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T A S J O U R N A L
Basic Repertoire
Southern African and West African Pop
Derk Richardson
The third in an occasional series that highlights the “basic
repertoire” of a particular music by identifying the recorded
essentials.
While thousands, if not millions, of
pop music fans in the United
States gained their initial exposure
to African pop music in
1986 through the vehicle of Paul
Simon’s Grammy-winning Graceland album, the
taste provided by the globetrotting singer-songwriter’s
groundbreaking disc and subsequent tour
was not only diluted in Simon’s shimmering
and ethnically eclectic folk-pop, but
was also as narrow as it was buoyant and
emotionally uplifting. The primary African
influence on Graceland was South African,
represented most prominently by the male
vocal ensemble Ladysmith Black
Mambazo. (Senegalese superstar Youssou
N’Dour was overdubbed onto “Diamonds on the Soles of Her
Shoes,” but it would take a collaborative 1987 tour with that
even more ambitious pop promoter of world music, Peter
Gabriel, to break N’Dour onto the international scene.)
If listeners had strictly followed Simon’s lead, they might
have rediscovered the resurgent Miriam Makeba and Hugh
Masekela, who both joined the Graceland tour, and might have
made further investigations into South African pop music rooted
in the Zulu a cappella singing (isicathamiya) of Ladysmith
Black Mambazo—plus such styles as marabi and kwela, the precursors
that led to mbaqanga and township jive. That, of course,
would have yielded plenty to enjoy, including music by
Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, the Boyoyo Boys, and
others. But just as Graceland was neither the first nor last
attempt to fuse African and Western musical styles, so even a
deep dip into South African popular music hardly penetrates
the surface of what the African continent has to offer.
African pop music was being disseminated to the West well
before Simon scored a cassette copy of Gumboots: Accordion Jive
Hits, Volume II from a friend. Musicologist John Storm Roberts
had been studying and gathering the Afro-pop sounds that originated
in the 1950s, and founded his seminal Original Music
record label in the 1970s; Fela Anikulapo Kuti made his first
trip from Lagos, Nigeria, to Los Angeles in 1971, hipping the
hipsters to his funky and political Afrobeat sounds; and by
1982, the potentate of Nigerian juju music, King Sunny Adé,
had been signed to Chris Blackwell’s Mango label
and was poised to break big—by virtue of albums
and tours—in the U.S.
In the 20 years since the release of Graceland, the
many genres and subgenre variations of African pop
have become ever more familiar to the growing
legions of “world music” fans in the West. When you
consider that even in a somewhat more politically
and socially cohesive country like the United States you have
great disparities in popular music styles—from Memphis soul
to Seattle grunge, Delta blues to Southern California surf, to
name but a few—the task of building a representative repertoire
of African pop is daunting. Even confining a survey of
essential recordings to southern and western Africa (for the
time being sidestepping the fertile cultures of the northern,
eastern, and central regions) yields a plethora of bright, bubbling,
poignant, and politicized regional genres, styles, and
artists as crucial cornerstones for any African pop collection.
SOUTHERN AFRICA
Largely because of the long and ultimately victorious struggle
against apartheid, South Africa has been in the cultural spotlight
longer and more consistently than most other African
nations. Its music industry is nearly 100 years old, with commercial
recording dawning in 1912, and Eric Gallo founding
the country’s first professional studio in the 1930s. By then,
African-American musicians were already making the transatlantic
voyage to entertain in South African cities, and gospel
and jazz influences were merging with the indigenous traditions
of the Zulu, Sothos, and Xhosa peoples—a tendency that
would continue with the assimilation of rock, soul, disco, reggae,
and hip-hop as the century progressed.
South African jazz artists—including trumpeter Masekela,
singer Makeba, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, and saxophonist
Dudu Pukwana—were among the first to travel (and exile themselves)
to the U.S. and Europe in the early 1960s. Makeba—a.k.a.
“Mama Africa,” whose life journey included playing for President
Kennedy, testifying against apartheid at the U.N., collaborating
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