Arthur Mafokate is not a great musician. Repeat Arthur Mafokate is not a great musician and not by any stretch of imagination could he ever be the king of kwaito.
He is a hard-working marketer, aided by charm and quiet demeanour and driven by entrepreneurial savvy. He is also a decent choreographer and a competent beat programmer. But a great musician he is not.
Mafokate shot on to the scene in the early 1990s at the genesis of a wave of new, urban contemporary youth sound that later became known as kwaito. One of his earliest hits, Vuvuzela, is widely regarded as a pioneering hit in kwaito.
The album that installed him as a megastar was the 1994 release Kaffir, skilfully playing on a term that touched on raw nerves. On that album he also had a song that opened with mimicry of Nelson Mandela, then an amusing and trendy thing to do. The Mandela speech closed with a declaration that “named this boy, Vuvuzela, the president of kwaito”. This is where the term king of kwaito seemed to originate.
In retrospect, Mafokate’s music — for lack of a better term — thrived because, in its early stages, it lacked a context within which it could be appraised. But as a more creatively robust body of work developed to define kwaito, so it became clear that all Mafokate was doing was creating noise — now there’s a better term –that would be accompanied by sleek videos, good dancing and sensual moves.
The real problem with Mafokate’s approach to the aesthetic conception of his sound is that it panders to simple minds. In interviews he sometimes sounds like a record company executive “just looking at what people like and giving the market what they want”.
I have always thought this argument flawed and in a musician’s case — or someone who claims to be one — it is even dangerous. What it means is that anyone with a clean singing voice can be a recording artist, he just has to know the right people, or win a Mr Soweto title, as Mafokate did.
Mafokate’s saving grace remains that he has the ability to create a very catchy tune to spark audience imagination. After that, in all his albums, he has a song or two that are derivatives of the first hit, instrumental versions and then a balance made up of puerile, unbearable and sometimes flaccid sound.
His tendency to grovel to an unsophisticated audience is demonstrated by his love for sampling without giving credit and without a clear reason. When Kabelo Mabalane of TKZee samples Ali Katt’s Eighties hit Let the Good Times Roll, you get a sense that he is reaching back to an era that shaped the music appreciation of the kwaito generation. What’s more, he adds value to an inspired choice with lyrical depth.
But when Mafokate samples Salome de Bahia’s Outro Lugar for his “hit” Mnike or R&B star Mya’s Case of theEx for one of his new artists, Purity’s I’m Bad, you cannot vaguely imagine why he chose these songs other than the fact that they were overplayed in clubs and on radio when he recorded his track.
Sampling has also carried his 999 stable. I saw him perform at the Vaal Triangle Technikon in March 1996 and again at the Cultural Calabash in Taung, North West, last year. The sets were eerily similar, differing only in attire and the songs that had been released in the years between.
The bulk of the performance was taken up by cover versions, including Queen Sesoko’s rendition of Killing Me Softly. In 1996 it was fresh thanks to the Fugees’ genius. In Taung she sounded flat and a bit unsure whether she should sing the song at all.
Mafokate’s rise to the top has been largely due to his vigorous marketing to an unsussed audience, like the children of Taung who walk 20km to see him perform a four-year-old live set. It has also been due to inept arts coverage by the media. Here I do not know whether to blame those of us who stood by and allowed the king-of-kwaito myth to gather an aura of believability or those who worked hard — or maybe lazily and unquestioningly — at fuelling the myth.
The most powerful testimony given to the hollowness of this myth was when his song, Oyi Oyi, won song of the year at the South African Music Awards — largely due to the timing of its release and again a good video.
Author Zakes Mda rightly noted that it did not deserve to win “not because it’s kwaito, but because it’s lousy kwaito”.