The last thing Johnny Clegg sees himself as is a disciple of the Internet. Yet, he is leading South African music's charge onto the information highway.
Interview by Arthur Goldstuck
Mail&Guardian 11 June, 1997
When Johnny Clegg sees his eight-year-old son enjoying the
Internet too much, he takes him for a walk with the dog.
It's not that Clegg feels the Internet is a threat to young Jessie,
but rather that he wants to promote his son's "sensuous
engagement with the world".
"He does karate, he does soccer, I want him to engage in
the world. However, at the same time, I realise that his intellectual
development is very important. He's got to be computer literate,
he's got to be able to work the virtual room."
But the virtual room is exactly where Clegg draws his own line.
"I'm not really a disciple of the information highway. I
like to keep my life as simple as I can at home and as non-intrusive
as I can. I think that, to participate in it, you've got to accept
the concept of a virtual community on the information highway.
You've got to accept it at an emotional level."
For a person who, with a little help from his friends, redefined
South African music during the 1980s, Clegg is in no hurry to
get to the cutting edge of technology.
"I'm a face-to-face kind of person. I'm old fashioned in
that way maybe. I prefer to deal with things as they enter my
life. I'm also trying to slow down my life. I'm trying to enjoy
my family, my friends, my local community as much as I can because
I suffered in the 80s and early 90s with touring and I felt very
disconnected at moments."
Ironically, the Internet has been playing an ever-increasing role in building Clegg's image worldwide, and in the coming month will see the artist participate in a ground-breaking technological experiment. His music will be among the first to be offered for downloading in a new compression format that reduces digital sound files to a 20th of their normal size, and reduces entire songs down to as little as 1,4Mb of disk space. Users pay 99c per song they download, and can then play back these "electric records" with a freeware software package called the Electric Record Player.
Developed by Bell Labs, and supported by a division of AT&T,
the product has built-in copyright protection, which makes it
the first online music delivery system to fully address the intellectual
property rights concerns of the record industry as well as of
artists.
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