Sampling South Africa's music

Music often tells us more about a country than we imagine. Since landing, I’ve been itching to listen to some local sounds. Shamefully, I have managed to do so only very occasionally, though at least it has been on the radio, which brings with it the joyous, unmatched prospect of happening upon something beautiful randomly.

But even these brief encounters have confirmed one thing I kind of knew as soon as I arrived: beneath everything here, there is something, an unheard beat or rhythm. It isn’t obviously detectable or even easy to describe, but as with all good music, you feel it. Some of it comes in the way people talk, the way they move their heads, the way they walk, but it comes through.

As a visitor you are blessed in foreign lands when exploring their music. There is not the trap of cross-genre snobbery that you might fall into in countries where you spend more time. In England, for example, a country with possibly the freshest, most innovative music culture, different genres become different cultures altogether, looking down at each other. Those polished glamsters of house music sneer at the skinny folks of the indie scene, who sneer righteously right back; those rougher-edged ones of jungle, or garage or hip-hop, look down on everyone else. Those into reggae, or dub, mind their own business, the herb traditionally making love not war. So it goes, and often people will not dip into other genres over an entire existence.

But when you’re a stranger somewhere, as I am here, things are different. You don’t choose the music, the music chooses you. So Selaelo Selota chose me a few days back, suddenly, in a taxi, and immediately made all the hairs on my arms stand up. I’m not going to insult locals by writing about him, knowing almost nothing about him as I do, save to say that when you apply jazz to local grooves, the results are lush. His music apparently is influenced by the singing and dancing of workers in gold mines. More will have to be learnt and heard, and long live the internet.

A little prodding and digging reveals that South African music is open this way, to influences from within and outside the continent. Alongside the indigenous scene, many global genres are to be found, given local interpretations: rock, punk, reggae, jazz, soul and hip-hop, lots of hip-hop which is about right for what is currently music’s most global and easily exported phenomenon: it is a monster. Very little of it makes the ICC’s playlist for intervals, wickets and boundaries which is a shame. But they’ve done well to make it at least an eclectic mix of Bollywood, and anything else contemporary and popular.

Pakistan has always expressed itself best, and mixed with the world, musically. Great stuff is bubbling around currently, nowhere better heard than in the Coke Studio sessions, where young, modern, worldlier musicians have melded effortlessly with older, earthier folk and classical musicians. These sounds, and those from South Africa, need to be heard.