As a millennial, the mishap of singing dirty songs as a child has been a nostalgic joke for many but great food for thought for some. I'm not talking about gangsta rap or 90s club anthems like Masters at Work's 2001 smash hit. It's the ones that slip through our mental cracks like Aqua's Barbie Girl.
For some of us, this was a song we performed in preschool, and while it seems harmless when you look back at it, the lyrics encourage young girls to sing about young males to undress them and do with them as they please.
Our dissonance towards the lyrics of songs allows us to enjoy the genres of these tunes which would otherwise ruin the memories attached to them that hold a completely different meaning compared to the message conveyed in the lyrics. These songs age like spoilt milk and we pretend we can still sip from them with a nostalgic glee. It's something evident in the traditional songs sung at funerals or ceremonies we attend.
While Heritage Day is a great time to look back and celebrate our diverse cultures, it also highlights the oddities of our traditions. Movies like Inxeba provoked conversations about the sacrosanct space made for initiates and the issues faced by those who don't fit into the expectations once they are circumcised. Damian Galgut's The Promise left many uncomfortable in how it approached satirising its white characters and their systemic privileges. So naturally, we should be able to look at music the same way and the thought did not hit me until looking at Castle Milk Stout's Afrokaraoke, a copycat of Spokenpriestess' Afri Sauti Karaoke which aims to preserve African traditional music.
In a campaign Milk Stout recently ran, young folk in urban areas were asked to finish the lyrics of songs typically sung at funerals or weddings and they struggled beyond shameful humming to finish the storied songs. It's a cause for concern as cultures of the African continent are oral histories, with music being a key to passing them down from generation to generation.
In today's lingo, this has been called “losing recipes”, highlighting how many don't know what to do in cultural settings where young audiences have neglected and eventually forgotten the important music that translates into the different tribes and languages of South Africa. Songs like Umakoti which rejoice in the labour of a new bride and the Sotho wedding chant Tswang, Tswang, Tswang, lean heavily into colourism and are guilty of the Barbie Girl contradictions.
We keep some of these songs around and hardly sing them with any meaning. When speaking to Yanga Chief and Ntate Stunna who collaborated with Afro-Karaoke, they shared that these are just songs that need to be kept around. For them, they speak into the histories we have and the stories we told at the time, good and bad. On the flip side, that's not necessarily the conversation we get to have with these songs that still get sung instead of being a known history.
Much like the lyrics to pop songs that seem harmless, our traditions need better confrontation or perhaps rewriting. We run the risk of participating in traditions we don't agree with whenever when we see them as sacred and untouchable. Rather than worrying about how well today's youth can start a hymn to welcome in a new bride or say goodbye to family members and friends, perhaps we should start singing new songs that won't alienate savvy South Africans who will relate to weddings that are kicked off with an a cappella version of Sister Bettina.
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