kagablog

m’du: Yebo.

aryan kaganof: How did you get to become the Godfather of kwaito?

m’du: This kwaito thing, the genre of music, it started in the early nineties. But I grew up in a musical family. A gospel family, my grandmother played organ and piano in the church so that’s how I got into the music. I started the professional side, just backing all those top artists in South Africa, at the age of twelve. But I at school so we had a problem with my mother, but my granny siad that’s fine you must do what you want, but my mother was not impressed. She wanted me to focus more on education. But I was doing both but I loved music most, because I grew up listening, my mother likes to buy music, and my granny likes to play it. From about 1987 I started to do sessions I was a session piano player, and this was the apartheid times. Early nineties you know we decided to come up with something that’s going to, because we as youth in South Africa we were very angry, it was this chaos thing of fighting and stuff, but as a musician just to calm the youth down, I decided to, I mean I recorded some of the umzabalaza songs then, late eighties, I call them toyi toyi songs. When you’re having like boycotts and stuff, there’s certain songs that you sing to send the message across you know, so I recorded those songs just to spread them around, for other people to know about the songs that we used when we did that mzabalaza thing. So later we knew that Dr. Mandela was going to be out of jail so I just had to come up with something that’s going to calm the youth down. To look forward to the future. It was early nineties. So when Dr. Mandela was out the youth thought we were gonna fight but I like what he said, let’s not look back, let’s not fight, let’s look forward to the future. Let’s just educate ourselves with knowledge. Because most of the time we were interrupted at school you know. That’s another thing that made me love music, because while school was interrupted with demonstrations I would go to rehearsals and stuff. So this kwaito thing started early nineties, and the reason for it was as I say to bring the youth down, and look forward to the future to get the youth to conecentrate on the future of the country as well. And we kept that going until such time as deejays, South African deejays, brought out their own house compilations, now they’re trying to kill kwaito. But kwaito is our culture, so I fought for that. Kwaito is South African. It is music that you only find in South Africa. And the difference about kwaito and other musics is that it relates to the townships. How we live in the townships. So some of my colleagues said let’s change it to house music and I said to them no I’m sticking to this kwaito genre because we are the kwaito generation. And kwaito is about looking forward to the future it is encouraging us not to look back you know. In 2000 I came up with a song called Chumiyababa (???) which means Friend To The Kids, and there was a lot of competition then because deejays wanted to be musicians but not musicians creating something just taking songs from Europe especially, just compiling them, si I fought them I said why don’t you come up with something? You can make African house because that’s what most of the French and German guys do they sample African music so why don’t you do that here, you have the ability, but I think the deejays here were lazy they are not creative. So that’s when I got the name Godfather because I started the kwaito and I fought for it to be where it is and there is now an entire young gneration in it and it has the future. The only thing that I am working on now is to introduce it internationally. It will be better if we collaborate with other international mujsicians just to expand the kwaito culture. It’s more of being proud of your language, proud of being African, it has a pride.

aryan kaganof: Let’s talk about kwaito in terms of traditional African music forms. Where does it fit in? How does it fit in?

m’du: Talking about music then. You get Philip Thabane and Ladysmith Black mambazo and stuff. And today’s music which is kwaito. Firstly we are still keeping the culture. But in a modern way. As you know recording is much easier than it was in the past when it was with all those analogue tape reels etc, now it’s digital. But we are still keeping and sampling some of the old African music. And we still use live instruments as well you know. Like for example if I did a cover version of Philip Thabane, instead of sampling it I would like him to come and play the guitar, of the same song, just for him to feel part of the song you know. Revamping old music, kwaito is all about that you know, whereby we take old music and traditional music and fuse them together.

aryan kaganof: Digital technology has revolutionised the position of artists such as yourself in terms of the record companies.

m’du:I remember in the past when I first did a demo tape and I took it to several big record companies and it was kwaito but no one from the A&R understood, it was like, what is this you know? That’s when I decided to form my own company. I wanted to do what I feel. In the creative world you have to do what you feel but you have to have the guidance from someone. The I started M’du records. Because no one wanted my stuff. And then suddenly when the big companies hear that it’s big then they started knocking, saying listen we want to sign you and stuff. But that’s what happens all over the world, every time when you come up with something new they reject you first until they see that that type of music has a potential you know. So we are collaborating a lot with older musicians. My plans are to work with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Hugh Masekela as well, Miriam Makeba just to mix kwaito and the old style heavy African traditional music. I’ve done a couple of songs with Jabu Khanyile and it was so nice. African and kwaito. I came up with this kwaito rap and he sings African. In music you can take any elements, classical music, mix it with anything, there is no apartheid in music. As a creative person I like coming up with new ideas and new elements all the time.

aryan kaganof: How does hip hop relate to kwaito?

m’du: I should say kwaito and hip hop is the same thing. The difference is hiphop is the American culture, they singing about the ghetto about how they live, the way they talk. To them swearing is normal but to our culture swearing is like, you don’t respect or something. So it’s exactly what we’re doing here in kwaito, keeping the township culture going.

aryan kaganof: Clearly kwaito is a mirror of the township culture but as the country slowly transforms itself, more and more successful blacks will not be living in the townships, they will make the move to the suburbs. What does that mean for the next generation who will not be of the township culture, how will kwaito reflect their lifestyles?

m’du: I think in the past black people were not allowed by law to be in the suburbs. But to us it’s still our country. That’s what we fought for, to live anywhere where we want to. Not for someone to decide to put us in a corner. It’s our country. I don’t think that township culture will die out. It’s still here in the suburbs, to us it’s still the same. We’ve got a whole lot of black people living around here and to us it’s our country South Africa.

aryan kaganof: African people never chose historically to live in ghettoes. That was a choice imposed upon them. So there’s a kind of glorification of the ghetto but essentially people want to live in dignity and surely the music must reflect that basic human urge and right, to live a dignified life?

m’du: The only dignity is your own culture and what you believe in. I can go and live anywhere but I’ll still keep my culture. It doesn’t mean when I’m out of the ghetto I will have changed. we are moving on of course, especially by being more knowledgeable and being more educated, and having skills to improve our country and to share this culture with other countries. Yes there are still shacks and stuff but we are working so hard to change that. The only way to change the fact that our people do live in shacks is through education. I’m the ambassador for the kids you know, that’s the information that I give them; reading, knowledge. You don’t have to steal to change your life, like we used to do in the past, because we were never allowed to come to town or something so we ended up stealing and doing all those negative things but today we are just pumping this knowledge of looking forward to the future. You must work hard at school in order to change your life.

aryan kaganof: You grew up in Zola.

m’du: Yes.

aryan kaganof: How come so many great kwaito stars come from Zola?

m’du: Firstly as you say, Zola people, the language, you know, how we speak. In New York you know there’s a certain language that they speak that everybody’s interested to know so I think our influence was the language that we’ve created within the neighbourhood. It was a unique language and everybody wanted to speak that language. From kwaito’s point of view I think that’s what made most of the kwaito artists who were born in Zola.

aryan kaganof: Let’s talk about language. In the apartheid days music on the radio and on recordings was strictly compartmentalized by ethnicity. Kwaito changed all of that.

m’du: Firstly, in Zola we were Sothos, yes there was a section for the Sothos, but to us we could live in the offically designated Sotho section if you were Sotho or not, so that’s when this mixing of languages started. At school guys who spoke Sotho guys who spoke Shangaan guys who spoke Zulu guys who spoke Afrikaans, so we mixed all these languages you know in order for us to communicate with each other. And yes the radio stations had separated those languages but to us we are South African, we are one. Even though we speak different languages we are one. If you are South African now you live where you want you speak what you want, we’ve changed that, we fought fo it. We are one. You see kwaito started as a tsotsitaal, a thug language, they call it a thug language but even the grandmothers are speaking it. And we have to put some English in it for it to be understood by white South Africans, by all South Africans.

aryan kaganof: How will kwaito be understood in the international arena?

m’du: Well firstly music speaks a universal language. We love North African music, I love Salif Keita, I love Bona(?), I love to listen to Youssou Ndour, we don’t understand the language but you feel the music, music is all about emotions you know. Yes, some of the soungs, in order for Europeans to understand it will be better for us to colloborate with the top musicians and for them to interpret what we are saying in our languages, Zulu or whatever, then the Europeans will understand our music. By doing so together as musicians we will be taking it to another world. I like what Black mambazo did. They collaborated with all the top musicians in the world and it worked. And South Africans love to see their musicians working internationally, not only in South Africa.

aryan kaganof: So can we expect The Godfather to be collaborating soon?

m’du: Yes sure. I worked with Jean Michel Jarre, I’ve re-mixed two of his songs. I’ve worked with Kenny Latimore I’ve worked with Quincey Jones and they are all saying the same thing: collaborating is the key to the world!