Johnny Clegg’s mix of African Pop and western Rock provided the template for later genre-blenders like Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel with the formation of the world township band Juluka in the late ’70s. Unlike the Pop dabblers who milked the hybrid for its transitory benefits and moved on, Clegg has remained committed to the idea of weaving together the joyous sounds of Zulu rhythms and South African musical tradition with the infectious melodicism of modern Pop/Rock for the past three decades. And Clegg is no armchair-to-studio activist: The white frontman for a multi-cultural South African band has been jailed and waylayed uncountable times for disregarding South Africa’s apartheid laws, which he was, if you’ll pardon the expression, instrumental in helping to overturn.
The title of Clegg’s new solo album tells you a lot about both his subject matter and his viewpoint: Human. He doesn’t necessarily hear the divisions within his music, he just hears music. And although he can’t help but see the divisions that separate mankind into small, isolated camps, he recognizes that our collective responses to our individual environments and the external world at large are, at our very cores, a component of our common humanity.
Take Human’s opening track, for instance. “Love in the Time of Gaza” is Clegg’s firsthand observation that love can bloom and thrive even in a time of unspeakable destruction. And, as Clegg explains in the liner notes concerning the soul-stirring “Asilazi” (featuring the gorgeous voices of the Soweto Gospel Choir), the political freedom that South Africa now enjoys is an empty gesture without the economic freedom to benefit from it, while “Congo” notes (with no small irony) that Africa’s wealth has often been its greatest detriment.
Even when Clegg is addressing very specific African dilemmas, there is a universality that accompanies the message and, of course, the music that propels the message transcends any attempt to fit it into a particular pigeonhole. On Human, like so many albums before, Clegg is a human making human music. Over the past three decades, few have done that as well as him.
This article appears in Nov 10-16, 2010.