- Clegg on his shows:
- "...rock `em, dance `em, learn `em cultural events".
A White South African Superstar Fights the 'Political' Brand
by Lynn Van Matre
October 26, 1990
As a white South African singer and songwriter who doesn`t shy away from the subject of apartheid, Johnny Clegg frequently finds himself branded as a "political" performer. Clegg, whose sound fuses contemporary pop with traditional Zulu rhythms, doesn`t see it quite that way-though he describes his shows as "rock `em, dance `em, learn `em cultural events."
"I don`t start out wanting to make a political statement in my music," he says. "Actually, I feel quite cynical about the political process. I don`t see myself as an ideologist; I`m not propagating a particular political system or philosophy. I see myself as a cultural activist, committed to mixing cultures and trying to find a common ground. Unfortunately, in my country, that is considered to be a political act. But I`m simply trying to describe issues and events and articulate their universal aspects."
Clegg, who performs Thursday at Park West with his interracial band, Savuka, is a superstar in his native South Africa. A dozen of his albums, including his latest, Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World, have gone gold (sales of at least 25,000 copies) there, and a few have reached platinum status (50,000 sold). He has sold more than 2 million albums in France, and his records also have sold well in Switzerland, Belgium and New Zealand. Now Clegg hopes to conquer America, or at least, as he puts it, "establish a firm base" here. This summer, he and Savuka (Zulu for "we have arisen") proved popular with U.S. audiences when they toured as opening act for Tracy Chapman; last month, Clegg and the band embarked on their first headlining tour of America.
A former Johannesburg university lecturer who holds a degree in social anthropology, Clegg "reluctantly" left academia in 1982 to become a full- time musician with his first band, Juluka (Zulu for "sweat").
"I didn`t start out to be a performer," he says. "My mother was a jazz singer, and I didn`t like the people she brought home. They would all sit around the piano and try to be ultracool and b.s. each other, and I didn`t want to be like that. So I said I would never be a professional musician, even though I made records. Then, after the fourth album, we had some success internationally and I had to choose between lecturing and music as a career. My mother really gloated when I chose music."
Unlike some pop musicians who "discovered" African rhythms relatively recently, Clegg, 37, grew up with an appreciation for tribal culture. Born in England, he moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with his mother as a baby following his parents' divorce. When Clegg was 7, his mother married a South African journalist and the family moved to South Africa.
As a young teenager, Clegg listened to Celtic folk music, his "roots" music on his English father`s side, but soon became interested in Zulu music as well. "When I first heard Zulu guitars being played on the streets, I heard certain echoes of Celtic folk music," he says. "Certain melodies seemed kind of similar.
"As I got deeper and deeper into Zulu music, the similarities between it and the Celtic songs faded away, but the Zulu music had a magic of its own that I found immensely appealing," adds Clegg, who speaks fluent Zulu. "It was really exciting to discover so much traditional tribal culture in the city. And I could identify emotionally with the migrant workers in the city. I had grown up in three different countries and gone to six different schools as a child; I felt confused and in-between and marginalized myself."
In the early 1970s, Clegg teamed up with Zulu migrant worker Sipho Mchunu in Juluka, the folkier forerunner of Savuka. Signed to a record deal in 1976, the band released seven albums before Mchunu left the group in 1985 to return to his father`s cattle farm. The next year, Clegg put together Savuka, which includes two former members of Juluka. The band has released three albums, Third World Child, Shadow Man and Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World.
"Savuka took up where Juluka ended," says Clegg. "With Juluka, we had gotten to the point where we had explored all the avenues we could with the acoustic sound, and we wanted to get harder-edged. It`s just been an evolution."
While he acknowledges that the current interest in African and world-beat music has given his career a boost, Clegg plans on being around even after the spotlight moves on to other exotic sounds. "I think that all major long-term music trends essentially establish themselves initially from fads or fashion," he says. "It`s then up to the practitioners of the music to hang in there and keep the hardcore audience interested for the next 10 or 15 years. If you lose your audience, there is obviously something wrong. Music is the ultimate form of communication, and if you aren't communicating what you want to get across, you have to think again.
"When you look at the establishment of reggae or fusion jazz or whatever, you'll find that there were musicians who took their audiences along with them (after the sound was no longer the latest trend) and they all grew together," adds Clegg. "That is essentially what we have to do as African- based musicians. We can`t simply reap the benefits of a musical fashion; we have to be able to establish a genre of music."
Despite his reluctance to be pigeonholed as a political artist, Clegg definitely believes that music can serve as a force for political and social change.
"I was changed by music," he says. "When I heard Bob Dylan and other people sing, I was stunned to realize that other people were feeling the same things that I was feeling-and maybe even feeling them more profoundly. The songs spoke to me as an individual. Music can`t change groups, but I know that it can change individuals, and then those individuals go and change other people.
"That`s the transformative aspect of music. Music moves you to a different emotional and intellectual space. How long you stay there is really up to you and how profoundly the music affects you. But I know that a lot of the people who come to my shows are changed people after they leave."
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