Ishmael’s new album is about a youthful crooner who has finally grown up Charl Blignaut It seems that not even the impoverished outreaches of rural Wolmaransstad managed to dodge the Xanadu bullet of the Seventies.
The spectacularly cheesy cover of Ishmael Morobe’s (the artist formerly known as E’Smile) latest album, Iskhathi sa Khona, features a photograph of the R&B star as a young boy, posing in front of a corrugated iron shack sporting too-short beige slacks, a badass Jackson Five afro and prescription suburban roller skates.
Somehow the picture sums it all up. For Ishmael, born into abject poverty and emerging first as a breakdancer in Hillbrow nightclubs, it’s been a long, wobbly skate down a dirt road to stardom. He’s paid his dues. He’s done the hip-hop thing with Prophets of the City and the kwaito thing with Skeem. Now he’s just doing his own thing the way he knows best. He’s a raw, dusty, indigenous talent who’s equally at home working a diverse range of local styles yet is equally able to absorb international trends and then mix it all up to produce what is arguably the closest thing that we have to a truly local R&B flavour.
Well, R&B is how most people choose to label Ishmael’s solo work certainly the South African Music Awards do, honouring him as best R&B artist for the past two years running but, in truth, his sound is not as easily categorised as that.
The jamming launch of Iskhathi sa Khona at The Voodoo Lounge in Pretoria a fortnight ago proved as much. Ishmael played the central role in turning a space that had surely been a Goth club in a previous incarnation into a rowdy, spontaneous hothouse to showcase the Ghetto Ruff stable’s summer releases. With hip-hop maestro Ready D scratching away in the background and various groups of dancers throwing themselves into the spotlight from Cape Flats b-boys to oh-so-Yeoville bump’n’grind babes Ishmael casually took the mic and pulled together the various strains of the new school.
Twisting through it all was Ishmael’s particular brand of crooning, swinging effortlessly from gospel blues to Latino streetparty strains. By the time TKZee’s Kabelo joined him on stage to perform the summer’s surefire kwaito anthem, Pantsula for Life, the crowd was going ballistic. Ishmael never sounded this good before.
Sure, his previous solo releases Mi House and Beautiful Thing promised to break through, but the truth is that when you compare them to the new album they sound more a bit indulgent, monotonous and formulaic the same old American R&B thing. The reality is that, like all local R&B releases TKZee, Loyiso and Ashaan included the albums have barely registered a blip on the sales charts. We’re talking a couple of hundred sales per album by artists who are virtually household names. Who knows why?
This time, though, it looks like Ishmael’s finally going to blow up. That has something to do with the fact that on Iskhathi sa Khona he’s opted for a more pop angle (watch out for Boom Boom and Zwakala). But it’s mainly because, as Toni B chants on the new album: “If you wanna blow up, you gotta grow up.”