Zola has had an extraordinary year for a debutant. He moved from being a virtual nobody — something he moaned bitterly about on his debut album Umdlwembe (Stray Dog) — to featuring prominently as a fully realised character actor, Papa Action, in the Yizo Yizo TV series.
Umdlwembe recently scooped the top two prizes at the Metro FM Music Awards: album of the year and artist of the year. Meanwhile, the single Ghetto Fabulous off the Yizo Yizo soundtrack scooped him song of the year at the same awards ceremony.
Certainly Ghetto Ruff producer Kaybee has done an extraordinary job of realising Zola’s vision, however defective. He has assembled and sculpted solid beats to imaginatively interpret Zola’s humourless lyrics. The dark concrete sound is laced with spark, giving it appropriate menace for Zola’s particular brand of doom and gloom.
Though there’s nothing spectacularly innovative and new, the sound is bold and fresh enough for his audience’s jaded eardrums. In the song Mavovo (praise name for the Mkhize clan) Kaybee reclaims a traditional Sotho concertina sound for the kwaito generation. It’s the sound used by Paul Simon on The Boy in the Bubble off the legendary Graceland album.
But all musical gains are cancelled by the desperate ranting of the son of a preacher woman who provides a second-rate, schoolboy imitation of the lyrics of Tupac Shakur. (How abysmally uninformed music journos are when they gleefully proclaim Zola’s atrocious lyrics to be poems).
In the album’s inner sleeve there’s a weighty “poem” on the Ellis Park soccer tragedy that is as bad as it is sincere.
And therein lies the rub. Zola is nothing more than a combination of Tupac and Mandoza, as creatively original as a battery thinker. You can count his creative ideas on one hand.
Moreover, Zola annexes and twists some traditionally humanist African concepts to suit his own now bitterly violent world outlook. And the “now” is crucial. For Zola apparently used to be a nice boy complete with delectable dreadlocks, effeminate even. Then the dreadlocks were shaven off to fit his jailbird role as Papa Action. Since then he has retained the overtly masculine, threatening “hard man” image of that character. See his poseur’s eternal chewing of a matchstick.
In Mdlwembe he deliberately twists a Zulu saying — and it’s not an imaginative play on words — to perpetuate a never-ending gangster turf war, whereas the Zulu concept is for men to resolve their quarrels. He impishly declares that in his wake widows will multiply aplenty.
But let’s face it: Zola has never taken part in criminal activity as he’d like us to believe. As a son of a Zionist preacher, his conscience will ultimately betray him. He will break down and pray to be redeemed from his orgiastic indulgent celebration of criminality.
Zola’s popularity has had a lot to do with his portrayal of a reconstructed criminal and his visibility on TV. And his nascent musical career is suspiciously opportunistic.
Even the name Zola is adopted after his Soweto township’s reputation for murder, violence and perpetual crime, and the fact that a number of major kwaito stars hail from there: Mandoza, M’du and Mzambiya, for example.
Though callous, it’s a shrewd business decision on his part to play on the glamorous criminal romance of Zola. But for his health’s sake, he should urgently see a psychiatrist, to get him over his triple split personality and identity crisis.