Tag: zulu

M(x) Blouse doesn’t have time for idiots

Joburg-based M(x) Blouse might rap, but they don’t consider themselves a hip-hop artist. Born at the end of 2016 as a creative outlet for KZN-born Sandiso Ngubane, M(x) Blouse’s first release was “WTF(SQUARED)” in collaboration with Joni Blud. The release made an impact and led to a performance at Braam’s Pussy Party and which was followed in May 2017 by the release of their debut EP ‘Believe the Bloom’. Produced with a heavy boom-bap influence and a lot of mistakes along the way thanks to naiveté, the EP nevertheless was a valuable learning for M(x) Blouse. “I think it’s true what they say, if you wanna do something, just jump in and hope to swim. Because after that I started seeing more interest from other people saying let’s work.”

Fast-forward a year and the latest single from M(x) Blouse has sonically moved away from boom-bap, exploring areas such as kwaito and gqom. Produced by Thor Rixon, Stiff Pap’s Jakinda and Albany Lore, the track has helped M(x) Blouse push themselves as an artist. “It’s been amazing for me to just take a cue from them and how they do things and incorporating my rap into that. It’s opened up a huge scope for what I can do as an artist rather than trying to stick strictly to rapping in a hip-hop sense. So the growth has been crazy.” Another major growth-point for M(x) Blouse has been the switch to vernacular. “It just feels so comfortable, feels authentic, but I must add that I don’t necessarily feel like people rapping in English are not authentic. It would be a ridiculous notion to say that considering how much English is a part of our lives in South Africa. But for me specifically, writing in vernacular and mixing it with English just feels natural to me because that’s just how I speak.”

The single, “Is’phukphuku”, Zulu for idiot, speaks of freedom and those that encroach on it, the idiot being those who restrict the freedoms of others trying to have a good time. “The beat to me just communicated a sense of freedom and I wasn’t necessarily thinking this is a song about freedom but that’s eventually what it came to be. In the second verse I talk about this dude who approaches a woman. She’s trying to have fun, he offers her a drink and she’s like ‘nah, I’m cool bra, but thanks’, but he takes that the wrong way and starts calling her a bitch. That to me is someone who is making a space unsafe for someone. That sort of became what the track is about, but it really didn’t start off that way, it just clicked in the end.”

The video that accompanies the single is a visual feast featuring M(x) Blouse in South African fashion from the likes of ALC Man, Nicholas Coutts, with jewellery by Stefany Roup and Lorne, while dancers and supporting cast can be seen rocking Nicola W35T, and Art Club & Friends, with headgear by Crystal Birch. “I identify as non-binary. So it was important for me to express that stylistically, so the styling very much communicates that I’m not bound by gender in terms of what I wear. When you dress how you feel it doesn’t matter how you express yourself in terms of fashion. People always raise an eyebrow. So I really wanted a video that expressed that kind of quirk, if I can call it that, and being in a space as someone who is different you always seem like a fish out of water. I wanted to find a space where me and the people that I’m with would just look like a bunch of weirdos in the space, so we ended up going to a fish and chip shop!”

An EP or album isn’t on the cards for the next year at least, but M(x) Bloue will be releasing music this year. “I do have one or two more singles that I want to put out before the end of the year, but there’s also the Thor Rixon collaboration which is a house track, I’m very excited about it.” They are also looking to perform more in 2018. “What I’ve been trying to do is, at least here in Joburg, gather like-minded artists and do our own shows. So I’m hoping that’s going to pan out real soon.”

Having found a way to touch on social issues much like their hip-hop idols such as Nas and Lauryn Hill, without boxing themselves within hip-hop, M(x) Blouse is able to push themselves creatively. “I don’t even know what genre to say I am doing at the moment, but I’m happy to be exploring the limits of what I have to offer.”

Credits:

Photography – Aart Verrips

Styling – Bee Diamondhead

15 May 2018
Mbali Dhlamini and the decolonial etymology of colour

South Africa is constituted through a myriad of textures; it’s a kaleidoscopic interweaving of constantly adaptive and evolving languages and cultures, and communicative gestures within this context often do not lie prostrate to colonial dialects of restrictive definition. Complex physical and metaphysical engagements are constantly operating through forms of language that imposed ontologies could never even begin to find the words for. Mbali Dhlamini, artist and co-coordinator of Artists Anonymous, speaks to some of these intricate entanglements of representation within her practice, and has often considered African Independent Churches (AICs) as sites of dynamically contested meaning-making, or as a way to access wider concerns related to the decolonisation of contemporary-cultural identity. Drawing inspiration from her childhood curiosity of Sundays in Soweto, where incredible palettes of colour would mystically unfurl and radically alter her visual landscape, Dhlamini carefully listens to this often-unheard etymology as a transmission of alternative articulations that intercept dominant, dichotomising narratives or preconceived notions of monotheistic spiritually as being inherently westernised.

Like the imphepho sometimes burnt at her multimedia installations, colour can operate to heighten senses and perceptions and alter the parameters of understanding. The symbolic colours utilised within AIC garments, often delivered to church leaders through dreams, reflect uniquely African idioms which prompt a radical re-learning. While white may have been violently thrust upon the precolonial body as a way to capture and contain, the incomprehensible and incorporeal could never be served through such insipid specification. The vitality of progressive spiritual practice within South Africa is constantly reconstituting its own vernaculars against anaemic appropriation; while umbala may translate to ‘colour’ in English, in Zulu, the meaning is constantly shifting and so it cannot be arrested by dominating dialects. These invocations are often connected to fabric and clothing through ideas of ritual preparation and transformation, as well as questions of how what we wear (both physically and symbolically) comes to carry our form. Dhlamini feels that there are significant lessons here for issues of representation and identity and laments that these can be lost if everything is viewed through the registers of oppositional logic that embrace static constructs like ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’- the complexities of human existence require far more rigorous and unsettled narratives; something resonate with the twilight of ubomvu (red), which expands and transcends the dichotomy of ubumyama (darkness) and ukukhanya (lightness)…

All works below were taken from Mbali Dhlamini’s project titled: Non Promised Land

All works below were taken from Mbali Dhlamini’s project titled: Spirituality and Colour

28 July 2016
Mashayabhuqe, the Modern Maskandi intersects tradition and the avant-garde to capture the millennial mood

Mashaya shows up to Father Coffee just a few minutes late for our interview and he quickly allows me into the landscape of his life these days. He is fresh from AfroPunk in Paris and we fall into step chatting about his experiences in Paris.

He is refreshed and ready to work on more music, now on the other side of Amancamnce mixtape, released last year with a host of cosigns from the upper echeleons of the creative industries along with a feature from his friend uMalume KoolKati and a sampling of the original Urban Zulu Busi Mhlongo.

The Black Excellence Show first released in 2013 introduced Mashayabhuqe KaMamba as someone to watch, and be enthralled by, it presented him and his unique blend of the traditional and Zulu with the digital and urban. He has even been successful enough to have a few copycats, but he’s already onto the next concept, and scheming on greener pastures.

Mashaya occupies a niche space in South Africa’s music scene, his influences and style collide the past and the future, and his perspective is about walking in creative purpose and pushing the boundaries of what performance and urban music mean within this space. An individual steeped in his tradition and culture, with a mind opened to the global possibilities of his craft.

‘Why are you here? Am I here to make things that are acceptable to the community or am I here to challenge people’s minds?’

With that said this alchemist of modernity and Maskandi is doing it like it hasn’t been done in a minute, and he has worked with some of South Africa’s legends. I mean real legends; KingTha For The Babies, was a groundbreaking challenge for emerging artists to win a free feature from Le Grande Artiste herself, Thandiswa Mazwai. Mashayabuqhe won it. Now, they have a song, ‘Izayoni’ together. We both geek hard for a second. Then he says, ‘She’s amazing. I listen to the song and pinch myself all the time, her music moulded uMashaya, noBusi Mhlongo, no James Blake and Bon Iver…’

For a moment I consider Mashaya’s forebears and then him as the next bearer of the legacy both Busi Mhlongo and Thandiswa have built upon. That pioneering perspective that broke new ground and resonated with the culture of coming to Johannesburg to follow a dream and grappling with urbanity and modernity, dealing with the anonymity and isolation of the city while using it to propel yourself to new heights. It is not a new story, but it presents us with a new face, a new hero every so often; some of them shed their skin and make a whole new persona, eschewing their roots for a brighter future. Mashaya revels in his culture and eschews expectations and definitions, consistently curating his own style, always looking to do what the industry is too afraid to; break musical ground, bring the truth of South Africa to the fore using its culture and its current permutation as an outpost of western culture, to tell the story that we can relate to and be inspired by.

His energy, wonder and sincerity are on a hundred this crisp Jozi morning; he lets me in on how he grew up in a village eNkandla and how most of his English was studied from the television and music he was exposed to at his family’s home. Then he wound up working in television in Jozi with his most faithful friend uMatsoso who has supported Mashaya’s career from its infancy and continues to call him to this day to inform him of the latest copycat to appropriate Mashaya’s sound. These simple things, these pieces of his history give context to the person I see before me now, that understands and reconstructs the relations between art, technology and tradition and refuses to be pigeonholed or defined by anybody but himself. And he’s already onto the next one.

‘I just dropped Sun City flow, and there’s a lot of attachments to it, it could be the jail, or the casino, or any city in Africa because there’s always sun. This song is about sharing my experiences with the kids; letting them know that if you’re a raw talent, they will try to chain you.’

Mashayabhuque chooses substance and creativity when it comes to his art, thus staying true to the source to leave awe and imitators in his wake while the world waits and watches to see just how far he takes it.

Editorial image credits

Photography: Hanro Havenga

Styling: Jamal Nxedlana

Image 1:

Mashayabhuqe wears a suit by Diego Ranieri, beret by Crystal Birch and a neckpiece by Pichulik. (Accessories stylist own)

Image 2:

Mashayabhuqe wears trousers by Diego Ranieri, beret by Crystal Birch. (Accessories stylist own)

Image 3:

Mashayabhuqe wears a shirt by Studio W, trousers by Diego Ranieri, beret by Crystal Birch. (Accessories stylist own)

27 July 2016
Introducing Lasta, a Zulu punk songbird finally flying solo

The dulcet tones that helped make ‘Boss Zonke’ a national phenomenon, that feature on Maraza’s Igesi belong to Lasta; A Zulu, neo-electronic, punk singer.

In her EPK, Lasta reveals her artistic journey and she details how she’s sung on many hooks, for many artists. And while paying dues is a part of becoming established in the industry, it is problematic that Lasta is only coming to the public eye through her solo efforts. Patriarchy is so pervasive in our society, no industry or culture is exempt, and the sustained invisibility of the women who are contributors and creators of the sounds and sights we enjoy is a symptom of male supremacy within the creative industries. In happier news, Lasta is set her drop her solo debut soon, and the first single, Alive, is sultry and sweet, a welcome refresher on romance.

Lasta’s identification and pride in being Zulu represents an important movement on the continent; with Africans claiming their culture for creative purposes while offering a representation for blackness, and Africa that is modern and multi-faceted. An important contribution to people of colour as well as Zulu people world wide.

Lasta’s EPK is featured below, enjoy getting to know her and putting a face to a beautiful voice you’ve definitely heard before.

30 March 2016