kagablog

Background

I’m driving back from Cape Town to Somerset West, across the Cape Flats, listening to Who Cares? a rather bleak song about a day in the office, by The Buckfever Underground (BU). I’ve just interviewed Toast Coetzer, the singer and songwriter of this band. Ahead of me, a taxi pulls over on the side of the freeway in an illegal traffic maneuver, and one of the passengers nonchalantly chucks an empty beer bottle onto the verge. School-kids saunter across the road, chased by plastic bags in the South-Easter wind. These days, they play ‘rape me, rape me’ at school, in an effort to deal with their savage world. Squatter camps line the freeway; above the squalor, planes laden with tourists arrive to sample the delights of the Cape. Who cares indeed, about road rules, kids, the environment, the poor, or the country?

I think that Toast cares, for all the cynicism and irony which can be read into in his lyrics. Not that it’s his mission to save South Africa or the world, although songs like Ons Maak Onsself Dood (we are killing ourselves) do reflect a concern for issues like saving the environment. He says he doesn’t make an effort to put political content into his works, or to leave it out, but that it’s a ‘bit of a waste’ not to put it in … ‘its an extremely easy thing to do, you just have to read the newspaper’.

Toast grew up on a Cradock farm. He describes his conservative upbringing - ‘rock music was considered evil’ - as idyllic, despite the fact that in the 80s, ‘the Eastern Cape was burning’. He encountered Battery 9’s Lucy in the Steakhouse in Delmas while still at boarding school, but it was at Rhodes, where he went to study Journalism in 1996, that he, like me, experienced ‘like a massive sort of … what the fuck?’

He became a DJ on the student radio station and began interviewing bands during ‘the SA music explosion of the time’. There he met BU member Gilad Hockman and together they became live music junkies, with Oppikoppi as their annual holy grail. It was then that the mind-expanded Toast began writing ‘things that weren’t meant to be songs’ and putting them to music with Gil, at Monday night sessions at the Student Union called Fireside Jams. The rest, aside from some personnel changes to BU, is underground history.

BU albums, and especially their live performances, leave listeners in little doubt that this is as far from mainstream music and as raw as music gets. Toast would not be drawn into a debate about whether his outstanding lyrics are matched by the quality of the music, modestly saying he is not a musician ‘by any means; I’m in the band, but I can’t play shit, or sing shit’. He writes his freestyle lyrics to the tunes produced by the band in a sort of Kerouac style, agrees with me that his best lyrics are written in Afrikaans, and criticizes his inability to sing: ‘most of our songs are quite depressing, sort of droney affairs …’

Toast writes for Weg and Go travel magazines, which are run by the very mainstream Media 24 company. He’s using the system to finance the BU albums, which come out sporadically every few years, and to finance the offbeat Ons Klyntji litmag, which is also bought out sporadically, in cahoots with a couple of his associates. Toast has been interviewed by just about every cultural publication in the country. Aside from writing and singing, he is now venturing into theatre. His websites groan with humour, but our interview, which flowed easily, was surprisingly serious.

On the Afrikaans question

When asked, ‘what does it mean to you as an artist, to be an Afrikaans speaker?’ Toast took the tack that to be an Afrikaans artist ‘you are in a prime position to produce something that did not exist before you made it’ and that ‘its almost easier, you don’t have to compete against the entire English world, there is only a small Afrikaans world … it’s relatively easy to get exposure in the Afrikaans media’. He says Afrikaans is thriving for a supposedly dying language. Afrikaans speakers, aside from several vibrant annual festivals, produce a ‘shitload’ of books, and there an entire TV channel ¬– MK - dedicated to Afrikaans music and culture.

Afrikaners do support their own artists, Toast asserts, so the danger is that artists sometimes get away with producing poor quality stuff, which is ‘lapped up’ just because it is done in Afrikaans. The ideal, or challenge, is then to produce art which will hold its own if it is translated, for instance, into English: ‘I think a lot of Afrikaans mainstream artists get away with it, they are just making pop music, it doesn’t really matter about the quality of the music, or the lyrics, or the intensity of the thing …’.

Toast had no problems with the title Avante-Guava Afrikaner, saying that these days, many Afrikaners are able to take the piss out of themselves – there is even an school music competition called ‘Rockspaaider’. ‘We can always hurl “soutpiel” back at you’ observes Toast …

He says the Afrikaners are no more plagued by ‘swak smaak’ (poor taste) than any other nation. ‘Afrikaners are no more “common” than anyone else … if you try to pretend that you are not common, its like saying your own shit doesn’t stink’!

And he reacts strongly when asked ‘If you had to compare the Afrikaans nation to a person, at what stage of development do you think this person would be at?’ His reply was ‘You can’t lump Afrikaners together! Humans as a whole are barely bipedal, and we find terrible ways to fuck things up, we all do …’

I think he finds it quite ironic that BU has been told they are doing good Afrikaans songs, which is good for the Afrikaans language, because only two BU members are actually Afrikaans. But to ‘identify with the Afrikaans nation’ is a tricky, complex issue, ‘because what is that? If you stand for “Die Volk” people think that you want to wear khaki and have a homeland somewhere near the sea …’ This issue, of pride in being Afrikaans, but revulsion for the conservatives, is something that underground Afrikaans-speaking artists appear to often twist around painfully.

But Toast does not react as strongly against conservative Afrikanerdom as some of his fellow underground artists: ‘I think if I was older and had gone to the army, I might have had more of a grudge against Afrikanerdom, but I grew up in a rapidly changing country, so I don’t reject it … I obviously reject racist people and ‘Volk’ thinking, but that is not what I am reacting to … Die Volk (is in die kak) can be applied to any nation, it’s a reaction to consumerism …

Toast’s song Oom Willem Strikes Back paints the picture of an ‘old South African’ hard-drinking farmer who ‘is slightly embittered by his circumstances, but he is his own little republic, who keeps trucking, but the new South Africa is at the door!’ Exactly who is at the door, a farm murderer, a drinking buddy, or Eskom, is left open-ended. Toast says Oom Willem is tapping into something, striking a chord in the Afrikaner psyche, because most Afrikaners have an Oom Willem somewhere in their family or past.

The artist and new technology

BU are definitely keeping abreast of the new technology available to bands, using sites like MySpace and Facebook to advertise their shows. Their songs can be heard, downloaded and bought over the Internet through I-Tunes, CDbaby.com and the local site Rhythm Records, in a manner ‘which was only imaginable before, without a major record deal’…

The virtual CD can bought for around R7 a song, which makes it cheaper than buying the actual CD (minus the artwork) and their material is online for people all over the world. ‘It’s all nice and well to make independent art in your back room, but if you want people to listen to it, you must use the technology, because it’s essentially free technology’ says Toast. He believes this kind of access for distributing one’s art is not changing the style of the music, although it is changing other artforms like graphic art. Musicians must take full advantage of modern technology; the Net has given independent artists an equal chance to get their material out there. Overall it’s a good thing. The only downside is that there is perhaps an over-production of poor quality stuff, and because there is so much music to choose from on the Net, it becomes difficult to find decent music.

On Disempowerment and politics

Toast believes that the sense of disempowerment that Dutch journalist Fred de Vries talks about in South Africa is wide-spread, not limited to the whites or the Afrikaners. Even as South Africans use their new-found voting power, they are discovering that the promises made by political parties are as empty as ever, that corruption is as wide-spread as it was under late apartheid. Our country has a history of betrayal.

‘There are so many opinions out there … like people sitting in a shebeen discussing something over a beer … their protest, or their socio-political commentary, is gossip, gossip at the hairdresser …’ But Toast says ‘I don’t feel disempowered, I feel quite empowered, I am a privileged person with a car and a job, when you have money you feel empowered, because you are in charge of your own movement, for example …’

Can he effect any change with his songs? An Afrikaans singer singing about the lack of safety and housing may not be taken too seriously by the ‘massive, ANC-dominated, black government’ - as opposed to Voelvry artists, who sang in Afrikaans against an Afrikaans-led government 20 years previously - but these things ‘still need to be said’, argues Toast.

He seems determined not to be dragged into depression and ‘wallow in the misery’ about what is happening to South Africa. Its all too easy to say, ‘white people don’t get jobs, lets move to London’ especially ‘if your parents have been killed in a violent crime, you can understand why someone like that wants to get the fuck out of the scenery …’ Toast acknowledges he’s been lucky with that so far, ‘I haven’t been robbed of that bit of innocence’.

He does sing about crime and rape in Die Wortel van Kwaad (The root of anger) but, looking to the positive side of things, he says, ‘In South Africa it’s also easy to make your own thing, to open a T-shirt shop, or start a band and say what you want to say in it’.

It’s difficult to distinguish where the irony ends and optimism begins, when examining Toast’s astute lyrics: ‘I Want to Die on a Tuesday Afternoon is about how I would prefer to die like 20 000 other South African, because that is how many get murdered every year, shot or stabbed or whatever … its obviously taking the piss, by saying its fashionable to die like that, so I want to die like that …’

The underground versus the mainstream

Toast is convinced that there is no Afrikaans underground, or at least, not one that is separate from the English underground. What is underground, he asks, is it just ‘not mainstream’? He refers to Brixton Moord en Roof Orkes, who he thinks sit somewhere in the middle and blur the boundaries. The lead singer, Andries Bezuidenhout, writes a column for Rapport, ‘which is as mainstream as you are going to get’ and Toast himself uses his mainstream travel writing jobs to finance his ‘fulltime’ underground job; ‘the two things feed into each other quite nicely, the fact that I travel means I see incredible things … you see entire new worlds, and I think that is very healthy, whether you are writing or making music, and that does find its way into my lyrics …’
The most striking point that he makes on the topic, I think, is how mainstream and underground sometimes cross over.
‘I think if independent art stays on the margins, and doesn’t stray into the mainstream now and then, the danger exists that the mainstream continues as it is, and independent music stays in the margins, in the shadows, as a result.
‘But every now and then, it crosses over by accident, and finds itself in the glare of the mainstream spotlight … it might only last for 15 minutes … lets take Fokofpolisiekar as an easy example … they have a name that incites an opinion immediately … they started off just as an Afrikaans punk band, then the Afrikaans media, and eventually the English media, picked up on a controversy here and there, so suddenly my mother and my girlfriend’s mother know who Fokofpolisikar is. I don’t say they know the music, but here and there they catch a bit of it, and maybe 2 000 young people who wouldn’t have known about their music ¬- unless they discovered them in a smoky bar somewhere - see them on TV, and might go out and buy their CD.
‘So that’s where it can effect a slow change in mindset, even if it just makes Afrikaans rock music a more acceptable medium, which it has become, whereas 20 years ago it was very marginal … now there is the Rockspaaider music competition, sponsored by the two major Afrikaans daily newspapers in the country, you can’t really imagine that 20 years ago …’
The crossover is vital. If the underground remains in the margins eternally, it only preaches to the converted, and artists with insight and new ways of seeing things will have no influence on changing broader mindsets.

Ons Klyntji litmag

Ons Klyntji (our little one) is a litmag bought out by Toast, Drikus Barnard and Erns Grundling. It’s a motley collection of stories, photos and comic strips, and the fact that back issues have sold out show it is providing a much-needed platform for South African writers. The anecdotes, from writers’ experiences across the world, range from humerous to slightly shocking.
The title, which is in Dutch, hails from the first Afrikaans magazine, bought out in 1896 and running until the 1930s. The original Ons Klyntji even published letters sent from Boers in the Boer War POW camps to their families on the outside.
In the mid 1990s Koos Kombuis bought out a zine with the Ons Klyntji title, which he sold at gigs. In 2000, Koos asked Toast and Erns to keep the zine going, which they have continued to do. Many of the contributors are themselves musicians, such as Andries Bezuidenhout, Paul Riekert, Alex Omega and Robin Auld.
Originally in Afrikaans, the zine now features several pieces in English. It’s been a labour of love for Toast, Erns and Drikus, who have had to cover the costs of bringing out Ons Klyntji out of their own pockets, but it finally seems to be breaking even.
The late 2007 issue also came out with a diverse 22-track CD called Ons Kerk se Mense (our church’s people) featuring bands like Insek, Esme Eva Kwaad, Paul Riekert and bands with names like ‘Die Bullebak Blaasorkes’ and ‘Tannie Marie and the Biscuits’.
The cover art, by Nicolene Louw, has a slight Bitterkomix influence, possibly due to the fact that Nicolene studied under Anton Kannemeyer (then again, Bitterkomix has probably had an impact on most offbeat Afrikaans artists, to some degree or another!)