"Walking Like a Crab": Analyzing Maskanda Music in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article addresses a South African music genre: maskanda, often marketed as "Zulu blues." It describes the various ways maskanda is musically analyzed and interpreted by musicians, audiences, producers, and scholars, including myself. By treating music analysis as a form of participant observation (and indigenizing my own analytical conventions) the article aims, foremostly, to foster a cross-cultural dialogue about musical experiences (hearings) and the practices of finding words for these experiences (conceptualizations). Music analysis as participant observation also sheds light on local historiographies, critiques, and structural analyses of maskanda, and it bridges the artificial academic dichotomy of object-related observation (music analysis) and discourserelated theorization (cultural analysis) that still impairs much music research.

‘Something else is possible’: transcultural collaboration as anti-apartheid activism in the music of Juluka

“…Once the isihlabo concludes, the guitar establishes a new ‘melodic-rhythmic pattern’ which undergirds what follows (Collins 2006/2007, p. 4). Above it, the singer initiates a call-and-response texture known as the ukubiza nokusabela (Titus 2013, p. 305) 7 . The responses to the soloist's calls may be provided by either one of the guitar lines or back-up singers in maskanda groups; in either case, they characteristically both enter after and overlap with the soloist's calls, and their points of melodic closure do not align (Titus 2013, pp.…”

“…The harmonic organisation of maskanda music varies across its subtypes. According to Barbara Titus, the isiShameni subtype ‘is quasi-diatonic in applying an ostinato progression of I–IV–V–I, also often heard in the more urban mbaqanga and isicathamiya genres’ (Titus 2013, 291). More significant for this study is the isiZulu subtype, which harkens back to Zulu bow songs.…”