Artist: KOOS
Album: The Black Tape
Song: Sing Jy van Bomme?
In his excellent book Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds gives a detailed account of how punk, in all its reductionist fury, gave rise to what I personally consider to be the most creatively fertile and still-relevant mo(ve)ments in rock music’s history.
I hesitate to call post-punk a movement, as it was never so much about a unified front as it was simply an environment in which amateurism, experimentation and cross-pollination was encouraged, resulting in music that still sounds startlingly contemporary and exerts an undeniable influence today.
In the United States disco and punk fused into the beat-driven, eerie minimalism of ESG and the frenetic caterwaul of James Chance and the Contortions; Pere Ubu and Suicide assimilated electronics into a rock band context; other bands, like DNA and Mars, threw the rule book away completely and created noise so forbidding that it still sounds impenetrable and alien.
In the United Kingdom punk and dub merged into the music of PIL and the Pop Group, Dadaist sensibilities informed the output of the Flying Lizards and Wire, and the stark, brooding preoccupations of Joy Division remain canonical to this day. In short, as ephemeral as punk itself may have been, it begat a climate of innovation that still resonates in most of what’s worth listening to today.
It is tempting, if myopic, to claim that punk never had any legacy in South Africa. While there were most certainly bands operating in what could broadly be called a post-punk idiom in the Eighties (Live Jimi Presley and Not Even the TV spring to mind), it is interesting how subterranean this history still is and how untainted by it South African rock seems to be today.
KOOS are perhaps the ideal embodiment of this ethos in a South African context: a band consisting of thespians and artists rather than musicians, creating a distressed sound that reflected the turbulent times the country was going through. Fine artist Neil Goedhals was the main musical impetus in the band, which is evidenced in the more abstract, rather than “musical”, nature of many of the songs.
Most of their lyrics were penned not by band members but by poets and playwrights, making the band closer in spirit to a community theatre project than a rock band, albeit a politically and sonically literate one. Fred de Vries saw fit to include them alongside well-known sonic innovators such as Sonic Youth and Einstürzende Neubauten in his book, Club Risiko, which chronicled the rock underground in seven major cities worldwide.
As someone who became interested in music at quite a late stage, I couldn’t claim to have been a fan when KOOS were actually a going concern; in fact, I would have been eight years old when their only album came out and was probably listening to Carika Keuzenkamp or something. It was only years later that I, at the time still convinced that South Africa had no underground rock history to speak of, first heard anecdotal evidence of this band, and years later still that I found a copy of the cassette, proceeded to track down a cassette player, and heard it for the first time.
Sing Jy van Bomme, then, represents to me a kind of first contact with a history I never suspected was there, kick-starting the album with a dissonant and abrasive guitar chord that instantly sets the tone for what is to follow.
It is a buzzsaw texture that immediately tells you to forget everything you thought was acceptable in music, gives you nothing pretty to hold on to and forces you to consider everything that comes after it in elementary terms.
After four bars, the bass and drums kick up a regimented, dirge-like rhythm, which everything else in the song seems to be nailed to: guitar, bass, vocals and saxophone all stab on the one and three, as if to echo the imperative the lyrics allude to later: “ons moet maar”. A precarious silence before each of these beats creates a plodding, reluctant motion, yet there is a rude exuberance to the skronky notes the sax blurts out.
Where the guitar is dissonant, the saxophone is downright out of tune, bleating with an irreverent glee that suggests at least a degree of pleasure in the duty to “sing for the harmless” and reinforces the idea that one doesn’t need to be humourless to be serious.
In the second verse Megan Kruskal bellows with a heavy English accent, overenunciating every syllable with fearsome determination, the onomatopoeic “boem boem boem” lending the song, in all its gravity, an unwitting playground-chant feel.
In Die Suid-Afrikaanse Herfs Marcel van Heerden makes explicit reference to themselves as “children” and whether you read the lyrics, taken from Ryk Hattingh’s play of the same title, as a soldier’s revelry in bloodlust, or as a repurposed statement of intent for the band to sing of that which is the case, an air of inevitability pervades the song, a resignation to circumstances beyond any one person’s control.
That age of overt dissent is now over and, tellingly, KOOS ceased to be in the same year that Nelson Mandela ceased to serve time in prison. Whether the minutiae of the lyrical content are still relevant today, the level of sonic inventiveness and outward awareness that KOOS embodied is something that many contemporary South African rock bands could do well to emulate.