Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 398

The World Cup: Algeria in Queens, New York

Islamic hymns emanated from street food carts on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens, in observance of Ramadan. At Cafe Borbone, a non-descript Italian coffeehouse nearby, a middle-aged, working-class, almost all-male crowd gathered for Algeria’s maiden knockout round appearance, with not even a glass of water in sight, a far cry from the chic shisha bars just down the road.

The air was humid, stuffy, and hot. Their blood was hotter. The cafe’s narrow corridors and private back-room parlor – where the most hardline supporters convened – were effectively the private New York lair of Les Fennecs (The Desert Wolves).

“You are not welcome here!”, one perturbed fan shouted at us, demanding a swift exit as lights were switched off to brighten the dim glow of a shoddy television feed.

His angst could be excused given the opponents.

Algeria’s national team once formed the footballing arm of the anti-colonial National Liberation Front (FLN). In 1982, two decades after independence, they became the first African team to defeat European opposition at a World Cup, trumping West Germany in a group stage match. But that achievement did not allow Algeria to advance.

In the final group match, Germany led Austria 1-0, a scoreline that secured passage for both teams at the expense of the North African newcomers. The game stagnated and the score stood. Many on all sides suspected foul play.

“The Germans and Austrians contrived to make sure we didn’t go through.” former midfielder Lakhdar Belloumi, one of the stars in Algeria’s constellation of talent in the 1980s, told The Daily Star.

The Guardian recalled that a German commentator “almost sobbed during the match as he lamented: ‘What is happening here is disgraceful and has nothing to do with football.’”

Algeria’s current head coach, Vadid Halilhodzic, said that the memory still lingers. “We talk all the time about this match in 1982,” he told The New York Times.

That injustice was not lost on Queens’ 1000 or so Algerian community, either, who ardently believed “Quatre vent deux (’82)” would inspire an organized, youthful Algerian side to continue the stuttering narrative of giant-killing in Brazil.

“They have a complex against us,” said Amine, 38, a pastry chef.

For the entirety of the first half, his words rang true. Algeria’s relentless strategy of direct balls to forwards and wing-backs exposed Germany’s risky high defensive line. Were it not for the dynamic sweeping of Manuel Neuer, Algeria would have reaped due rewards.

They continued to strut the pitch with authority, creating chances and revealing new gaps in Germany’s prided defense. But the inability to break Neuer’s lines threatened to turn a crowd’s passion into ire.

A minority, meanwhile, were more preoccupied envisioning a potential meeting with erstwhile colonial power, France, in the quarterfinals. “There will be big problems in Paris,” said a luxury watch dealer, who asked to remain anonymous, with a wry smile.

Sixteen members of Algeria’s World Cup squad were born in France, and porous allegiances were not taken lightly at Borbone. Slurs thrown at a fan of German birth escalated into a bout of fisticuffs. “It’s just a joke,” said the peace brokers to alarmed patrons, in the close-quarters emotional hotbed of a venue.

The valiant fight in Porto Alegre, however, diminished as Andre Schürrle and Mesut Özil capitalized on an exhausted Algeria in extra time. The goalkeeping gates of Raïs M’Bolhi finally cracked.

Even before Algeria’s deserved but irrelevant late goal, the lights were switched back on and an exodus ensued. The suffering was palpable, but the reality beautiful.

“This is a new team, new players, young players, we’re at the World Cup,” said Tarik Daidai, 22, a college student, as cars zipped by with fans waving Algerian flags from sunroofs, celebrating what felt like victory. “Everything is okay for us.”

Despite failing to introduce Abdelmoumene Djabou earlier, which irked the faithful, Halilhodzic escaped indictment, his tears at the final whistle underlining an unordinary dedication by a foreign manager of an African side.

Algeria’s largest French-language newspaper, Liberté, said that the team could look back on their most successful World Cup with “sword in hand and head high,” a sentiment shared by Algerians in the Maghreb neighborhood of Queens, as they broke their fast for the day.

The World Cup: Algeria in Queens

Islamic hymns emanated from street food carts on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens, in observance of Ramadan. At Cafe Borbone, a non-descript Italian coffeehouse nearby, a middle-aged, working-class, almost all-male crowd gathered for Algeria’s maiden knockout round appearance, with not even a glass of water in sight, a far cry from the chic shisha bars just down the road.

The air was humid, stuffy, and hot. Their blood was hotter. The cafe’s narrow corridors and private back-room parlor – where the most hardline supporters convened – were effectively the private New York lair of Les Fennecs (The Desert Wolves).

“You are not welcome here!”, one perturbed fan shouted at us, demanding a swift exit as lights were switched off to brighten the dim glow of a shoddy television feed.

His angst could be excused given the opponents.

Algeria’s national team once formed the footballing arm of the anti-colonial National Liberation Front (FLN). In 1982, two decades after independence, they became the first African team to defeat European opposition at a World Cup, trumping West Germany in a group stage match. But that achievement did not allow Algeria to advance.

In the final group match, Germany led Austria 1-0, a scoreline that secured passage for both teams at the expense of the North African newcomers. The game stagnated and the score stood. Many on all sides suspected foul play.

“The Germans and Austrians contrived to make sure we didn’t go through.” former midfielder Lakhdar Belloumi, one of the stars in Algeria’s constellation of talent in the 1980s, told The Daily Star.

The Guardian recalled that a German commentator “almost sobbed during the match as he lamented: ‘What is happening here is disgraceful and has nothing to do with football.’”

Algeria’s current head coach, Vadid Halilhodzic, said that the memory still lingers. “We talk all the time about this match in 1982,” he told The New York Times.

That injustice was not lost on Queens’ 1000 or so Algerian community, either, who ardently believed “Quatre vent deux (’82)” would inspire an organized, youthful Algerian side to continue the stuttering narrative of giant-killing in Brazil.

“They have a complex against us,” said Amine, 38, a pastry chef.

For the entirety of the first half, his words rang true. Algeria’s relentless strategy of direct balls to forwards and wing-backs exposed Germany’s risky high defensive line. Were it not for the dynamic sweeping of Manuel Neuer, Algeria would have reaped due rewards.

They continued to strut the pitch with authority, creating chances and revealing new gaps in Germany’s prided defense. But the inability to break Neuer’s lines threatened to turn a crowd’s passion into ire.

A minority, meanwhile, were more preoccupied envisioning a potential meeting with erstwhile colonial power, France, in the quarterfinals. “There will be big problems in Paris,” said a luxury watch dealer, who asked to remain anonymous, with a wry smile.

Sixteen members of Algeria’s World Cup squad were born in France, and porous allegiances were not taken lightly at Borbone. Slurs thrown at a fan of German birth escalated into a bout of fisticuffs. “It’s just a joke,” said the peace brokers to alarmed patrons, in the close-quarters emotional hotbed of a venue.

The valiant fight in Porto Alegre, however, diminished as Andre Schürrle and Mesut Özil capitalized on an exhausted Algeria in extra time. The goalkeeping gates of Raïs M’Bolhi finally cracked.

Even before Algeria’s deserved but irrelevant late goal, the lights were switched back on and an exodus ensued. The suffering was palpable, but the reality beautiful.

“This is a new team, new players, young players, we’re at the World Cup,” said Tarik Daidai, 22, a college student, as cars zipped by with fans waving Algerian flags from sunroofs, celebrating what felt like victory. “Everything is okay for us.”

Despite failing to introduce Abdelmoumene Djabou earlier, which irked the faithful, Halilhodzic escaped indictment, his tears at the final whistle underlining an unordinary dedication by a foreign manager of an African side.

Algeria’s largest French-language newspaper, Liberté, said that the team could look back on their most successful World Cup with “sword in hand and head high,” a sentiment shared by Algerians in the Maghreb neighborhood of Queens, as they broke their fast for the day.

The World of Ridiculous Youtube Music Videos: First Bangs, then Ice JJ Fish, Kwality, now Berenice

Singing or rapping off key in an expensive or sometime low budget music video is now a cottage industry in the rabbit hole that makes up Youtube.   The African diaspora have not been spared. The pioneer of this subgenre was Bangs, the Sudanese-Australian rapper (see here for an “archive” of his exploits), then came the American IceJJFish, and last month we met Kwality (he’s from Nigeria, it seems). Some of these are the products of slick marketing campaigns (IceJJFish most definitely; Kwality maybe), but some are just people with lots of gumption and no self-awareness.  Which brings us to Nigerian “Youtube sensation” BERENICE, who does covers of pop songs. Like John Legend’s “All of me.”  Get earplugs:

She’s also done a cover of Beyonce’s “Drunk in Love.”

We’re being kind BTW. Just read the Youtube comments on her videos.

Photography: Conversation with David Goldblatt about “Rise and Fall of Apartheid”

Almost fifteen years ago, I saw David Goldblatt’s photographs in Rotterdam, at the Netherlands Architecture Institute. They were small and unobtrusive, and I stood before them, very moved. Subsequently, as I learned the story of South Africa through literature, theory, history books, Goldblatt’s work—and later, other photographers’ work—was my real entry. In a way, I could not have done my scholarly work without first conversing with these photographs.

When Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life was at the International Centre for Photography (ICP) in New York, it was a different kind of experience. This incarnation of the show, in Johannesburg, feels different—and not only because Museum Africa is a larger exhibition space, or because we are in Johannesburg—but many of the images that greet us, and those that are blown up to billboard size to help create the audience’s emotional response to the show, and help fashion our initial responses are very different. When New Yorkers walked into the ICP, the first, blown up poster they got to see was that of the women of the Black Sash protesting—which, I feared, may have given them an erroneous impression of what protest marches were like, and who protested; it’s not that the women of the Black Sash did not do important or dangerous work, but seeing nice, white, middle-class ladies gathered around carrying protest placards was hardly a common sight. At Museum Africa, it is Noel Watson’s photograph of a young man—a boy, really—who steps out from the half-moon of fellow protestors, and into the space of gun-wielding, police in riot-gear: his arms are outstretched, his forefinger and middle finger raised in defiant peace signs.

Although the subtitle of the exhibition—“Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life”—tells us that Okwui Enwezor, the curator of this show, attempted to show how the everyday and the ordinary were infiltrated by apartheid policies, he has devoted more space to protest culture. And perhaps that is to show that people did not simply lie down, and remain cowed.

Undoubtedly, in an exhibition of this scope, intended for audiences in several global centres of art (after New York, the exhibition went to Milan, Munich, and finally, to Johannesburg), a curator must act as an editor, shaping the exhibition in a way that audiences in each location will find palatable, while challenging them at the same time. What’s lost here? Photographer and trade union leader Omar Badsha finds that one of the most problematic aspects of Rise and Fall is that “you come out thinking that all photographers were equals and all were progressives” deeply involved in exposing the horrors of apartheid. He notes, also, that hierarchies between white and black photographers, “power relationships between news houses”, as well as the difficulties faced by black photographers in trying to find work over their white counterparts is absent. Badsha fears that as we walk through this exhibition, we might imagine that “[white South Africans] played a major role” in the struggle against apartheid: the proportionality of risks taken, the percentages of involvement (and this goes for the Indian and Jewish radicals who also took part in the anti-apartheid movement), isn’t obvious—we get to hide behind a few representatives who sacrificed their entire lives for liberation, and refer to them when we are asked, “What did you do?”.

The ICP and their partners supporting the exhibition in Johannesburg went to some lengths, through a pilot campaign, to get people from a different demographic here from the usual museum-goer—black working-class people in inner city Joburg—the exhibition’s publicity campaign sent people with flyers to high-traffic zones such as taxi ranks to invite commuters to the exhibition with their families and friends and also advised trade unions and political parties to get involved in spreading the word. From the opening night on 13 February until 28 February, more than 2,300 visitors were registered, and the number of visitors per day increased to 170 per day. People have come and recognised family members in these photographs. In a way, this exhibition has recaptured what this building was originally intended for: a marketplace, meeting ground; only now, we meet to exchange thoughts and ideas, haggle over who gets to tell history.

So it was no wonder that on June 24, the night on which we organised this conversation, the auditorium was packed—and with a largely young audience. Here’s the trailer of the talk (the full video is at the end of this post):

I began the conversation at by asking Goldblatt about the title, and whether apartheid has really “fallen” and whether—given the structures that still maintain it remain strong in South Africa—it isn’t problematic to bookend apartheid.

Goldblatt’s at his best when he speaks about the details of the structures he photographs, and what “values” these structures uphold and display to the world. His ability to analyse how the architecture of Afrikaner churches changed—listen for it on the video—as the National Party and Apartheid became ever more powerful—is brilliant. Soon thereafter, the conversation centered around how our churches or other religious organisations helped uphold the structures of apartheid by staying “quiet.” Around min. 50, the audience began speaking about whether attempting to survive—keeping one’s head low—is a form of complicity. Goldblatt said, of churches, “The prevailing value in the Protestant communities at the time was, ‘Don’t rock the boat.’” Yet, he also made it clear that leaders of the Anglican, Methodist and other churches and small churches in small towns were vehemently—and at some risk—against the apartheid system. In contrast, he said, the Afrikaner churches were riding high at the time.

I understood, on an academic level, the point he was making, but I knew I had to mediate that comment. So I said, “My experience is that most people do stay quiet, because we want to get on with life, send children to school, you want a future for them that’s different. When I think of what happened after 9/11, my response was to do what my friends urged me to do when I travelled”—which was to squeeze my “ass into tight jeans and look like a ‘Mexican chica’” in the eyes of the authorities. I chose to capitalise on (and thereby reinforce) an existing American stereotype. Essentially, I was “passing”. I wasn’t interested in giving border guards a chance to harass me. I knew I wouldn’t be “threatening” to them until they looked at my name on the passport, and I hoped that dissonance between embodied signals and my label would aid me somehow.

David then said, in that quiet way that I now know, after eight years of interviewing him, is going to be the prelude to a bomb: “I’m going to throw a thought out that will possibly get me into trouble…we were all complicit in apartheid except those who were prepared to risk their lives. And I include the black people in South Africa.Until the students in South Africa came out and revolted in Soweto in 1976. We were not prepared to risk our lives.”

There was a literal, palpable bristling in the entire auditorium. Omar Badsha, who was in the audience, reminded him that black South Africans took up the armed struggle long before, in the 1960s, in fact. Someone asked, quite innocently, about Jewish people who made “piles of money”; and another alluded to Indian collusion. Yet another reminded us of photographs of the poorest Indians—children working in sugar cane fields in what was then Natal: some went along and capitalised via the back avenues of apartheid, but most were enormously damaged. Goldblatt and I both made an attempt to remind ourselves about those Jewish and Indian men and women who risked their lives, challenging the system—but I always fear that such reminders are heard as weak rejoinders about a token few, who become the face of uglier collaborations. It’s always like that for those who live in the “in-between”—I suppose it’s that discomfort that began my political education, and opened up my political mouth, too.

Meanwhile, I’d seen this young man in the front, shaking his head, and shaking his head, looking down at the floor. I remembered being that kid—full of disagreement and a kind of knowing that came from an embodied experience of difference from those who got to be on the stages of the world, but having no avenue to offer my “correction.” So I stopped the order of questions from the audience, and said, “I saw this young man in the front, shaking his head, would you mind offering us our thoughts?” (He didn’t even realise he was the one being addressed; his neighbor had to nudge him.)

Then, the conversation really began.

Here’s the video:

* Rise and Fall will continue on at Museum Africa in Newtown, Johannesburg, till 30 April 2015. Many thanks to the Goethe Institute, Pro Helvetia, and City Press for helping make this conversation happen.

Film: Vivian Maier’s 100,000 photographs

Vivian Maier, the nanny turned street photographer, who has found fame posthumously, now a subject of the documentary ‘Finding Vivian Maier’ (trailer below), was a recluse in the exaggerated form. Then the film is directed by Terrence Malick, also a recluse (he directed the Oscar winning film ‘Days of Heaven’ in 1978 and then after a twenty year long hiatus, directed ‘The Thin Red Line’ in 1998. He also did not bother to pick up his Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.)

Where Vivian Maier recluse is concerned, up until 2009, when her death notice was published in the Chicago Tribune, nothing existed about her was on the Internet. Except for the people that saw her take pictures, nobody else knew that she did and very little was known of her.

But in 2007 a local amateur historian, John Maloof, was looking for vintage photographs to illustrate a history of Chicago’s Northwest Side,  they found the work of Maier. Maloof bought a sizeable collection of about 30,000 photo negatives. He was intrigued and developed them, and then began searching with information obtained in a note from the box the mystery owner of the negatives but nothing turned up on the internet.

Also Maloof found another note that revealed Maier to have been a nanny. Maloof finds this not only fascinating but also intriguing.

Maloof tracked down Maier and found many boxes and memorabilia abandoned in storage. He amassed a collection of 100,000 of frames shot in New York, Chicago, France, South America, and Asia between the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-seventies.

In 2009, Maloof googled Vivian Maier again and found to his surprises an obituary announcing that Vivian Maier had died only a few days before.

Maloof developed the negatives and tried to get them into galleries but nothing came of it. It was only after posting them on the internet that they began to demand attention. The visceral photographs of, amongst other things, crying babies, a dead horse, rich and poor people are a combination of art and social realism. They are reminiscent of street photographers like Henri-Cartier-Bresson, Lisette Model and Andre Kertesz.

Maier, first worked as a seamstress, weaving together clothing in a warehouse with tiny windows that only let in sprinkles of sunshine. This frustrated her as she confided in someone and she chose being a nanny because then she could be out there in the world and walk however far she wished. She often took the kids she looked after along with her Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera on long walks, into slums, city and parks.

Maier stacked away in boxes over 100, 000 negatives. In addition to those, she left a series of homemade documentary films and audio recordings. In an interview for a nanny job, Maier had apparently said “I come with my life, and my life is in boxes.” And when she showed to work, she was with 200 boxes.

The inevitable question of whether Vivian Maier would have approved of the attention her work is getting is also poised. One of Maier’s former bosses says, “She would never let this happen. These were her babies”

John Maloof feels vindicated from this question late in the documentary and unwittingly he relates this to the camera. This happens when he goes to the village of Saint- Bonnet- en- Champsaur in France, where Maier spent most of her childhood, where she learnt to photograph, before moving to New York in 1951. Maloof gets the letter read to a man who owns a photography print shop and to which the letter was addressed to. In the letter Maier asks the man if he could print her photographs in good paper and not anything else. From this Maloof feels vindicated for dragging Maier’s work into the public eye without her permission and against her not ever showing it. But his vindication is weak. The only thing Maier wanted was to print some photos and said that they were great. That she was aware that she was a good photographer and wanted them printed says nothing about exhibiting those photographs to the public and creating, as Maloof has done, a superstar out of her.

The documentary, through interviews, photographs, voice and home video recordings, paints Vivian Maier Maier as an aloof, opinionated, obsessive and a playful person. It also lets loose the skeletons trapped in her closet. The families who employed her as a nanny have mixed memories of her. Some remember her as a loving nanny, who let them play outside, took walks to far places that their own parents never dared to go to and some remember her as an angry abusive nanny who force-fed them as children.

Besides the uncomfortable feeling that it invades Vivian Maier’s life without her being given the opportunity to object.

* The film screened at the recent Encounters Film Festival in Cape Town. For screening details, see the film’s website.

This Studio Of A Life–Portraits Of Rappers And Producers

I can’t recall when I first fell in love with hip-hop, but I do know that the first song I transcribed was Coolio’s ‘Gangster’s paradise.’ Transcribing lyrics in ‘songbooks’ was a big deal in the mid-nineties; it was shortly before I discovered that oohla.com existed, around the same time I was heavy into the culture of cassette-sharing. Myself and a primary school friend would exchange kwaito tapes — M’du, Mashamplani, Trompies, B.O.P — every second week.

On one of those tapes — Mashamplani’s Never Never — I heard the instrumental version to ‘Is Vokol Is Niks.’ A year later, I was in my first year of high school and left to my tools on a Saturday afternoon. I put the instrumental on loud in the main room, took an empty cassette tape, inserted it into a boombox, pressed record, then proceeded to kick my first ‘rap.’

Which brings me to the topic — This Studio Of A Life!

I was born ten minutes’ drive from Maseru’s CBD. I started hanging around rappers since I was 12 years old — in studio, at rap cyphers, and at shows. I’ve been to a lot of studios in that time, but it’s only in the past year that I’ve attempted to capture the electric energy and creative impulse present when artists congregate inside a studio.

*

Click to view slideshow.

Dear Ann Coulter …

Ann Coulter, an American columnist who makes Richard Littlejohn and Donald Rumsfeld look like easy-going lefties, has finally written about football, having “held off on writing about soccer for a decade — or about the length of the average soccer game – so as not to offend anyone” (Note to Ann: a soccer game is 90 minutes long). It’s probably just an ingenious bit of trolling but I just couldn’t let it go, so here’s a point-by-point rebuttal. Ann says:

Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks and drop fly balls — all in front of a crowd. When baseball players strike out, they’re standing alone at the plate. But there’s also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns and slam-dunks.

In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child’s fragile self-esteem is bruised…

In football, players don’t “fumble” passes they misplace them. They don’t “throw bricks”, that would be dangerous and frankly bizarre. They do frequently kick the ball in a way that infuriates their teammates and supporters, though. In fact, individual responsibility is taken so seriously in football that players have even been killed for making an error in a game. You talk about “losers” and “accountability” but when has an American sports star paid the ultimate prize for a simple human error made during a game? I’m not going to be able to take your point about “losers” and “accountability” seriously until I see Tom Brady gunned down in the street for screwing up a touchdown pass.

You seem to think that football doesn’t champion the kind of rugged individualism so beloved by Americans, but “soccer” and “European socialism” are not one and the same thing. I like to watch 22 men dutifully tilling collectively owned wheat fields as much as the next man but I don’t call that watching a game of football, I call it reading a 19th century Russian novel.

Goals are football’s equivalent of slam-dunks, touchdowns or home runs, and when you score one, much glory comes your way.

Football, like baseball, basketball and American Football, is a team game which features star players. One of them is a Portuguese man called Ronaldo. He’s a bronze stallion, covered in gel, and whenever he scores hundreds of millions of people worship him like a God.

As for your desire to see the self-esteem of children crushed, perhaps I can suggest that our children have a play date. My kids can fight your kids (I propose the mace as a weapon) and the kids that lose will be mocked for the rest of the day, before being put in solitary confinement in the working model of Guantanamo Bay I’m sure you have in your garden.

 Do they even have MVPs in soccer?

Yes. I timed it and it takes 4 seconds to Google “Soccer MVP”.

The prospect of either personal humiliation or major injury is required to count as a sport. Most sports are sublimated warfare. As Lady Thatcher reportedly said after Germany had beaten England in some major soccer game: Don’t worry. After all, twice in this century we beat them at their national game.

Baseball and basketball present a constant threat of personal disgrace. In hockey, there are three or four fights a game — and it’s not a stroll on beach to be on ice with a puck flying around at 100 miles per hour. After a football game, ambulances carry off the wounded. After a soccer game, every player gets a ribbon and a juice box.

Since your ideal sport seems to be the “sport” of Europe-wide warfare as practiced by Britain and Germany once upon a time, it seems odd to me that you would champion baseball and basketball, neither of which are high on blitzkriegs.

In terms of personal disgrace, don’t worry! Players are constantly dishonouring the noble names of their forefathers by letting goals in, biting other players, misplacing passes, getting sent off, spitting at the referee or generally being shit.

In terms of physical injury, one German goalkeeper played a game with a broken neck  and players have actually died on the pitch, as well as regular breaking crucial parts of their body. I only hope that the prospect of seeing potentially fatal damage done to other human beings will make you re-consider your line on football. After all, I imagine the high proportion of American Football players who go on to suffer from serious brain damage is what keeps you loving that game. That and all those awesome commercial breaks…

I hate to tell you this Ann, but it’s even more disgraceful than a “ribbon and a juice box”. It’s tens of thousands of pounds a week and a carefully balanced selection of fitness drinks.

You can’t use your hands in soccer. (Thus eliminating the danger of having to catch a fly ball.) What sets man apart from the lesser beasts, besides a soul, is that we have opposable thumbs. Our hands can hold things. Here’s a great idea: Let’s create a game where you’re not allowed to use them!

Well, it’s called “football”, so you play it with your feet, but there’s also a goalkeeper, who is allowed to use his hands and thus mock all those dumb animals with their clumsy, non-opposable paws.

If that still sounds crap, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t we create a sport together? It can be some kind of individuals-only death match in which you’re only allowed to use your soul and your opposable thumbs.

I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is “catching on” is exceeded only by the ones pretending women’s basketball is fascinating.

I note that we don’t have to be endlessly told how exciting football is.

Beyonce is a singer who has sold over 75 million albums. Hillary Clinton is the wife of a former president who has been part of the political elite for over three decades. These two women do not represent a radical, alternative culture that is being “pushed” into the mainstream.

Do you really think that light-rail is force-fed to the American public by the “liberal media” the way that cars are by the automobile industry / government / town planners / media? Are you like Homer in The Simpsons, obsessing about Clown College because you saw one advert?

Every single media outlet in North America tells you how exciting American Football is. That is the nature of sports coverage.

It’s foreign. In fact, that’s the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not “catching on” at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it.

Yes, foreign, unlike American Football, which evolved out of Rugby, or Baseball, which came from Cricket, or Basketball, which was invented by a Canadian. And of course no-one had ever thought to skate around on ice with sticks before America invented the idea of toothless Canadians.

I look forward to you finding a bar in the Bronx made up of rappers burning footballs wrapped in French flags. After all, it’s not as if anyone in the U.S. soccer team is black, is it? Oh, wait …

 Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren’t committing mass murder by guillotine… Liberals get angry and tell us that the metric system is more “rational” than the measurements everyone understands. This is ridiculous. An inch is the width of a man’s thumb, a foot the length of his foot, a yard the length of his belt. That’s easy to visualize. How do you visualize 147.2 centimeters?

Those fucking liberals, swanning around using fancy words like “centimetre”. I think you must be the only person in the world who thinks that guillotines, far from being rusty and time-consuming instruments to use, could actually kill thousands of people in just one go. You know who stops this information from going public? Pervert Frenchmen who love the concept of a centimetre more than they love wine and garlic.

I went into my local Walmart the other day and asked for three belts of potatoes and seven thumbs of steak. The guy behind the counter looked at me like I was mad. Where was he from? Foreign.

 If more “Americans” are watching soccer today, it’s only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law. I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer.

Would you like to watch the baseball sometime? Me, Davy Crockett, George Bush and the entire crew of the Mayflower know this great place…

A Few Thoughts About The Rapper AKA

“What do you like about the guy?” asked a friend after I told them about an album listening session the rapper AKA had hosted a day earlier. “I don’t know, I don’t get the guy; and maybe I never will,” continued the friend emphatically. It felt like they should’ve added: “is there anything of artistic value that he adds to the conversation on rap music in South Africa?”

We continued driving, flouting conventional wisdom and indulging our pearls of rap wisdom while the roadside became but a spectactor to a conversation about a once-ostracized movement.

AKA stuck to the back of my mind; his significance, if any; his relevance, if any; his music – the musicality thereof…if any.

What, for instance, do I learn from listening to “Kontrol,” his chart-topping, South African house music-sampling duet with rapper Da L.E.S? Frankly, a line such as “sip champagne/ when you order you should parlez vous Francais/ then we should take this back to my place, so whatchu say” does not inspire much faith in his ability to pen anything different from what everyone else (read: radio-friendly rappers) is talking about. AKA does not, in short, engage me intellectually - and therein lies the problem with mainstream artists.

We the music-consuming public get to interact with versions of themselves they [the artists] want exposed. Their perfectly-curated sense of self therefore cracks under public scrutiny; in searching for more substance to cling onto, we are left wanting, which then leads to accusations of overblown egos and lack of originality. The music becomes less and less a point of focus while the personality comes under intense scrutiny.

One might argue that social networks have eased barriers of entry in the fan-artist nexus. It’s become easy to pop a question to just about any public figure who’s active on either twitter or facebook and, in some instances, get a response. Moments after his listening session, I posed the question to AKA about how he handles the inevitable backlash from people who do not take kindly to his music. “I used to be that guy who thought I could fight everybody,” he said, and then added, “now, I just realise that silence is way more powerful than any response could ever be.”

He alludes to undergoing enormous growth in the two years since his debut album Alter Ego, but his periodic twitter rants trump that claim. He recently got involved in a tweef (‘beef’ over twitter) with Cassper Nyovest, an emcee whose rise has been nothing short of magnificent to behold. Some quarters have interpreted this as a bad move from AKA, but he’s done it before (with L-Tido over at Facebook) and emerged a better artist.

AKA is a brilliant performer. He works the audience incredibly well regardless of whether he is solo, or performing with either Khuli Chana or Da LES (he appeared with both artists at two consecutive Cape Town International Jazz Festivals - with Khuli in 2013, and Da Les this year). He’s also a producer of note; his friend, the radio and television personality Sizwe Dlhomo, has spoken of how AKA would be holed up for hours in basement studios crafting music to what would become his debut EP 24/7/365. He did so with the production outfit IV League, a unit he’s no longer affiliated to.

With close to 265, 000 followers on twitter as of writing, AKA’s public life has become the focal point for social media-savvy South Africa. When questioned about his take on celebrity in one instance, he responded: “I’m just fucking good at what I do.”

Thinking back, the listening session I attended was an exercise in media engagement. AKA was jovial, affable. He performed for those gathered before him, alternating energetically between the stage and a coffee table to sing to his mother who was also in attendance. It was pop; it was spectacular; there was free food, an open bar, and a shattering level of product placement.

“These songs are a work in progress, you’re actually welcome to suggest changes,” he said invitingly.

As AKA readies for his album release, and with one more number one singles (“Congratulate”, “Run Jozi”) to boost his (alter-) ego, the stakes have never been higher for any South African hip-hop artist. Will AKA live up to his potential greatness?

*AKA’s album is released today on iTunes. 

**This post is part of Africasacountry’s series on South African Hip-Hop in 2014. You can follow the rest of the series here.

Africa is a Country Video–The Editor of New Book on Brenda Fassie on ‘Letting It Bleed’

Often the biographical genre puts the burden of accountability on the subject written about than it reveals about the writer. Bongani Madondo craftly debunks that in his sophomore project, I’m Not Your Weekend Special, a collection of essays penned about the siren Brenda Fassie. The book invites lesser-known individuals such as Mmabatho Selemela, to heralded impressarios like Njabulo Ndebele and Vukile Pokwana, to sit around a proverbial fireside and unpack their experiences on Fassie. I’m Not Your Weekend Special employs the celebratory endeavours of profile writing as well as critique to come up with a new form of biography.

What started as a solitary journey by Madondo eventually grew into an ensemble where invited writers were challenged to strum and blow their best by laying bare their inner most feelings on MaBrr. They had to bleed and reveal their insecurities as much as those of the subject. A form of language precipitates from this exercise, where by default the contributors themselves engage each other in dialogue via their respective testaments.

Under the curatorship of Madondo, there exists a push and pull, road heaviness (as read in the chapter Searching For MaBrr In The Colony) as well as a pacifying that sends off the spirit of Brenda Fassie. The editorial allure of the book lies with its ability to connect different players. It by no means attempts to be a work of simplicity, neither does it adhere to the painstaking efforts of trying to out sell all the others at your nearest book store. It is honest work toiled over by group of friends.

#Belated: Tumi And The Volume

Their stage act resembles an inside joke; they play tricks on the audience with a wry sense of humour which underlies the whole scenario. The guitarist will sommer play a lick off of a well-known song of theirs (‘76’ and ‘People of the light‘ come to mind) before bouncing right back into material from their most recent offering Pick a Dream. The tight-knit nature of this four-man troupe pokes fun in the face of criticism, and casts aside all doubt of how their capability to deliver good music.

Their music travels; subtle musical intonations meandering through shades of spiritual brilliance with every note, every snare, and every rhyme. They have taken their music across continents – North America and Europe have, at one point or the other, been exposed to the ebb and flow of their compositions.

The quartet of Dave Bergman (bass), Paulo Chibanga (drums), Tumi Molekane (raps/vocals), and Tiago Paulo (guitar) is known to increasingly-wider audiences as Tumi and the Volume.

Bar from their current single ‘Asinamali‘ riding skid-row on South African commercial radio airwaves, these gentlemen have, by and large, been ignored locally. Though hip-hop aficionados rate them as one of the best hip-hop outfits this country has ever produced,  one is more likely to see them on magazine covers, television interviews, and festival appearances in countries such as France, Senegal, and the Reunion Islands than they are to witness them in top form locally.

Their appearance at this year’s Cape Town International Jazz Festival (to which this article’s introduction makes reference) is but one of the few. However, matters seem to be taking a turn for the better; they were recently billed – along with Baaba Maal, Habib Koite, and the Mahotella Queens – to perform at the Afrika Day celebrations broadcast live on SABC2 in Newtown towards the end of May.

Presumably, the event afforded Tumi and the Volume an audience they may have otherwise not reached. Pick a dream – their third album in a catalogue preceded by their self-titled studio debut and a live recording entitled Live at the Bassline (which featured the talents of Kyla-Rose Smith – now with Freshlyground) – is a sonically-mature, lyrically-impressive collection of scathing socio-political commentary (‘Asinamali‘, ‘Reality check‘); par-excellence lyrical dexterity (‘Number three‘, ‘Enter the dojo‘, ‘Volume trials‘); and melancholic yet uncompromisingly honest self-reflection (‘Light in your head‘, ‘Moving picture frames‘, ‘Through my sunroof‘).

This, however, is not an article about the whole but the part; this is about a man who a week prior to our conversation was ‘at Analogue Nites playing to an almost-exclusively black audience’. Our meeting, however, happened in the wilderness that is the Nekkies resort in Worcester on a Sunday afternoon. The day before, Tumi had performed in front an almost-exclusively white, predominantly Afrikaans-speaking RAMfest audience; The Volume were nowhere in sight. Instead, Peach van Pletzen (drums, Yesterday’s Pupil/Bittereinder), Richard Brokensha (guitar/vocals, Isochronous), Franco Schoeman (bass, Isochronous) and Alex Parker (keyboard, Isochronous) provided fitting musical accompaniment.

Aside from his band, Tumi also has a solo operation on the side. He started out in the Johannesburg underground circa 2000 with offerings such as A dream led to this and Tao of Tumi before linking up with what was then a relatively-unknown 340ml – minus Pedro da Silva Pinto (vocals/harmonica) and Rui Soeiro (bass). In 2007, he decided to strip the live band elements and return back to the basics of hip-hop –  the emcee and the deejay – by releasing his first widely-available solo offering Music from my good eye. A strong album in its own right with moments of sheer brilliance in many places, it did suffer from trying to fit too many things into one.

As Tumi observes during our chat: “I almost had to prove to myself with Music from my good eye that, you know what, I can do this. I have the commitment to do this alone; to make the music, release the music, tour it, you know, on my own! And I failed at that, but I think with failure comes lessons and growth.”

I ask him to relay the story of The Volume. “I’ll try sum it up,” he begins. “As far as the band is concerned – Tumi and the Volume – at that point we were very much a spoken word outfit backed by a band. And I think over the years, just playing festivals and playing tonnes of different shows, we became a band period, you know.”

One of these was a slot at the Sakifo music festival at the Reunion Islands in 2004. Jerome Galabert from Sakifo records in France was so impressed that he decided to offer them a recording deal right there and then. This then enabled the band to tour across South African boarders and reach a wider audience, one more appreciative of the type of sound they were trying to push.

Regarding their sophomore offering The volume, Tumi states that it wasn’t well received in South Africa, adding that it was more had better reception in Europe. “That’s why our careers have pretty much been [over there],” he says.

Music from my good eye saw Tumi incorporating more Zulu vernacular into songs, a trend he had begun on the band’s self-titled sophomore. Reluctantly, I ask how important the multi-lingual expression is to his music, and how it has fed into the Tumi ‘brand‘. “I don’t like the word brand; I am not a brand, I am a man,” comes the firm response. Engaging further on the language issue, he says: “I have so much respect for language. I would never just…just dabble. I believe in being prolific; the stuff I’ve heard by Bittereinder [and] Jitsvinger, is absolutely incredible! They absolutely explore the language, and it’s poetry. But you know, when things feel natural, I kinda do them. I reserve the right to rap in any language.”

He not only uses his calm demeanour to endear one’s favour in conversation, but to display a brutal sense of honesty whenever the situation calls for it. On two occasions, he forthrightly acknowledges his failures with regards to his music.

The Volume wasn’t their victory lap. “It was our first studio album. We really took our time with it; it was really thought out, and we were also struggling with how to transform our live sound into a studio sound,” he pauses, as though to reflect further before continuing “and in that respect we failed!”

But that very album gained them a bigger following. As Tumi observes: “People started regarding us as not just a performance band. There was real depth in the band, you know.”

Tumi says that the current offering is an attempt to fix all their past mistakes.

“Radio didn’t want to play any of the songs, and we didn’t have any strong single – I think. We wanted to make stuff that’s more accessible, and I think we’ve matched our live sound – the quality of it.”

There is no denying Tumi’s writing abilities or aptitude when it comes to flow. One feels no sense of fabricated emotions when listening to him, only the raw sense of an individual who connects with the music on planes other than the one on which we exist. I ask him to break down the lyrics to the song ‘Number three‘, and after letting out a huge smile, he said the following:

“The song is just a Tumi and the Volume anthem. If you think of how the A-Team starts, that’s what it is,” he says matter-of-factly while adjusting his sitting position. “We rarely do songs like that; we’re always kinda very conceptual with songs. So that was really…to have a song like that on a CD really just solidifies and kind of documents the really good relationship that we have as a band.”

“In terms of the verses, I couldn’t stay away from not saying anything at all,” Tumi states, another broad smile emerging from his lips. “The first verse, I used the whole imagery of fashion and design to kinda just talk about my career and what I’ve done”:

Rap’s society’s  fabric/

Around here brothers are inanimate objects/

Mannequins subjected to the fashion of prospects/

“So there are a lot of references to like ‘Singer‘ (sewing machine), ‘Nubuck’ (a type of leather). And in the second verse I talk about travelling”:

When I say it’s a small world,

it’s not expression boy, I mean it/

The airport’s like my second home, believe it/

I take off like you take a walk, frequent/

“And the third verse is where I go ape-shit really. Like I said, we rarely do that, so it’s really kinda nice to just be able to do.”

Besides his affable persona, Tumi came across as quite an honest human being, very connected to his environment, and having a positive outlook on life and the prospects therein. We conversed further about Danyel Waro, Zaki Ibrahim, and twitter.

Tumi spoke in a radio interview of how Danyel Waro, the Reunion-island based maloya musician, is his favourite artist ever.

“When I first heard Danyel Waro, [it was through] this amazing song that he’d done about his (now-ex) wife called ‘Tine blues’. I thought it was from New Orleans, it had a really bluesy feel about it. He was singing in Creole, but it’s the Creole they speak in the Reunion Islands, not in the US. I got the opportunity to meet him, and I pestered him on some ‘I try to do what you do, but I rap’. He told me some amazing things about singing, about art being functional in people’s lives, you know.”

Tumi re-iterates his initial statement on the radio interview “he’s my favourite, favourite, favourite musician ever! He’s my absolute favourite singer, the stuff he makes is incredible, and I don’t think I’ll ever make another album without him, as long as he’s interested!”

Zaki Ibrahim made a statement regarding his relationship with Tumi in an interview: “[he’s] actually kind of become like a big brother to me. He checks me when I’m kinda dragging my ass, and I check him back too.”

Tumi shares those sentiments; after meeting on tour (circa 2005/6), they have maintained a good working relationship together. Their camaraderie has extended into songs such as ‘Blink twice’ (from Music from my good eye) and ‘Volume trials’ (from Pick a dream). Of Zaki, Tumi says: “It’s so easy to work with [her]. It’s her and Zubz whom I trust with any song; I can literally say ‘here’s a song, here’s the idea, whatever you got’. There’s nobody else I trust like that.”

The conversation evolves into radio, and how his solo exploits have, in a way, opened up channels for the type of music him and his band do to get appreciated further. Going back to the topic of ‘Asinamali’, the band’s current single, Tumi says: “Me and Zubz always sit back and laugh about it like ‘we’re out there on radio talking about SA’. It’s bitter-sweet; it’s sweet because there’s a track like that out, but it’s bitter because that’s one of the only tracks out there talking about South Africa. I think Simphiwe [Dana] does it, but aside from that you hardly hear about your own country in your music.”

There are arguments from all sectors of society for and against twitter. The naysayers speak of how it has erased the mystique of the celebrity; nothing is a surprise anymore, all gets put out in the open. For Tumi, twitter seems to be an alternative outlet, a medium as far removed from his personality on record as it is perhaps an extension of the views which ultimately form what we get to hear on those very records.

He might tweet, rather surprisingly: ‘I was against releasing [Pick a dream] in South Africa’, or offer an interesting retrospective such as ‘I love how Verwoed sounded so intellectual with his Apartheid arguments. I would have loved to see him debate with Biko’.

Whatever the situation, he has made good use of the medium thus far.

Of twitter, he says: “It gives space for more thought, you know? And also just the interaction; on a business level it’s great, on an artistic level…it’s a cool social toy.”

Tumi’s endless work ethic has also seen him releasing the POWA mixtape recently. Inspired by the story of Akona Ndungane, it is a powerful statement against women abuse. It is ‘not about beats and verses, it’s about a sad reality that affects too many people’.

Every person reaches a cross-road where they must choose which path to take; Tumi chose music, and as he declares: “I think there’s a lot of scholarship in what we do. It might be informal, but [it’s still scholarship]. I always say that it’s better to struggle at what you love; any job that you do is gonna be good and bad, and if you don’t love it, it’s gonna be really hard to keep on doing it.”

Tumi Molekane’s third solo album Rob the Church will be getting released in the second part of 2014. We’ve written about him here and here.

* This post was first published in 2011 when Tumi and The Volume were still active. The opening image is a Tumi and the Volume press picture. The second image courtesy of Motif Records.  It is  part of Africasacountry’s series on South African Hip-Hop in 2014. You can follow the rest of the series here.