After holding the number one spot on the World Music Charts for two months solid, Busi Mhlongo launches her long-awaited second album, UrbanZulu, at home. Bongani Madondo gets to the source of her sound
Despite the sea breeze caressing my extra melanin-ebonied skin in a way no massage parlour can, on this particular Friday Durban’s weather remains furnace-like. Two Indian youngsters with faces that scream “gangsta rap” drive by in a million-watt Golf with Dr Dre’s Chronic damaging our eardrums, while a buffalo-strong, dark-as-they-come, stocky man in his thirties rushes past me towards the beach front strip.
“Rickshaw,” I mutter to myself as I foot it down the boiling streets, hurrying to a date with that hotter-than-amber-coal artist, Victoria Busi Mhlongo. It’s a week before her soon-to-become-historic second record launch in South Africa.
Why historic? Simply because, after her three-cities launch: Durban midweek, Cape Town on Friday and Johannesburg on Saturday (February 20), it will be unimaginable for Mhlongo not to rightfully claim her seat on the present and past musical terrain as one of the most phenomenal, most exciting musicians – one of a handful of truly great artists to have walked South African soil.
The music from her new CD crushes down musical boundaries in that it is maskandi (traditional Zulu guitar music) with a super kwaito pulse – a groove-packed album with biting social, African revivalist lyrics dripping with love and despair. All this hooked in one album, appropriately titled UrbanZulu.
The album was co-written by Mkhalelwa “Spector” Ngwazi and Themba “Ntshebe” Ngcobo and features South African musicians Umfazi Omnyama and Mphendukelwa Mkhize, as well as Spector and Ntshebe. Drummer Brice Wassy from Cameroon was flown to South Africa to lay down rhythm tracks. The bass contribution came from Paris-based musos Hilaire Penda and Noel Ekwabi; the Senegalese percussion courtesy of Sydney Thiam, Jack Djeyim and kora from Moussa Kanoute.
If the South African music industry wasn’t abnormal I might have found the release of the album in the United Kingdom last October, four months before its local debut, a tad odd. Her second album, it comes to us five years after her debut Babemu, and it’s the biggest homebrew to have hit the so-called “world music” charts where it hurts most.
UrbanZulu held the number one hot spot for two hard-hitting months (December and January), edging ahead of notable veteran Afro-beat stars such as Congolese virtuoso composer Ray Lema and Fela Kuti’s family heir, Femi.
And then to come home and hear one regional DJ asking: “Who is Busi Mhlongo?” It makes you want to march barefoot to Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s office and scream: “Please strip me of my citizenship, chief!” If radio personalities don’t even know her name let alone her worldwide infectious grooves and scatting, her dance antics, her stage presence … woe is me.
Our meeting place happens to be the melting pot of all things artsy, as in rootsy, in Durban – the Bartel Arts Trust Centre, where Durban’s cultural intellectuals, painters and generally sunburnt share black coffee with the city’s learned and fancy musical sorts.
It is an hour past the scheduled time. Out of the blue of the Durban sea from somewhere in the heart of the old port with its background of titanic ships, struts a medium height, twiggy-shaped woman. Dark brown Gucci shades adorn her sculptured face with a black, velvety hat pulled down on her forehead. She catwalks towards me.
“Looks like Kiara Kabakuru, Gucci’s Ugandan- born covergal,” I say aloud to no one in particular. I mean, if you thought that just because Mhlongo is the queen of Afro-optimism on the music circuit you’d find her looking like an over-decorated flea-market stall you’ve got another think coming. The lady looks as hip as the best Foxy Brown rap and R&B videos can spit out on MTV.
Mhlongo is not someone who finds it easy to share her deepest thoughts with the world, but she lets rip: “I feel very good.” Although she’s been a troubled soul for the better part of her life, at 50-plus Mhlongo is currently savouring an all-time high. But trauma and sorrow have become part and parcel of her adventurous life as an artist and wandering spirit.
Of course her new-found happiness has a lot to do with her new musical offering, but also with the fact that, these days, she manages her energies well, rather than taking pleasure in drowning in sorrow (as I suspect she might have done in the past).
Today, there is a much lighter side to her. She punctuates her conversation with deep- sourced, hearty laughter and the squeaky giggles of an 18-year-old Spice Girl who’s begun dating the college hunk.
We talk about the new wave South African urban genre, which is neither kwaito nor traditional music, but an amalgam of the two. It’s a phenomenon that’s seen kwaito kids Bongo Muffin bumping and grinding to the breeze of African renaissance with such hits as Amadlozi, Iphindlela and That’is’gubu – lyrically empty, but the cradle of the urban Afro-vibe.
“Oh, I love kwaito,” says Mhlongo. “I love those kids. What they are singing about may not be lyrically moving, but man … the beats – the groove is African through and through. And that is the base.” Mhlongo throws light advice without lecturing.
She is on a roll. “With this album, it’s either we break it or quit it. I really enjoyed working on it, with all the creative people involved.” She has packaged it in a wickedly creative manner, the final result being a mean mix masala: basic maskandi with wild guitar riffs reminiscent of latino guitar god Carlos Santana, played to funky urban sounds, emitting from the disco kwaito and electric drum `n bass.
This is Busi Mhlongo, authentically Zulu and South African with a new sound that will find a home in a hostel as easily as it will on a dance floor in Yeoville or London.
My lucky stick seems to be doing the trick and she grows more expansive. “See, my son, I have been hurt a lot. My life has been dotted with bad vibes. This world, especially my mother country, South Africa, has had heavy negative effects on me, so in music I derive solace. I would not want my music to sound like a depressing church sermon, hence the groove and beat in my music.
“You don’t have to sound depressed to sing about depression. I deal with my trauma through music for, in it, I strive for happiness,” she says, sort of settling the score with herself. This new-found optimism seems to be the defining factor that pervades her stable, the indie Afro, jazz and electric dance revolutionaries Melt 2000.
Owner Robert Trunz feels passionate, not only about the album, but about the way in which the album has relieved Mhlongo of her own personal demons that have haunted her for the past two decades.
“This is Busi’s true home-coming album,” says the Sussex-based Trunz, who had to fight a 1 000 legal skirmish with Mhlongo’s previous label, Netherlands-based Munich Records, to free her from that contract.
“I’ve put my life on the line for her. I truly believe that if South Africans talk about African renaissance, then the name Busi Mhlongo will not be left behind,” says Trunz, widely known as a modern-day musical missionary.
Blame it on the record boss’s commercial enthusiasm for Afro clich, but truly, if Busi Mhlongo is not the very epitome of musical renaissance – in the same boat as Bayete, recharged Brenda Fassie and Mfaz’O’mnyama – then Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer didn’t invent the rainbow nation.
Trunz has worked with Brazilian and Cuban musical royalty Airto Morreira and Chucho Valdez. On the making of UrbanZulu, he says: “Besides being the vibiest product I have touched this side of the equator, this album has transported Busi from gloom to light. She is happy these days, and you know that before, it was not easy to make her happy.”
He hasn’t been the only one to say it, but former Kippies manager and Africa Oye Concerts conceptualist Arabi Mucheke once confided in me that “it is very difficult to work with Busi”.
No, she is not “Miss Tantrums” nor an over- age prima donna. “She just needs to be in good spirits to work with,” is a line popularly bandied about by the music industry types whenever challenged on the absence of South Africa’s most popular act, after Sixties icons Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, from major gigs in her beloved country.
Says Mhlongo: “Yes, I admit that in the past I experienced discomfort working with South African promoters, because most are money- minded, neglecting the artists’ concerns and creative spirits. There still exists a lot of jealousy in this country. There is no harmony, which is a pity because artists are supposed to carry society’s soul. But now I am truly back. Come rain or storm, sunshine or earthquake, I will tough it out in the music business’s pervasive dirt.”.
Minutes later, I gatecrash her rehearsals. As a fly on the wall, I get first-class access to the artistic passion which seems to be an omnipresent shadow to all truly great artists. Mhlongo’s voice is so polished, so passionate, so experienced, she makes her backing vocalists sound like aspirant Billie Holidays in a voice class at jazz school. The band struggles to hit Mhlongo’s resonant high spirited note. Twelve-string genius Mfaz’ Om’nyama derives pleasure from answering his mobile phone right in the middle of a song. For a moment you think all hell will really break loose.
But soon Mhlongo negotiates herself down and, as if overcome by some beyond-this-world magic, all the band members glide into her feel and soak up the song Awukho umuzu kukhuluma kwayo (There are problems in every homestead) like possessed ancestors disguised as musicians. It’s a wonder the hall’s roofs remain fastened to their nails and don’t fly into the nearby sea. The music cooking here is just too tasty, too nutritious for any listener to remain still.
“I have done this, tried that,” says Mhlongo, sweat shimmying down her face into her navel to soak up her skimpy red top, “Now I am happy that I have done an album that comes straight from my heart.”
It’s not that her ground-breaking but still largely unpromoted album, Babemu, (her collaboration with the late guitar kingpin Doc Mthalane) was forgettable. It’s just that, as Robert Trunz says, “This album took almost five years to finish.”
UrbanZulu’s producer was funk king and ex- Soul II Soul producer Will Mowat, largely responsible for Angelique Kidjo’s sizzling early disco gems such as Batonga and Agolo. He is credited with making Soul II Soul’s ghetto sounds into international hits. But this groove king met his match in Mhlongo. Although she is a true kamikaze warrior of groove, she was intent on maintaining her maskandi content.
Artistic fisticuffs in an English studio are nothing but light sparring compared to this troubadour’s lifestyle. Like the gliding star Mohammad Ali, this small- built, coffee- complexioned woman has taken lots of life’s punishment. Like Ali, most were comebacks from what she dished out.
It is painful for Mhlongo to re-live her own personal story. Not long into her marriage to one of South Africa’s genius pianist composers, Early Mabuza (TV chatter box Felicia Mabuza-Suttle’s uncle) Mhlongo, bitten by the musical bug, left the country. She took with her nothing but a bit of experience as a member of African Jazz and started out in Portugal via Mozambique and Angola with the group Conjunto Joan Paulo.
“The past 20 years have been a rollercoaster of emotional events in my life. I find no joy in saying to you that I left my husband – all loving and supportive of my career – here at home, with my little daughter Mpumi, as well as my family, to follow my dreams overseas. It’s nothing to brag about. It was like a calling. I could not resist the allure of breaking beyond the confines of South Africa.”
A year after her self exile in the late Seventies, her husband passed away.
“I have no regrets,” she tells me. “Then it was a mistake, but I made a dash for it. Today I am not going to allow my life to be shadowed by those Seventies decisions.”
To this day Mhlongo’s relationship with her child Mpumi – now engaged to an American and living in the United States – remains as good as that between Mugabe and the press at best. At worst they love each other as much as America loves Bin Laden.
Today Mhlongo does not see the purpose of talking about it. Too close to her breasts for that. She prefers to focus on taking care of her ailing mother in Kwa-Mashu and on popularising this brand new genre of Afro- groove traditional served in a pre-millennium kwaito pulse.
“Gem-packed” becomes the operative word in describing the CD that features Yapheli’- maliyami with its soaring, yet deeply deep bluesy feel alongside socially disturbing pieces such as Uganga Nge Ngane. When spewed out live Awukho umuzu ongena kukhuluma kwawo simply claims its place as one of the greatest ever contemporary singles to come out of South Africa.
Introduced by fiery London-based West Indian poetess Zena Edwards, the song is as powerful as Masekela and Fela Kuti doing Lady. Itchu! For Johannesburgers, on Saturday at Mega Music and forever after, there is no better salvation to our gloomy, hijacking-infested lives than Victoria Busi Mhlongo’s emotion- tinged alto, with its ability to metamorphose into high-pitched verbal pyrotechnics. Igishaya nga phakathi!*
Bongani Madondo is busy peeling off the skins of more than 20 unforgettable artists for a book with the working title Sukuma Pre- Millennium Creations, an intruder’s insight