A FAMOUS GROUSE
MUSICIANS, composers and producers have welcomed the SABC’s new lokal musik über alles policy. As the headlines predictably put it, Dithering Towers’ decision that its 18 radio stations play at least 90% local content is music to their ears. The decision also applies to the SABC’s television channels and digital platforms. There are to be no exceptions.
Time alone however will tell whether this “radical decision”, as the corporation’s chief operations officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng calls it, will be music to anyone else’s ears.
Certainly, in a dull age where talk radio has a stranglehold on the culture, it seems most listeners would far rather be entertained by concerned citizens telling Kieno Kammies that the authorities must do something about motorists who smoke in their cars than listen to music.
Here at the Mahogany Ridge, though, we see the SABC’s diktat as a bold attempt to return to the glory days of Radio Bantu’s early sonic boom. That was, like it or not, also a good time for local content; apartheid really did shape the music. And it was brilliant music, too.
Simply put, separate development required separate radio stations for the separate people. When it came to content for their new stations, the SABC settled on music. And perhaps with sound reason. These bantu were musical fellows, were they not? Simple folk who sang as they worked?
And so began a programme in the early 1960s, under the direction of an accomplished musicologist, Dr Yvonne Huskisson, to find this music. Which she did, in the far corners of rural South Africa. Her chief concern was to use radio as a means of exposing black people to their traditional culture.
She was extraordinarily good at her job. One of the more well-known acts she was associated with was Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
It’s not strictly true to say they were a Huskisson discovery, but it was through her efforts, as head of the SABC’s transcription services, that the isicathamiya group made their first recordings in 1969. She reportedly had to convince the group that it was safe to sing into the microphones, that the perforated pieces of metal would not steal their voices.
Huskisson documented almost 7 000 compositions by black composers for Radio Bantu, thus enabling them to register copyright and to enjoy proper recognition for their work.
It seems bizarre, looking back on all this, that grand apartheid should have been so proprietary about popular black music and yet have been so ashamed of its own. Its cringeworthy embrace of a faked-up “high kultuur” all but wiped out Afrikaans working class folk music.
Moving from saloon to salon, popular artists like Die Briels — our own Carter Family — were elbowed aside for the “Viennese” schmaltz of Mimi Coertse and Gé Korsten. And what fun that was. Not.
Huskisson was, of course, an apartheid apparatchik. She served her masters well, particularly when it came to the sort of music we should enjoy. She sat on committees that pored over lyric sheets, studying them in terms of five criteria: politics, religion, sex, drugs and questionable taste. She had a hand in the banning of much material from airplay.
Motsoeneng, too, serves his masters — and with the mania of an idiot. He has a certain jones for big numbers: all news bulletins shall contain 70% good news; the COO’s pay packet shall increase by R900 000 each year; there shall be 90% local music, and so on. The apparent ease with which he tosses off such edicts does provide the illusion of competency.
He reportedly settled on the 90% figure after consulting with the pianist, composer and producer Don Laka who has, in recent weeks, been complaining that the previous local content quota — almost 35% — had done little to advance his career as a jazz musician.
It is no surprise, then, that jazz is one of the genres that will be singled out for preferential treatment with the new policy — the others are kwaito, gospel and reggae — and there is now a great fear that the nation will be subjected to Laka’s tinkly noodlings ad nauseam.
The SABC once ensured that we dwelt in a cultural backwater. The world to the north ended at the Limpopo. Beyond that there was only barbarism and the Jesus-hating and drug-taking Beatles. Today, in the digital age, it would have us remain in the same blinkered state but there’s little chance of that.
Finally, we must consider those words first uttered with great urgency more than 60 years ago: one may be for the money, but two really is for the show.
Give musicians venues. They need audiences. Live music — that’s where it all starts.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
