Simphiwe Dana

deLYS

That old fighting spiritBy By David HonigmannPublished: March 1 2008 01:16 | Last updated: March 1 2008 01:16Simphiwe Dana is the most garlanded singer to emerge from South Africa for many years. Critics have raved about both her albums. At this year???s SAMA awards ??? the South African Grammys ??? she walked away with four prizes. She is nominated for a Radio 3 Award for World Music as well. She may not win ??? the Africa category is generally reserved for west Africans old enough to be her father ??? but it would be unwise to bet against her.Last week she was in London for the final date of a tour that had taken her round the world. This elusive concert had originally been scheduled for Piccadilly???s tiny Pigalle Club last November, then slipped around the calendar before being postponed. Three months later, Dana all but sold out the much larger Queen Elizabeth Hall, in spite of not yet being a huge name in British world music circles. A healthy proportion of expats filled the seats.Dana was born in 1980 in the rural Transkei. ???It was a great adventure,??? she recalls. ???We always had expeditions, down to the river and into the forest. Just me and my next sister.??? (She has three younger sisters.) After two years studying information technology at Port Elizabeth Technikon [Polytechnic], she dropped out and moved to Johannesburg. ???I???d had it with Port Elizabeth. It was time to start doing something about my career. And Johannesburg is the creative hub of South Africa.??? She lived with a friend???s parents in relatively salubrious Lyndhurst, working as a graphic designer and building her musical life.Dana wanted to be a singer, she says, ???ever since I???ve been. Ever since I could breathe. That was all I wanted. I used to sing in front of a mirror with a spoon.??? Her family suffered for her art. ???My mother didn???t like it. I didn???t always have a nice voice. I was terrible. But I grew into my voice.??? At 12, she was lead soloist in her church choir.When her family moved to a less rural area and had access to electricity and television for the first time, Dana discovered popular music. Before the end of apartheid, ???stadiums were packed for bands like Stimela. People still hadn???t lost that fighting spirit. I loved Stimela. Sankomota. Caiphus Semenya. Mostly pop music.???Above all, she admired Brenda Fassie, who ???will be forever in our country???s history books???. Fassie, a self-destructive bubblegum pop diva who died of a cocaine overdose in 2004, aged 39, is an unlikely heroine for the disciplined Dana. For a 27-year-old, she has a hard head for business. Interviews she accepts as ???good for my career???. She promises to ???look cute??? for the photographer, an unlikely aspiration for one so resolutely unfrivolous.She praises her record company, Gallo, for being prepared to take a chance on her first album, though she is unsentimentally aware that she is now famous enough to dictate her own terms. She distrusts South Africa???s dominant record producers. ???They believe that by adding instrumentation later they???ve composed, whereas they???ve just arranged.??? Dana writes all her own songs, recording them a cappella, trying to make them strong enough that any instrumentation is a bonus.She lambasts the SABC, South Africa???s public broadcaster, for failing to support indigenous music. ???During apartheid, it had a mandate to strip us of our cultural identity. And they still have that stupid mentality, not to play local music. They were putting in all this American music??? ??? she means the commercial R&B that dominates the South African airwaves ??? ???and it worked. That???s what people like. We must fight them to play our own songs. They never meet their quotas, and the quotas are pretty low.???One of the reasons she appreciates Fassie is as a ???Xhosa girl from Cape Town???. Dana is a Xhosa, the second largest group in South Africa but, as musicians, overshadowed (abroad at least) by Zulus. She insists on singing in the language.???Xhosa is me fighting for my roots, fighting cultural debasement. What we do is beautiful and amazing; the whole world can love it. Should love it. Apartheid did lots of damage, and cultural identity is the first step to regain that. And language is a very important part of culture.??? At the very mention of Afrikaans, she bridles. ???There???s nothing African about that language. It???s them trying to replace us.???Dana???s most recent album, The One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street, pays tribute to Steve Biko and his philosophy of black consciousness runs through her work and her discourse. Biko???s supporters clashed, before and after his death in police custody in 1977, with African National Congress cadres, and Dana is wary of his rivals.???I mean, I vote for the ANC but I always felt that what they wanted was to have the white man???s house, the white man???s car, the white man???s suit. They wanted to be in the shoes of the white man. We don???t have to be in the shoes of our oppressors.???A decade after the end of apartheid, Dana???s country feels only partly transformed. ???I???m grateful that white people relented. But they didn???t really give the country back. The government is doing great things with BEE [Black Economic Empowerment]. But still, rich people get richer and poor people get poorer.??? She almost spits as she talks about people living in cardboard houses. ???Mbeki is the greatest president we???ll see for some time??? ??? Mandela she calls a ???saint???, not meaning it as a compliment, and Mbeki???s likely successors do not inspire her ??? ???and he still forgot to take care of his people.???If Dana???s opinions are forthright, her music harks back less to her 1980s pop heroes than to the divas of the golden age of South African music in the 1950s, such as Miriam Makeba, Dorothy Masuka and Dolly Rathebe. ???Me and them, we had a similar background. I loved reading about them, their passion for seeing things done right.???Her music rebukes patronising foreign misconceptions. ???I am tired of people thinking that there is no sophistication in African music.??? She is suddenly vehement. ???It???s very advanced, not just ???shaking my booty???. I am not a booty person. I am calm, and my music comes from that place.??? She has wide ambitions for this sophistication. ???My dream is to get a big band sound, with everything from trumpets to koras, but quiet. I won???t die happy till I get that.??? Touring economics make this hard. ???That???s why I admire Fela [Kuti]. He took 30 people on tour.???At the QEH, Dana???s band is nine strong, including a heavily pregnant backing singer, Priscilla Moeketsi. Dana is physically slight but, with the aid of high heels and a huge headdress, she towers above them. She is wearing a dark dress like a map of the night sky, with red and yellow darts that resemble the wings of a butterfly.In performance, the lacquered sheen of Dana???s records is cut with impassioned gospel, all harnessed to her black consciousness agenda. When she namechecks her heroes ??? ???they define our children and give them pride??? ??? they include Samora Machel (Mozambique???s first president) and Patrice Lumumba (Congo???s first post-independence prime minister) but the ANC pantheon is excluded. Steve Biko, she tells the audience, ???is one person who has shaped me to what I am today. We had the same background. In Africa we need heroes right now.??? She is unsparing of her elders. ???My hope for the children of the African continent is that where their parents have failed, they might succeed.???Towards the end, one of her backing singers, Vusi Khobeni, performs some energetic stick dancing (without benefit of stick) to an energetic wheezing faux-accordion jive on the synthesiser. Dana stands back and applauds. On ???Ndiredi??? she rushes the opening lines, but then the song speeds up
into a dancing shebeen hustle. A false climax provokes a tumult of clapping and shouts of ???Sisi, Sisi!???, so that Dana finishes by repeating the chorus over a mounting wave of applause. ???Thank you,??? she says simply, and stalks off, tall, assured and fully in control.The albums ???Zandisile??? and ???The One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street??? are released on Gallo

Never was aware of her music until seeing this metaphysically poignant feature in this weekends FT.Her spirit in the statements speak the cost of antiquating traditions to the assimilating waves of growing society, but going so far as to enlighten the perspective with the popular music industry and how it gets appreciated was what caught my attention! It was refreshing to hear a young artist with new ideas who's aware of the world outside their own career speaking wisely.Theres plenty insight to quote as well as poetry to appreciate in some of her statements. I'm only listening for the first time on her myspace, but thinking of the minimalist approach to songwriting w/tradition sans instruments. Theyre still topped off with current persuasions in musicianship and production for an interesting synthesis. I'm not so hip on the international/world music production sound post Yani lol, but my radar for newly released music has outgrown itself into a cantankerous Mr. Wilson type figure who can only seem to digest shit in daily increments alotted by blase things like Public Broadcasting. Never saw her name mentioned here but couldn't help to think someone else might be uplifted to hear such a class act in such a young mind in a world gone to . prolific with the survivement