If one listened carefully to the eight computer speakers suspended from the ceiling in a corner of the Durban Art Gallery’s Red Eye gathering last Friday, Kermit the Frog was speaking to Ladysmith Black Mambazo who were treading carefully next to Dollar Brand and the Tuxedo Slickers.
Their commonality was Solomon Linda’s song, Mbube (Lion); their aleatoric conversation revolved around notions of intellectual property, cultural fluidity and collective and individual authorship.
The late Linda’s Mbube has been the subject of authorship and copyright legal battles that culminated earlier this year when his estate reached an out-of-court settlement with United States-based Abilene Music.
Artists/cultural producers Ralph Borland and Julian Jonker have taken 72 versions — including the original — of Mbube and created Song of Solomon, a sound installation that is part orchestration and part algorithm.
Using Max/MSP software, the duo created Morpheus, an application that continually arranges and rearranges compositional elements from the various versions of Mbube, which is channelled through the eight speakers. Assuming an almost call-and-response effect, it is ethereal, haunting and clearly succeeds in their intention to “recreate a jungle of song in which the dead author might find a suitable resting place”.
Both Jonker and Borland (whose life-size shark sculptures haunt Jetty Square on Cape Town’s Foreshore, an area that was once underwater) admit to being interested in themes of haunting, requiem and paying tribute to the dead.
When approached by the Durban Art Gallery to do a piece for Red Eye, Jonker felt the story of Linda, who was from Msinga in rural KwaZulu-Natal, and a song of which there are an estimated 500 versions, was apt subject matter with which to interrogate contemporary concerns:
“We are thinking of a way we can pay tribute to Solomon Linda’s authorship of the song, while being antagonistic about the idea of authorship that frames Western intellectual property law. We can pay tribute to someone as the author, but still subvert the idea of the author,” says Jonker.
Both find the notion of the individualism inherent in intellectual property law frameworks problematic as it stifles the cultural fluidity through imitation and diffusion, which is profound in the genealogy of forms such as popular music.
Song of Solomon is more than just a tribute to another black man shafted by the global North, though it also examines issues of patenting paranoia, of traditional global North-South tensions and of rarefying and hardening cultural identity when acquiescing to the commodity-driven notions of intellectual property. Borland feels that Morpheus is “also a metaphor for cultural production”, which is antagonising because of its mimicry.
It is, ultimately, a daringly imaginative, multi-layered and accessible work, which remains with one long after.