Streaming services offer music in a kaleidoscopic and planetary abundance that would have seemed wholly fantastical to anyone who lived before the invention of the MP3 file.
They enable quick and promiscuous exploration, exploration without limit. A person in Johannesburg can move from a new track that a friend just WhatsApped moments after she Shazamed it at a club in New York to 1980s’ Italian disco and on to 1970s’ Nigerian funk in three steps that take five minutes. This is wildly marvellous.
It is also true, though, that a well pressed and well cared for record played on a good system offers a richer, more immersive sound than anything coming off a phone — even on higher-end platforms like Tidal. There’s more surface noise, of course, but also deeper resonance, richer overtones and a greater sense of space.
Streaming has its place, but building a record collection offers a very different way of living with music. A record can be inherited, received as a gift and treasured decades after it was first acquired. It can take years, even decades, to find a good copy of a rare album at an affordable price. Each record is a singular object with its own history, cover art and, often, imperfections.
Taking a record off the shelf, carefully removing it from its sleeve, placing it on a turntable, wiping away the dust and then dropping the needle into the groove is a far richer experience than scrolling through tracks on a phone. If Spotify is Tinder, a record is a date.
Bret Dugmore, who began by selling a crate of records from his home before opening Mr Vinyl — arguably Johannesburg’s best record store — in 2013, describes listening to a record as an exercise in deliberate mindfulness. “You can,” he says, “have a broader and deeper musical experience with a collection of 100 vinyl albums than by drowning in a flood of digital files.”
For Fezokuhle Mthonti, one of our most brilliant young cultural critics, Nina Simone and Donny Hathaway records playing in her family home remain among her earliest memories. She recalls “the crackle that gave way to the urgency of the sound” and that “there was always a kind of reverence”.
Twenty years ago, the record seemed to be well on the way to becoming as much a curiosity of the past as the Bakelite telephone. Collections gathered over decades ended up in rubbish dumps as people moved to CDs, iPods and then streaming. That’s all changed now. The tide started to turn in about 2010, and today millions of records are sold around the world.
One of the great joys of being South African is our extraordinary music. There are a surprising number of essential recordings that aren’t yet available on the streaming services, including work by artists as significant as Abdullah Ibrahim, Philip Tabane, and Ralph Rabie. Streaming is the most democratic way to access music, and filling these gaps, which often involves navigating complex historical and legal issues, is important. It’s also important, though, to bring our most significant recordings into the present through carefully crafted reissues on vinyl.
Matsuli Music, run by Matt Temple in London and Chris Albertyn in Durban, has done invaluable work to enliven our great jazz tradition in the present through meticulously put together vinyl reissues of iconic albums. The label has put out classic work by artists such as Batsumi, Dudu Pukwana, Bea Benjamin, Johnny Dyani, and The Soul Jazzmen, as well as reissues of more recent work by artists like Busi Mhlongo and Moses Molelekwa. Matsuli Music has also released new music, including, last year, superb albums by Ballaké Sissoko & Derek Gripper, and the Kyle Shepherd Trio.
Dugmore and DJ Abby Nurock founded SA Music Press (Samp Records) two years ago with a mission, as Dugmore puts it, to release “SA classics and future classics, with world-class pressing, graphics, everything”. The success of his record store has allowed him to sustain the label as a labour of love. Dugmore is keenly aware of the long history of exploitation by artists at the hands of record companies and, in a rare move, Samp Records pays all royalties upfront.
The label has rapidly put out work by artists working across a range of genres, and including Paul Hanmer, Hugh Masekela and Trompies. A Mandoza release is on the way.
Work for All, the 1983 album by Juluka, the band formed by Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu in 1979, is the ninth release by the label. Juluka is a bright star in our musical firmament, and it has long been surprising that the band’s work has not been re-released on vinyl.
In 1983 two signal shifts in SA politics opened the way for the tumultuous decade to come. On August 20 the United Democratic Front (UDF) was launched at the Rocklands Community Hall in Mitchells Plain in Cape Town. On October 29 students at the University of Zululand were attacked by Inkatha. Four were killed. Work for All was released in November that year, at a time when a new constellation of political forces was moving into place.
Juluka had released four albums before Work for All. The first, Universal Men, was released in 1979. The singles released by Clegg and Mchunu before the formation of Juluka are delicately crafted maskandi songs in an established genre. They are rare and sell for thousands of rand when they can be found. Universal Men did not plough an existing furrow, it broke new ground.
The album is about migrant labour, about men moving between rural homesteads and the city. It is a transcendent work, fully thematically conceived as an album and with all the poetic power of an artist like Leonard Cohen.
Its visionary producer, Hilton Rosenthal, invited a group of exceptional musicians into the studio, including Colin Pratley from the acid rock band Freedom’s Children and Robbie Jansen, who, five years earlier, had played on Abdullah Ibrahim’s Mannenberg, one of the most significant pieces of music composed in SA. Reflecting on Universal Men 21 years after its release, Clegg remarked that “the whole project was, musically, completely new... we were flying a kite and hoping to be struck by lightning”.
The album was not just sonically inventive. There are passages in the lyrics that are poetry of the first rank. Consider, for instance, these lines from Deliwe.
The bees are buzzing in your honey mouth
And I have drawn the water from your well
The deep rushing down while the night birds call
And the waters wash me on the inside
Clegg’s immersion in the migrant worker hostels in Johannesburg as a teenager was driven by his attraction to and participation in various styles of ngoma dance. His autobiography tells a story of a boy without a father finding masculine affirmation and connection via the dance. “In many ways”, he wrote, “the dance and its brotherhood was a male parent to me”.
Reflecting on Juluka today, Mchunu repeatedly cycles back to the dance. “It was very important for us”, he says, “very important”. Yet Universal Men does not carry the martial energy of the dance. It is a tender, lyrical and often mournful work expressing deep empathy for migrant workers.
The second Juluka album, African Litany was released in 1981. It continues some of the themes and musical styles developed on Universal Men. African Sky Blue is a gentle maskandi influenced song about a worker in a mine:
The warrior’s now a worker and his war is underground
With cordite in the darkness, he milks the bleeding veins of gold
When the smoking rockface murmurs, he always thinks of you
Impi, the song about the 1879 Battle of Isandlwana, where the Zulu regiments defeated the invading British forces, was the first song to bring the martial energy of the dance into Juluka’s music. Today it is always played at Springbok home games, but it had an electric political charge in 1981. Most of the song is in English and recalls the battle in the past tense but the stirring Zulu chorus, that anticipates a coming war and affirms a resolve to fight, is sung in the present tense.
The two albums released the following year were strikingly different. Ubuhle Bemvelo is a strongly mbaqanga-influenced album with all the tracks performed in Zulu. It is best remembered for its joyful opening and closing tracks, Umfazi Omdala and Woza Friday — the latter a re-recorded version of a hit single released under the name of Jonathan and Sipho in 1977.
Scatterlings is quite different. There is a clear rock influence, and the album carries a strong masculine energy. The interest in labour is still there — iJwanasibeki is another compelling song about a man working in a mine. There are stronger political references than in the earlier work, but they are still largely allegorical.
Things were clearer in concert, though. Clegg often introduced the opening track, Siyayilanda — a song about reaching for the future — as a tribute to Neil Aggett, the doctor and trade unionist who was killed during a long police interrogation in 1981. The title track charted in the UK, beginning Clegg’s international success.
Work for All is a continuation of the more rock-orientated style developed in Scatterlings. Carried by the rising popular movement in SA, it is the most directly political of the Juluka albums. Mchunu recalls that “John was very strong in politics at that time, you could really hear it in his songs”.
The album opens with December African Rain, a love song sung from the perspective of a dying protagonist. Bullets for Bafazane, the second song, is about the violence of migrant life, and there is a set of songs that explores aspects of rural life, one of which, Baba Nango, returns to a central theme of Universal Men — the migrant labourer returning home. Dugmore says that Walima ’Mabele, a song about drought, is among his favourite SA songs and Mchunu also speaks warmly of the track.
The End Conscription Campaign, which opposed the conscription of young white men into the apartheid army to fight in the townships and the escalating “border war” in Angola, had been formed in October 1983. Men who refused conscription were jailed. Gunship Ghetto engages this directly: “Border Order Prison Warder”.
Mana Lapho (stand there, figuratively meaning stand your ground) is an unambiguously powerful freedom song:
Bana manga we ’ndoda bathu iculo lethu sedifile (They tell lies oh man for they say our song of freedom is dead)
Mana nans’ indaba isho ngefreedom (Stand for here is a matter and it speaks of freedom)
Work for All is another song about workers and labour. Rosenthal recalls that it came directly from Clegg’s work with trade unions, something which several unions acknowledged after his death. Organised around the phrase Sifun’umsebenzi (We want work) the song is strikingly different to more melancholic feel of Universal Men and presents the unemployed as political protagonists: “Hear them sing in the streets now / Hear the sound of marching feet now”.
But it is Mdantsane where Clegg’s lyrics bring Juluka into the band’s most concrete political engagement. On August 4 1983 a bus boycott in Mdantsane, a township outside East London, was met with murderous repression by the police at the cost of 11 lives, with 36 people injured. The song directly references this incident, as well as I’m Explaining a Few Things, a well-known anti-fascist poem by Pablo Neruda, placing the massacre in Mdantsane in a wider context of anti-fascism.
The album closes with Mantombana, which sounds very much like the music played at a dusk when young men come together to dance at a wedding in rural KwaZulu-Natal. Juluka often used the song for the dance performances at the end of their gigs. Mchunu says that it is his favourite song on the album. “I always think about John when I hear that song, he was an amazing dancer, amazing ...”
Work for All did not achieve the same chart success in the UK as Scatterlings, but it was embraced elsewhere in Africa. Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy, the MD of Spotify in Africa, based in Johannesburg, recalls that “this album was everywhere in my life when I was growing up in Addis. I remember these songs so well!”
The final Juluka album, Musa Ukungilandela, was sung entirely in Zulu and, like Ubuhle Bemvelo, carried strong mbaqanga and township jive influences. It is a consistently strong album but largely remembered for Ibhola Lethu, a propulsive take on the experience of following football.
Mchunu rates Zodwa, the second track on the album, as among his favourite Juluka songs. Steven van Zandt, the original lead guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s band called it “one of the great albums of all time”. The songs generally deal with experiences from everyday life from a perspective that is not explicitly political but Akanaki Nokunaka is a striking exception, dealing directly with forced removals at the hands of “GG”, the apartheid government.
Juluka disbanded in 1985, the year the first state of emergency was declared, and the conflict between Inkatha and the UDF began to escalate into what people were starting to call a war. There was a sense in which Juluka had run out of political road. To have continued after 1985 the band would have had to find a way to make sense of the fact that while Juluka was now closely associated with the UDF many migrant workers in urban hostels and rural homesteads had been drawn into Inkatha, some as fighters.
The reissue of Work for All by Samp Records, pressed on vibrant, translucent blue vinyl, has been crafted with exquisite attention to detail — from the cover and sleeve art to the superb remastering by Peter Pearlson, a thoughtful, gifted and committed sound engineer and producer. The music sounds bright and clear, with newfound detail, as if Clegg and Mchunu are singing right there in the room as the record spins.
• Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut, and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.
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