Source: Cornia Pretorius (Brixton Moord & Roof Orkes)
Cornia Pretorius about Afrikaans rock bands in the Sunday Times.
Cornia Pretorius exposes the soul of Afrikaans rock ‘n roll
Karen Zoid is no Barbie doll. The 23-year-old rock chick is blonde, sassy and sexy with the kind of face that could easily grace the cover of a glossy women’s magazine. But when she smashed a guitar to pieces on stage earlier this year she proved she had big balls too.
Zoid captured the hearts and minds of a young generation of Afrikaans speakers looking for new icons to reassure them that they were okay and that their language was okay.
“Where are our Sheryls and our Sineads and our Toris and our Courtneys?” asked boere-blues legend Valiant Swart in an Internet column.
Then Zoid arrived and her cult following is hard to miss when she performs.
They chant her name in eager anticipation. They want to marry her and have her babies. And when she executes her rock and rap version of Afrikaners is Plesierig (Afrikaners are cheerful) they croon along as if they had crafted every word themselves.
Determined to sing in a band and whack her guitar until her fingers are stiff from old age, Zoid is working hard to make a living from the poetry of music. And she refuses to apologise for her businesslike approach .
“I always wanted to do this. Throughout my life I have been a performer,” she says. “And if you want to be a musician, be prepared to set up a CC or a Pty Ltd and be prepared to work. Underneath your jeans and your T-shirt you actually wear a suit.”
Zoid may be a lone woman in the world of testosterone-fuelled egos, but she is not the only symbol of cool on the stage of Afrikaans rock ‘n roll.
“There are undoubtedly more new Afrikaans bands on the scene. They have the guts to sing in their own language. The stigma that Afrikaans is shit is disappearing. You get everything from metal to hip-hop,” says Angola Badprop, trendspotter and youth culture journalist for Jip, a youth supplement to Beeld newspaper.
While many new bands are fresh from the basement, some artists have for years lived on the fringe and only recently managed to penetrate the mainstream music market.
There are Koos Kombuis, Valiant Swart, Beeskraal , Kobus!, the Brixton Moord en Roof Orkes , battery9, Diff-olie, Brasse vannie Kaap, Not My Dog, Akkedis , Spinnekop , Plank, The Buckfever Underground, Tynhys, Riku Lätti and many more on a lengthy list of recorded artists.
The new Afrikaans rock poets claim that they are neither language activists nor politicians. They are a happy-go-lucky, peace-loving bunch who shed the shackles of Calvinism and Christian National Education and are creating an original, indigenous flavour of music. And they sing in Afrikaans because they speak Afrikaans.
Says Paul Riekert (formerly Joos Tonteldoos) of battery9, a band with a gritty, industrial sound: “The music is accidentally Afrikaans. We are Afrikaans speaking – at least half of my day is. If we were Polish we would have sung in Polish. I love Afrikaans, but I am not on a [language] mission.”
However, the rock-and-rollers do reject the sing-along mob’s strategy to drag Afrikaans back into an exclusionist lair as it undermines their effort to break through to non-Afrikaans speakers.
“We don’t want Afrikaans to be an exclusive language. From the start our mission was to make Afrikaans more interesting to English people,” says Brixton Barnard, bass player for Brixton Moord en Roof, and Plank.
Failure to take up the mantle as language advocates doesn’t mean that their lyrics are devoid of politics. They do express opinions, and their songs contain an ample supply of social and political commentary.
Ultimately, says “Roof” Bezuidenhout of Brixton Moord en Roof: “Afrikaans rock is about South Africa. It is unconditionally local”, and it is “unintentionally political”.
“There are enough politicians and dominees . Musicians needn’t also preach and they need not be prescriptive. It’s about expression, not politics. Rock-and-rollers should sing and not speak.”
Indeed, the majority are not political animals. They sing about babes, booze and the places they love . Frikk-E of the band Diff-olie calls it the “natural progression” of lyrics from protest against the political status quo during the 1980s, to love songs in the early 1990s to songs about day-to-day living in South Africa in 2002.
Veteran musician Piet Botha agrees: “The bitterness is gone. They sing about the torment of love and against phenomena such as reality television. ”
The future’s rock-and-rollers are still at school and in the musical laboratory. This was evident when some strutted their stuff at the Aardklop Arts Festival in Potchefstroom two weeks ago, during a contest in search of the hottest young talent.
Jeffreys Bay-based outfit, Die Melktert Kommissie , beat the other wannabe rockers, with schoolgirl blues about lost love.
Betsi van Zyl, 17, Lucinda Strydom, 16, Tim van der Westhuizen, 19, Jan-Adriaan Korff, 19, and Jean-Marie Vlok, 18, say Afrikaans has become cool again. “It is as if Afrikaans has been reborn,” says Korff, the drummer.
Indeed the 1990s – South Africa’s decade of freedom – relieved the country of more than its cruel politics. It liberated Afrikaans, but long years after the first wave of Afrikaans musical pioneers such as the late Bernoldus Niemand (James Phillips), Anton Goosen, David Kramer, Koos Kombuis and Johannes Kerkorrel first confronted the Afrikaner establishment.
The definitive period was the 1980s.
Niemand’s 1984 song Hou My Vas Korporaal! ushered Afrikaans rock ‘n roll into a mood of defiance as the 1989 Voëlvry tour took off with Kerkorrel and the Gereformeerde Blues Band, Kombuis and Niemand.
They sang in smoky bars and chilly town halls. Their message to students was that they were “gatvol”. They annoyed the regime with their PW Botha-bashing . Police were in the shadows where they performed, there were power cuts and they were banned from campuses. They roamed the platteland, they established a network in small towns that continues to exist and remains the lifeblood of the latest generation of Afrikaans rock-and-rollers.
Kombuis (formerly André Letoit), who has cult status as a writer, poet and musician , captures the significance of the tour in the CD sleeve of a recent release of a live recording of the Voëlvry performances.
“With Voëlvry we stole the fire from the old people. We protested against the NP without giving up our Afrikanerskap. It was the kind of attack that the Bothas were unprepared for. They never expected it.”
Despite the support of independent record labels such as Shifty Record and Wildebeest to expand the influence of the so-called alternative artists, there was a lull in the Afrikaans rock and roll scene post-Voëlvry. There was Houtstok in 1990 , but the pace only picked up again around the middle of the 1990s when small groups of fans began travelling to a Bushveld resort outside Northam in the Limpopo province.
Oppikoppi, just a bar and a few rondavels on a small hill, began as an intimate meeting place for performers such as Kombuis and Valiant Swart and groupies prepared to boogie throughout a weekend.
Oppikoppi represents the second wave of Afrikaans rock ‘n roll. It grew into a mega-festival that attracted thousands of revellers , and together with new arts festivals began to give new talent the opportunity to appeal to a crossover audience of Afrikaans and English speakers.
As Afrikaans rock ‘n roll shifted into the mainstream spotlight, some of the newer bands such as Beeskraal managed the transition brilliantly. They introduced the concertina, a trademark sound of boeremusiek, into rock.
Drummer Corné “Happy-Bees” Olckers says their fan base includes young and old, English and Afrikaans speakers, surfers, headbangers and people who sakkie-sakkie.
“I had a lady of 60 who told me we are cool,” Olckers says.
Another band that has been pushing the boundaries of Afrikaans music is Kobus!.
Francois Blom and Theo Crous, respectively former members of the Voice of Destruction and the Springbok Nude Girls, together with Huyser Burgers’s mixing dexterity, perform macabre rock – a dark and fantastic rip-off act of everyone and everything once considered holy in Afrikaans music.
“Afrikaans has reached a new level if you can have a band such as Kobus!. It is a send-up of the older generation. It is more like a cabaret . . . and they do music that usually doesn’t appeal to the rock crowd,” says Badprop.
Dirk Uys, one of the first champions of the Afrikaans rock movement, says the umpteenth reincarnation of Afrikaans rock ‘n roll is not translating into sales in what remains a very small niche market.
Nevertheless, the energy of the youth may make a difference this time around. There is a new generation of South Africans who believe local is lekker. They have disposed of their hang-ups about identity and language, in particular being Afrikaans. They speak it, they write it and they rock ‘n roll in it.
They might just take Afrikaans rock ‘n roll well into the future.
