Brenda Fassie, South Africa’s bad-girl singer, in THE MARK GEVISSER PROFILE
‘HOW can I make you smile?” I asked an enraged Brenda Fassie, dressed in baby-pink denim cutoffs and throwing the contents of her handbag around my car with the jerky impetuousness of a seriously cold turkey as we drove away from her latest humiliation — a no-show from Bob Mabena for a radio interview.
“How can you make me smile? Go home. Leave me alone.”
There’s no more pretty to Brenda’s pink. There’s not even that raunchy “I-like-it-here-in-the-dirt” sexuality of her Quirinale drug-den days. She vonts to be alone, more Marlene than Madonna nowadays: bitter, prematurely aged … until you make a connection with her. Then she’s your best friend. Whatever she says, the cynicism is a thin crust: break it open and you’ll hear her scream, as she did several times during our day together: “I wanna be loved. I just wanna be loved!”
Since her July crash — when her girlfriend Poppy Sihlahla was found dead next to her in her room in a Hillbrow bordello and she was checked into rehab — she swears she has been clean. She is living in hotels for the moment; she drinks, she smokes, but no more coke. Three weeks ago she hooked up with Paul Tillsley, the mercurial former head of M-Net’s ill-fated news programme Camera 7 and current owner of The Shebeen. There are sparks already, though, and by the time you read this Tillsley might be the latest in a long and illustrious line of Brenda’s
Rehearsing on stage at the old Melodi Theatre in Orange Grove, which Tillsley leases, she poses for the camera, playing the superbitch. Today her targets are the five young men who make up her shimmying, vogueing, campy chorus-line. You could crack a coconut in the swivel of their hips.
“You bloody gays!” she screams at them, gratuitously, for the benefit of myself and the photographer. “You don’t know how to work! You think this is just a rehearsal! Quincy Jones could walk through this door any minute. I am a SUPERSTAR!!!! You don’t like it? Leave! Walk out that door right now. You’re fired! I hear Yvonne Chaka- Chaka needs some back-ups. Go to her. She’s your
She is 31, but she can be, at times, a parody of all the parodies of all the washed-out has-beens who have ever marched down Sunset Boulevard. She has always been difficult, but in the past she has also always ultimately complied. In township subculture she was revolutionary, not only because she stripped down to Lycra underwear, but because she was, figuratively, an easy lay for her listeners. This is the woman, remember, who burst into public consciousness as your Weekend Special, as the mistress who might complain that you never visit on weekdays, but who is nonetheless faithfully waiting for you come Friday.
She commanded intense libidinal power too: remember those incidents when people would trash the stadium — and even kill each other — when Brenda didn’t turn up for a concert? At her “Brenda’s Back” concerts this weekend — her first live gigs in nearly a year — South Africa’s greatest pop star performed with characteristic energy, the beauty and power of her voice peeking occasionally through the histrionics. You could see, as always, the contours of her genitalia beneath two layers of Lycra as she swaggered across the Melodi’s shabby stage. Her sexuality is more aggressive than ever. Sure, there are flashes of the ingnue, of the coquette. But now, when Brenda performs the sex-kitten, she does it with thinly veiled derision, or with vampish venom, as if to say: “look, but don’t you dare touch!”
She did not want pity — in fact she did a sneering imitation of people hypocritically commiserating with her — and she did not want concern. She wanted respect. The Weekend Special was finally fighting back: she had become an embodiment of Gloria Gaynor’s anthemic I will survive. But Brenda is never simple: she taunted and swaggered all the same. She played, as she has never done publicly before, with her sexuality: “I wipe the toilet- paper on both sides!” she yelled once, with clear delight, in reference to her bisexuality.
She told me that she owed it to Poppy to be upfront about her sexuality now. At another point in her concert, she cast an imperious hand back along her chorus line: “Stabane! [the township word for queens]”, she declared, again with delight. “There are more people here than in the Skyline [Hillbrow’s famous black gay bar] tonight! Why”, she challenged her audience (most of whom probably drive a Skyline rather than drink in one) “do we not give gay people their rights? It’s high time we
There was no applause for this peroration. In fact, there was no applause at all. At one point she received a note written by one of her fans clamouring at the foot of the stage, and sung it aloud, weeping: “Brenda, we love you! We are behind you all the way!” For an instant, there was a spontaneous burst of compassion in the 700-strong crowd: all the hands went up. For the rest, though, the audience — largely young and black — seemed to be profoundly ambivalent about Brenda. They did not dance to her music; they did not clap; they gaped with awe, rather, at the spectacle their icon had become: the lesbian addict beyond the pale; the glamour-dream they bought stripped bare to reveal a banshee howling out all the angst those CCV soapies edit out of their metropolitan fantasies. Brenda’s fans, like Brenda, are creatures of the city: look what the city did to her. Who’s next?
Interestingly, Brenda’s plummet down beyond the pale has not unduly affected her record sales: her latest single, Umuntu Uyashintsha (“People Change”) has already sold more than 30 000 copies. With characteristic bolshiness, she dedicated it to township rapper Senyaka, who recently came out with a song called Brenda ke Mampara (“Brenda is a fool” for taking drugs); she disses him as a country bumpkin and, in one mix, she sings “Umuntu Uyashintsha” while a ragga voice-over declares, “You cannot change Brenda Fassie Girl. She’s a fine musician, but she cannot change! You can’t predict her! She’s fuckin’ wicked!”
It’s clearly a caricature of Senyaka, but — brilliantly and characteristically — Brenda turns it round to work for her so that she can have her cake and eat every one else’s too : she can sing the repentant soprano harmonies of how she’s going to be good now while an insistent vocal bassline tells us she is B-A-D!
Backstage at the Melodi, she and I sit in the shabby make-up room. Brenda positions herself so that, while talking to me, she can look at her reflection in the dirty mirror framed with holes where the lightbulbs should be. There couldn’t be a better place to discuss the rise and fall of Brenda Fassie. She tells me: “Senyaka did drugs with me, so what the fuck is he on about?”
She has an understanding of social hypocrisy so sharp it could slit a wrist. She catches me being disingenuous before the words have finished leaving my mouth, brands me a “fake”, and refuses to talk to me for a while. Everyone is fake and hypocritical: her clan-cousin Nelson Mandela, for promising so much and delivering so little; Desmond Tutu, for telling kids to stay away from school while sending his own kids to America; journalists, for pretending to like her when they just want a scoop; managers, for pretending to like her when they just want a buck.
When Tokyo Sexwale announced, at the press conference he held for her at his home in Houghton after Poppy’s death in July, that she was a “diamond withering away… in the spirit of Masakhane, we must build up what has been destroyed,” Fassie caught the populism lurking in those mixed metaphors, doubted the Gauteng premier’s sincerity, and replied, ungratefully, “I’m doing it for myself”.
As for black people who say there is no homosexuality in their culture: “They’re lying! They’re fake! They don’t wanna come out with the truth! People do things in their bloody rooms and then come out and wipe their mouths and say, ‘I did nothing!’ Why do it if you won’t talk about it? Why do people not talk about sex?”
Brenda does talk about sex. She once said of Yvonne Chaka-Chaka: “She thinks she’s white. She says, ‘I stay next door to the Oppenheimers’. Who the fuck wants to know that? ‘I’m married to a doctor.’ Who the fuck wants to know that. Call Brenda Fassie, I’ll tell you who I fucked last night!” Now she tells me, with derision, about the husbands and wives she sleeps with simultaneously, “and they don’t even fucking know they’re cheating on each other!” She tells me, with even more derision, about how “lesbianism is becoming a fashion in Soweto. All these girls pretend to be gay just so they can be seen with me”. She then goes on to recount, in graphic detail, how she makes them go down on her, but how she’ll never go down on them.
No wonder she calls herself the Madonna of Soweto. Inside every dominatrix is a pussycat who wants to be loved. But, even though Brenda insists, “I’m in control”, she isn’t. She is spot-on when she identifies the hypocrisy of her fellow muzos who also do drugs but who pontificate sanctimoniously about her demise. The tragedy is, though, that they can control their habits and she can’t. They can control their emotions too. Would Madonna ever allow herself to say to a journalist, as Brenda does: “No, I just can’t be with a girl since Poppy died. Every time I touch a girl I see Poppy, and I just can’t take it. I am more lonely than ever.”?
So is the voracious sexual appetite simply a foil? She insists that she does what she does “because I’m a shocker. I like to create controversy. It’s my trademark”. I’d venture to guess that there has become, over the years, a fatal interdependency between Brenda Fassie and the paparazzi. She is ultimately a creature of the Sunday Times Extra, which has faithfully emblazoned her woes in banner headlines, from “FASSIE-MANIA SWAMPS WEDDING!” through “BRENDA SMASHED BY JEALOUS HUSBAND!” all the way down to “BRENDA TOOK OUR BABY, SAYS GRANDPA” and “BRENDA’S PAL DIES OF DRUGS”. She is a textbook tabloid commodity: her fix, and her downfall, has been notoriety, not cocaine.