POP: Bafana Khumalo
IN the world of popular music, some creations reach out and grab you by the throat, demanding attention. Some grow on you and stay with you for the rest of your life. Others, sadly, immediately become wallpaper and disappear as soon as they are churned out by the record company. East Meets West, a recording by Radio Metro disc jockey and heart-throb Bob Mabena and Kaiser Chiefs football club mid-fielder Doctor Khumalo, falls squarely into the latter category.
The 11-track CD, consisting of rap and some disco, lacks any creativity or originality, or even the most basic ability to rap or sing. The presentation comes across as the result of a decision taken at a board meeting to get two good-looking black boys — and they are good- looking, almost beautiful — with some public profile into a studio to do something, anything. In this case, that something was East Meets West. The hope is that the project will sell a couple of hundred thousand copies, and that musically untalented personalities will cut their teeth in a different career; if not, well and good, they will have made some money and a couple of marketers will flog a few products attached to the newly discovered “talent”.
In this case, I doubt that either of these two personalities will cut his teeth sufficiently to enable them to come up with anything better in the future. Making money is so paramount to this project that there is even a credit on the sleeve acknowledging the designer who dressed them, something one rarely sees on any real musician’s record. In all, East Meets West is a very eloquent argument against local content quotas in the electronic media. If this creation were to be used to argue that the local music scene was going somewhere and therefore deserved special protective measures, the argument would fail.