organization to demand better terms and conditions of work. You’re doing two people’s jobs, so somebody else doesn’t have one.  And there’s no time to look outside the battery cage at the other kinds of writing that are possible.

I can’t say: don’t take jobs like this. Everybody needs to eat. Doing such work will definitely teach you something: how to conform to iron work discipline, how to research fast (but not necessarily deeply) and how to write fast (but not necessarily well). I can’t even say don’t read it, because, like all that fatally fatty, sugary, salty fast food, it is precisely tailored to the dopamine-triggering consumption patterns the Godzilla global online platforms are panel-beating us into.

But I can say: there are other choices.

In South Africa, the Mail & Guardian, New Frame, the Conversation and the wonderful Herri https://theconversation.com/review-herri-is-a-rare-new-arts-and-culture-journal-from-south-africa-137805 all offer real music stories that didn’t have to be written and posted in an hour.  (Disclosure: I do write for some of these platforms. The above is why.) Internationally, Pitchfork, NPR, Afropop Worldwide, Africa is a Country and several more also offer thoughtful music writing, depending on your genre preferences.

Protesting Uber and Lyft drivers in New York

And as Uber and Lyft drivers have demonstrated, being forced to operate alone doesn’t stop you trying to organize with fellow-workers so you can at least get your treadmill running more gently. Don’t think, because you can call yourself ‘a writer’, that your situation isn’t just like theirs. Investors in the various gig economy enterprises aren’t there to make immediate profits (Uber hadn’t made a profit in 10 years until the peculiar pandemic circumstances of 2021.) They are investing in the future profit potential that will only come from destroying national industries and real jobs https://newsocialist.org.uk/the-gig-economy/ and replacing them with atomized, un-organised workers completely at their mercy.

Alongside the shoddy re-treaded music writing this business model foists on writers and readers, that’s one more reason to resist.

Let’s support our musicians while they are still with us!

Please see this important message regarding Pops Mohamed

One Night in Pelican and the Orlando jazz legacy

“Ah, Sophiatown,” observed the late Drum journalist Arthur Maimane cynically, “everybody who never knew it has romantic memories of it.”

One of those memories is that Sophiatown was the Johannesburg epicentre of Black modern jazz – and it’s not true.

Sophia did have a lot going for it in jazz terms before the mid-1950s when it was destroyed by the apartheid authorities. The Odin Cinema showed musicals like Cabin in the Sky and Young Man with a Horn as well as the between-movie music shorts of Ellington and more that provided aspirational images of tuxedo-clad American jazzmen. When it wasn’t a cinema, it hosted the sessions of the legendary Pinocchio Mokaleng’s Modern Jazz Club. Many of the most accomplished literati of the 1950s lived in the suburb, frequenting shebeens proud to have the latest jazz records on their turntables. And just down the road in Rosettenville was St Peters College, where the Huddleston Jazz Band was born.

The late Jonas Gwangwa, an alumnus of that band, used to get quite irritated by the assumption that because he played jazz he must be from Sophiatown:”[Historically] there were bands all over the show…but people only talk about Sophia.”

But though his family had briefly rented accommodation there before he was born, Gwangwa was born and raised in Orlando East – and if any townships had a claim to be cradles of Joburg jazz, it was the two Orlandos, East and West. As well as Gwangwa, Orlando East was the birthplace of Zuluboy Cele, who cut what’s acknowledged as the first South African jazz recording, Izikalo Zika Z-Boy, in 1939, and of legendary bandleader and composer Zacks Nkosi. And from 1972 for a decade, Lucky Michaels’ Club Pelican in Orlando West was cradle, university, proving ground and launching pad for the best modern jazz of its time and a great deal of other good music too.

Now, a new compilation from Matsuli Music, One Night in Pelican https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/one-night-in-pelican, brings together a sampler of those sounds.

A real night in Pelican. Pic from Music in Africa (sourced from Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/Club-Pelican-e-Sgangeni-180970561944876/photos/)

Hospitality was the Michaels’ family inheritance. Lucky’s father, Michael Tandy, had bicycled all the way from Zimbabwe to seek work in Egoli, and graduated, self-taught, from doing his employer’s household maintenance to becoming his chef. His mother, who had been born in Tucker Street in Sophiatown, supplemented those earnings and was able to save by running a shebeen in Doornfontein. The savings, pre- the Group Areas Act, bought the family a popular restaurant (and occasional music place) Michael’s Restaurant, in the Joburg city centre in 1947. There, aspiring young lawyers like Mandela and Tambo lunched. Three years later, the Act forced the family to sell up to a white attorney, Mr Smith, who fronted the enterprise and became the boss.

But by the 1970s, their grown sons, making a living as best they could on the edges of legality under a regime that had virtually outlawed Black sociality, saw a burgeoning, adventurous music scene and no venues. Inspired by examples they’d seen in Lourenco Marques, they leapt into the unknown by opening what they hoped could become a sophisticated nightclub just behind the railway station – although, observed Michaels “[to the police] it was just a shebeen with a load of lights”. The detail of that story is told in Kwanele Sosibo’s informative liner notes for the album.

The ten tracks of the album reflect primarily the groove-led ‘Afro-modern’ soul jazz of the mid-70s. Anybody who used to follow the Electric Jive blogspot that provided a platform for the Matsuli label’s founding spirits, Matt Temple and Chris Albertyn, will know that’s an era very close to their hearts.

It’s also a period that was, until recently, victim of another piece of SA jazz mythology: that not much happened musically at home after the ’76 uprising and the departure of many creative young people into exile. One Night in Pelican, many of whose tracks date from 1977, gives the lie, magnificently, to that myth.

The Pelican logo. Pic as above

On reeds and brass you’ll hear Khaya Mahlangu, Dennis Mpale, lots of Duku Makasi (and the more of Makasi that reappears on record, the better) and Teaspoon Ndelu. Among guitarists, you’ll find Themba Mokoena (whose partnership with Billy Monama is currently bringing him well-deserved and renewed attention), Marks Mankwane and Almon Memela – and even a youthful Bheki Mseleku pops up on keys, during his youthful stint with The Drive.  There are more names you’ll recognise, and a few tracks where it hasn’t been possible to identify everybody. (If you remember those bands, maybe you can help?)

The hard marketing lines we draw today between ‘pop’ and ‘jazz’ mattered far less then to either musicians or audiences. Nobody seemed to worry about whether superb solos might be “too demanding” for a good-time audience. As the diga crews demonstrate up to today, if your Florsheims are deft enough, you can dance to everything.

The Pelican set aside different nights for different genres and even, Michaels recalled when I spoke to him before his death, “we’d go and pick up the winners of the mbube competitions [at St Mary’s Hall]…and they’d also come here with their ‘a-la-la’ and all that.”

So One Night at Pelican is no more the complete story of that venue’s music than The Indestructible Beat of Soweto https://www.amazon.com/Indestructible-Beat-Soweto-VARIOUS-ARTISTS/dp/B000000DW2 covers all the music of those townships.

Lost glory: the site of the Pelican in 2018. Pic from lizatlancaster blog

But it’s an intriguing, compelling picture of a mid-70s musical moment, showcasing some superb playing, creative composition, and beats you can still dance to. It’s an essential collection, and not just for reasons of history or nostalgia.

Maswitsi: sugar-coated, but with very interesting fillings

It’s clear from the cover package of trombonist Kgethi Nkotsi’s debut, Maswitsi https://music.amazon.com/albums/B09PK7BKQZ  where the marketing is aimed.

Dressed in tooth-aching pink with rainbow splashes, candy-canes, jelly beans and the leader/composer in a walk-like-an-Egyptian pose, this cover doesn’t just speak to the spontaneous innocence of children’s musical ears that Nkotsi has discussed in interviews. It also addresses the sunny good humour of lazy Sunday afternoon jazz by some dam somewhere, with bottles of lurid alcopop and sugar-rimmed cocktails. ‘Drink me!’ the label says: “I’m easy listening!’

To back that up, the opener, Dipopaye, is an ear-worm of such insidious power that after only one listening I simply couldn’t stop humming it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo48SoPq3vc . That’s the radio hit for sure.

But don’t be fooled. There’s literally a lot more to Maswitsi than meets the eye.

Tembisa-born Nkotsi is a graduate of the shamefully under-acknowledged and under-supported Molelekwa Arts Foundation, the Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Festival and the UKZN jazz programme.  He performs in multiple original contexts: see him, for example, as part of a very different composer’s ensemble here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mEP8i7-d0

On the 10-tracks of the album, he works with reedman Simon Manana (most recently heard on Ayanda Sikhade’s Umakhulu), keyboardist Sanele Phakathi and what’s becoming a top KZN rhythm section of choice: Dalisu Ndlazi on bass and electric bass and Riley G (Giandhari) on drums. The playing is tight and uniformly appealing, and to the extent that Maswitsi actually is easy listening, it’s because everybody knows how to swing like the clappers.

Dalisu Ndlazi (b) & Riley G (drs). Pic: Rafs Mayet

Yet the composing is far more varied and sophisticated than interview and song-title invocations of childhood might suggest, taking the moods to shadowed as well as sunlit places. There are unexpected minor keys and modals. Melodies and structures allude to many faces of township cultural history, not just childhood and play.

Re koJaiveng, for example, is programme music for a helter-skelter Tom and Jerry cartoon chase, but also the cue for a soaring, searching Manana solo and rhythm from Giandhari that’s by turns relentless and swinging, culminating in a tricky tick-tock drum solo. The title track takes us back to jazz picnics at the lake, with the keyboards underpinning a funky groove.

Grootman is a lyrical tribute, affording Nkotsi, Manana and Phakathi the opportunity for solos brimming with controlled yet heartfelt emotion, and Khumoetsile, which follows, sustains the ballad mood, this time with a heart-stopping solo from Ndlazi.  On a slide trombone, playing slow while sustaining precision and a consistent tone, as these two numbers demand, is technically one of the harder things to do, and Nkotsi achieves it with warmth and grace.

Kgethi Nkotsi

Primary School After Care https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PizzK9G7Rw , by contrast, is a piece of classic, brisk South African hard bop, along the lines of Herbie Tsoaeli’s Days Mandulo, with Nkotsi and Manana doing the Jazz Epistles-style thing, while Majampa Jampa is perfect for the diga dancers.

In all these respects, Maswitsi is a typical debut album. It offers a sample of everything currently in the leader’s range, as both composer and player. It’s highly strategic, appealing via its packaging to all those jazz listeners who are, frankly, bored by the uncles in the corner endlessly debating the technical complexities of a solo. Nevertheless, the sound constantly displays and references precisely the qualities those conversations value, packed with playing that’s not only sweet and empathetic, but clever and tough too.

I’m eager to hear along which of the many musical directions showcased here Nkotsi’s second album will take him. Because if you can drag your ears past the wickedly addictive Dipopaye, there’s a lot to choose from.

Zakes Mda’s Wayfarers’ Hymns: words have music too

First, wishing everybody the compliments of 2022. Let’s hope it’s going to be a better year.

I can’t remember when I last listened to famo singer Puseletso Seema. Probably it was around the mid-1990s, when David Coplan’s monograph In the Time of the Cannibals (https://www.amazon.com/Time-Cannibals-Africas-Migrants-Ethnomusicology/dp/0226115747 ) got me searching through SeSotho music as a playlist. As 2021 ended, I needed something similar to accompany a marathon reading catch-up. And there Seema is, only 25 pages in to Zakes Mda’s latest novel, Wayfarers’ Hymns (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/book/wayfarers-hymns/9781415210895 ), the book he never intended to write.

She’s one of many real-life famo musicians who perform on its pages.

Mda had planned to stop his novelising with The Zulus of New York, his 30^th. But, he observed, “the story decides when it should be told.” And Wayfarers’ Hymns, which explores the social history of Lesotho’s famo music through the life of one kheleke (wandering Sesotho bard), needed to be written.

It needed to be written partly for the completeness of his own opus. Structurally, it’s the middle book of a Toloki trilogy. 1995’s Ways of Dying introduced us to the itinerant professional mourner and his lover Noria. 2007’s Cion found Toloki in America, alone, Noria having “died in Lesotho”, with the how and why unexplained. Wayfarers’ Hymns bridges that narrative gap.

It tells the story of a kheleke’s career, from early beginnings on a concertina, through accordion music, to stage and TV success. It takes the story of the music itself further, reflecting on how new famo may be emerging from the influences of hip-hop. And it paints not only a musical but an emotional coming of age.  

There’s another reason it needed to be written – the reason a book, rather than some music news, opens these 2022 blogs. Because what “traditional” music means outside the exoticising stereotypes, and what’s changing, matters for society, not just musicians. A novel takes those concerns outside the domain of academic musicologists.

One newspaper review of Mda’s novel headlines the “lurid world” of famo music. It’s true that right from the origins of the genre it has been associated with obsessive communal loyalties and violent masculinity. But as Mda makes clear, those loyalties – forged in initiation schools – protected against the dehumanisation and indignities of the migrant mining life. https://chimurengachronic.co.za/accordion-cowboys/

Terene in their distinctive blankets

The book’s unnamed protagonist  – “the boy-child who will end up food for vultures” – hears this history from the age-mates of his father, killed in a mine collapse, his body never recovered.  Like many other “gangs” (including the Mafia) the famo factions first formed as a shield from the oppression of extractive mining capitalism. But they needed funds, and in the years of the struggle, their conservatism led the marashea (Ma-Russia) to take it from the police of those same authorities in return for smashing strikes and demonstrations.

As impoverishment and land degradation in Lesotho intensify, and today’s mine closures dry up migrant remittances, those same close communities still need funds. In a rich irony, the gangs have taken over the zama-zama business of extracting the minerals that remain from abandoned mine workings and, as Mda describes, now pay money to the police to protect those operations. The sounds and insignia of the music factions express loyalties to what are today business operations. https://theafricancriminologyjournal.wordpress.com/2017/12/07/accordion-killers-hundreds-of-murders-in-lesotho-music-rivalry/

Today, the Lesotho Times is still filled with stories of assassinations, and in particular the rivalries between Terene and Seakhi music factions. The impact of those rivalries traverses the Lesotho-South Africa border from abandoned mines to village funerals. That’s the backdrop to the story of the music, woven in and out of the wandering bard’s life story like the arum lily pattern on the purple blankets his own band – increasingly indistinguishable from a gang – wear. 

But it was never only men.

Colonial laws and imported religion fanned violent patriarchy in village communities. The migrant labour system paradoxically forced the women left behind to become more self-reliant to squeeze a livelihood from the land. To evade those contradictions, or as a response to violence or desertion, some women opted for the single life. The historic practice of motsoalle (close and passionate relationships with other women) was one support in their self-reliance. Among the many women rejecting the conventional life, some chose music as their route to independence.

Before Seema, the famous Malitaba carved out that path. Coplan quotes one of her lyrics: ”They call me a vagabond/But I am not a vagabond, I am taking care of business/ Helele! Should I mind when they wink at me?”

The boy-child sometimes clings to old attitudes to women (particularly his sister) in his personal life, even as the strong women around him tease and subvert them. But one strength of Wayfarers’ Hymns is the way its narrative acknowledges and respects their role in the music: not only as backup dancers, barred from certain “men’s songs”, but as front-line performers also singing of war, and as makheleke in their own right, business managers, and even gangsters. Seema’s account of her own life https://www.thepost.co.ls/news/the-crazy-story-of-puseletso-seema/ illustrates this vividly. Oppression, though, is everywhere. One of Seema’s biggest hits, Mofata Seliba, castigated the exploitative music industry, and as recently as 2021, it’s still happening: https://www.thereporter.co.ls/2021/12/20/puseletso-seema-cries-foul/.

What happens to boy-child, to his sister Moliehi, and to Noria is wrapped by all the threads of this complex fabric, and in particular by the commodification of the lifela (songs/hymns) that began their life as expressions of people’s lived experience.   

As we travel with the boy-child, we feel the hurt when music becomes merely a good to be bought and sold. Holding a village feast to thank his ancestors, he sings one of his hit songs. But, his partners in the band explain threateningly, he cannot now sing what have become Arum Lily’s songs for free. They must be purchased for cash with a concert ticket. “’That song is our meal ticket. You are cheapening it when you sing it at just any event where people are not paying…you are cheapening the Cult of Arum Lily as a brand’…I don’t want to be a brand, I said. I just want to be a free man who can sing with his people anytime he feels like it.” It’s a stark and moving illustration of how cultural branding and commodification erode the social fabric.

But in the end we read a novel for its words. Wayfarers’ Hymns has to be one of the most musical of Mda’s recent books: sometimes more like a lyric or a poem, infused with the rhythms and idioms of “village, clan, traditional leader, of singer and lover”.

For all these reasons, even if you’re not into tradition, read this book. It’ll make you think about where music comes from – and where it might be going.

A Short Famo Playlist

Historic roots (Hugh Tracey ILAM recordings –a full playlist at the second link)

Puseletso Seema

Factional rivalries

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-472_PA0hQ (Terene)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5SLx83a8sc (Seakhi)

Famole

Khosi Mosotho Chakela

Famo in the 2020s/ SeSotho hip-hop

Malome Vector (pity the book mis-spells that name!)

Ntate Stunna