My doofus move was to squander pennies I didn’t have on a Blink 182 album that would be doing no favours for my street cred. Not exactly the sort of music you blasted out on the stoep in the townships of South Africa if you hoped to be in with how things worked around here. For that, something a little more, uhm, … (“urban” doesn’t really cut it) was necessary. “Quiet storm” hardly featured in the ’90s post-apartheid ethnic lexicon, so let’s just call it “suited to the demographic” for now.
Gangsta rap could, however, make your bones. Reggae, even faster. And you could never go wrong with Kwaito, the soundtrack of the post-apartheid mashup of dancing and democracy. Jazz and Motown? Those offhandedly certified you an old-school highbrow of the people’s music. Cyndi Lauper, amongst others, could, ironically, also get you off the hook. Sure the woman is white, but she also has that voice and ever since she released Time After Time, few seemed to split her hairs.
Nonetheless, there I was selling out. Forking out my thirty pieces of silver to get my hands on the suggestively-titled album Take Off Your Pants and Jacket.
Body piercings everywhere. Grossly tattooed. These seemingly godless white American youths puttering around naked in their music videos or belting obscene lyrics about moms and grandpas were not an argument I could explain to my homeboys and get away with it. Especially not when apartheid’s mad scientists had all but obliterated the African nuclear family, leaving nearly an entire generation to the care of single moms or grandparents.
Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker were exactly the caricature of the “ducktailer;” a township epithet denoting disheveled white bikers who supposedly “smelled bad,” drank severely and from whom locals thought to keep a wide berth … or else. Get too close and a maiming was likely, a bloody nose inevitable.
It’s not that by the late ’90s racialism in South Africa had not significantly began to peter out. Only that old habits died hard and music was often one of the more stubborn culprits. Besides, the new South Africa’s central platitude of “one man one vote” was yesterday’s news but apartheid’s structural and spatial architecture was as it had always been. The black elite had mainly upped and left for white suburbia but it remained business as usual for the ordinary black left behind in the squalor and decrepitude of the labour dormitories that are the townships. Hence the institutional disparities persisted and the everyman suspicions remained. And because “we” were here and “they” were there, the music was just an extension of the divisions.
Government could – and did – legislate integration in schools and the workplace. But the diversity consultants would’ve have had a tough time persuading people raised on a staple of African jazz, Maskandi (the “Zulu Blues” of the migrant hostels) and American funk that there was something to be said of pop-punk. And, in my neck of the woods, to a man everybody seemed to play by the rules. They knew the drill. So did I because it was so commonplace as to be religion.
Still, I was young, agonising whether this was all there was to it. Did it always have to be Bob Marley or the O’Jays or Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the boom box? Surely there were equally worthwhile things happening in China or elsewhere. ‘Blink’ affirmed that there indeed were and I so badly yearned for more of them. Like the young boy who’s bussed out to a recently-integrated boarding school and for the first time is proximate to racial groups he’d hitherto regarded inscrutably from a distance, I longed to unshackle myself from the hardline dogma.
This was 1993, three years since Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, another before he would become president and we were hurled into the melting pot of the formative days of a completely desegregated school system. Up until then, we’d been using different entrances in stores. Afrikaans was still considered the de facto lingua franca of the oppressor at the till, along the hot pavement and my late uncle, an anti-apartheid activist’s parting words succinctly summed up the mood of the times: “If any of these bastards starts with you, remember, you’ve got two fists.”
So there we were sharing desks, breaking bread and learning to speak English. If you ignored the Afrikaner farmer’s son who once scrawled a Swastika on a t-shirt, to us kids the transition was relatively organic. But one’s heart always went out to the teachers, some of whom had answered the callup to conscription, taking up arms in defence of apartheid. Could they be debriefed enough to earnestly teach the children of the very people they had been inculcated were die swaartgevaar – the black danger – whose designs were to slit white throats and to drive them back to the sea?
The school itself, sprawled capaciously at the lee of a towering clutter of mountains, placed a premium on academics and sport. The latter always came closest to the idea of autonomous integration but it was the music, when we were left to our own devices in the dormitories, that did a bulk of the natural unifying. At first, the cultural differences went unmitigated: white kids listening to pop/rock here, Coloureds enjoying something else there, and MC Hammer “spitting” (as the rap parlance goes) from the tape recorder in “our” black corner.
It took a while to embrace the crossover because you did not want to look like you were “sucking up to the whiteys.” Being labeled a “coconut” – black outside, white inside – is almost as derogatory – and as potentially provoking – as any affront beginning with “your mama.” It never ends well.
So you’d keep it real, play tough, pretending that this music couldn’t get to you. That it was wack and you just weren’t feeling it. You turned a deaf year to Bloodhound Gang or The Offspring that Steven, the boy with blonde hair parted at the side, played on the bed next to yours. Sure, you were friends, even played tennis together, and discreetly enjoyed snacks after lights-out but the music? That would be taking it too far. They have theirs and we have ours. So let’s keep it that way – straight and unsentimental.
On at least one occasion a school social came to an abrupt end. It’s not that anybody had committed the common sin of sneeking in contraband: only that the black learners thought the Dj was spinning too much white music and vice versa. How absurd is that? Teenagers ruining the opportunity at a dance or snog for such a frivolous protest. But I was naive, yet to understand how deep music could penetrate one’s psyche.
But once I plunged myself into the deep end, I knew there’d be no coming up for breath. My playlist would thenceforth drown in the multiculturalism of the road I took to get here. That moment – more than twenty years since – when I heard that voice in an unremarkable dorm reeking of cheap deodorant and shoe polish, I’ll remember as long as I remember anything. “Who’s that,” I’d asked? “The Cranberries … Dolores O’Riordan,” came the answer.
Wow! The Cranberries, how about that! That was the baptism. The moment I surrendered my heart to something that couldn’t have been more foreign to anything I was familiar with. The late O’Riordan (God bless her heart) will not know that at news of her untimely passing in 2018, on a porch in the boondocks of South Africa sat a middle-aged man, his stereo cranked, libations stacked in the fridge, and her voice blaring in a place where her voice elicited raised eyebrows. My mother threw a fit. Passersby looked up incredulously. I just bobbed my head, strumming at an invisible guitar. By now the reputation of playing unconventional (read: white) music had dogged me long enough not to be a pressing issue anymore. It had become something of a backhanded compliment, along with the nicknames. Even men my age often took on football nicknames: Drogba, Ace, Rhoo. I was the only “Rocker.” Nothing in the bigger scheme of things, but still something to hold on to, something that acknowledged your visibility, no matter how different.
If The Cranberries were the baptism Blink 182 were the confirmation. Surging with angst, pitifully restless – youngsters who embodied the spirit of youthful defiance in that Kurt Cobain platitude to “come as you are.” To say I’m me, and I’m hoping that’s all I’ll ever need. In their faux nihilism I saw a rebelling against all those things that you went along with simply because everybody was going along. Dancing to a popular tune when deep down you found yourself hemmed in. But best not say it out loud lest you should fall foul with everybody else. But tow that line long enough and you start to yawn, bored at how clownish you must look. So out of place, just another inscrutable character trotting in the herd. For precisely that reason Blink made sense.
Unlike anything I’d ever heard before, they lodged a curiosity in my mind: is being different really all that bad? If apartheid was truly over, why all the fuss and tiptoeing around each other? Why did I have to think twice about buying a pair of veldskoene – “bush shoes” mainly associated with white farmers. Weren’t we Mandela’s miraculous Rainbow Nation, after all? You’d think such philosophies would’ve been gleaned from radical chats with my uncle or a book on South Africa’s struggle for equality. In a sensible world that might have been how the story ended. Except I stood counting pennies at a music store to buy an album by a band where at least one of its members swears that aliens exist.