EDITOR’S NOTE
When I was a teenager, back in 1852, I used to sit and watch award shows like my life depended on it. The memory of Britney Spears performing I’m A Slave For U at the MTV VMA Awards in 2001, with a yellow Burmese python draped around her shoulders, is etched in my mind’s eye.
More recently, I remember Beyoncé giving an incredible performance at the Billboard Awards while pregnant — although nobody but her family knew at the time. Her daughter Blue Ivy is 10 years old now and a Grammy winner already.
In the decade since, award shows have sadly become a farce of tantrums, interruptions and lacklustre performances. Nothing like the twohour entertainment extravaganzas we all used to stay up for.
You see, music has punctuated every memorable moment in my life. Whether it was listening to my father wash the car while listening to Nat King Cole, my mom rocking out to Joan Armatrading and Letta Mbulu, my grandfather shuffling awkwardly to Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling or my grandmother enjoying the music of Mahlathini and The Mahotella Queen, music made life in Soweto sweeter.
I went from cleaning my mother’s stoep ezola while listening to Robin S to being lucky enough to have seen Boom Shaka, TKZEE and Mdu on the same stage, on one night.
And so, in putting together this issue, I wanted to remember the good things about music but also face the tough things about music.
After my first love breakup, I found solace in the 2000 version of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. But, as I hang my head in shame, one of the toughest moments for me was having to let go of one of my favourite party songs, Ignition by R Kelly. I had to stop playing his music because I remember in 1993 as a 13-year-old, watching Aaliyah (who was just as young as I was but was being marketed as a young adult), visit South Africa, being at her appearance at LA Jeans Clothing in Small Street in downtown Johannesburg (those who know, know), and being mesmerised by her beauty and lyrics.
The words from Age Ain’t Nuthing But a Number, co-written by her then secret husband R Kelly, before the marriage was annulled because she was under age, are soiled now.
Music infiltrated every part of my life, and musicians, in particular, have been my demigods because they are the people I look to when I need to feel strong (cue Jay-z’s The Black Album) or need Mary J Blige to weep with me for all the tired women in me.
Music can both heal us and contaminate us. It can make us question our lives or turn us into activists. There’s no way you can listen to Bra Hugh Masekela’s Stimela without recognising it as his way of calling out the inequality brought on by the apartheid system.
But music can also be aggressive and menacing, before Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg and his West Coast crew made us see the plight of the ghetto boy by gangsta rapping their way into our lives. That truth would inspire Lamar, with the same producer in Dr Dre, to become the first rap artist to win a Pulitzer Prize.
With this issue, from Thandi Ntuli’s latest album to the biggest list of amapiano’s hottest tracks, what we aim to do is remind you to dance, especially after these past three years of masks, deaths and war. We also remind you that it is crucial to know when to separate the art from the artist but also recognise, in the case of R Kelly, when it is impossible to do so.
We’ve assembled a great group of writers who interrogate everything from the role of women in South African jazz to why award shows have lost their shine.
And so, whether you want to read about how R Kelly has added to rape culture, or why you shouldn’t dismiss amapiano as a passing fad, one thing you can be sure of is that music will never stop being the soundtrack of our lives.