The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)
COLUMN
26 October 2007
Posted to the web 26 October 2007
Arthur Goldstuck
Lucky Dube was born on August 3, 1964, with almost nothing in his favour: alcohol led to the break-up of his family, he lived with a succession of uncles and aunts, and he grew up amid hunger and poverty. More than three decades later, he was the most successful recording artist in Africa, but he never forgot his origins. In fact, it is his understanding of suffering that enabled him to create the songs that have the power to move the world.
Serious Reggae Business (1996) marks the 10th anniversary of Lucky's career as a reggae artist, and a year in which he was named the world's best-selling African recording artist at the World Music Awards. The album also sends a signal to the world that Lucky Dube did not want to rest on his laurels, but rather wanted to move forward by adding new influences and new technologies to his music. So, while this is largely a compilation album, it is not a greatest-hits album.
"Greatest hits are done when people are dead or when they cannot make music any more, when they don't have any more ideas," said Lucky back then. "This is not the end of everything - there's still more to come." He added, with typical modesty: "Maybe I'm still going to have some hits in the future."
Although Mr DJ sounds like a classic example of kind of songs many artists produce to get radio airplay, it was part of Lucky's live act for many years before he recorded it. "This is how we open our show; it was going to be an intro to the album as if we are in a live show. We are not necessarily asking DJs that they must play this song."
Lucky is best known for his stirring reggae anthems, but many of his songs explored the personal demons - in reality often senseless fears - that haunt many people and have as much impact on their lives as do the political events around them.
"The idea behind my music is I write the music about people's fears, people's joys, people's dreams and everything. Feel Irie talks more about people's fears and my fears as well, because it says there that no man can hide from his fears. Since they're part of him, they'll always know where to find him."
Together as One is the song that Lucky acknowledges broke the "political virginity" of the state-run South African Broadcasting Corporation. The title track includes the line: "Too many people hate apartheid, why do you like it". The first instincts at the SABC were to ban the album, but it was persuaded to reconsider its decision, and an anti-apartheid song received airplay for the first time in history.
"Together As One was a difficult one. Dave Segal was there and Richard Siluma was there, and when I mentioned the word apartheid - "Too many people hate apartheid" - they immediately stopped the tape and said you can't say that, you can't say apartheid. That was what was happening at that time; you couldn't mention that word in a song, and so we stopped and talked for a while.
"That was at a time when South Africa was changing, and we did not have as much trouble as we expected. The SABC wanted books and things, wanting to know where I come from, how I think, and things like that, just checking me out basically. And after that they played the song."
Lucky's third reggae album, Slave, was one of the great success stories of South African music, going triple gold in three months, and having sold more than half-a-million copies to date. Although the theme of Slave is the impact that alcohol has on people's lives, the refrain "I'm just a slave, a legal slave" caught the imagination of the music-buying public.
"I've seen a lot of families breaking up because of drinking; I'm a victim of that. So it was just my way of trying to warn people against it, but then people read into songs, which is why maybe we write songs for people and not for ourselves. So they read that 'legal slave' part into the song, which I didn't have a problem with because a song is meant for the people. That is cool, I'm happy with it, because it means that they are listening to the song, they are not just dancing to the song."
Steel Bars always played two roles in Lucky Dube's live show: to introduce the next song, Prisoner, but also to give the backing vocalists a chance to shine.
I allow everyone to have some sort of a contribution to the whole show. When doing shows everyone must contribute something to make it a success. I'm not saying it's a Lucky Dube thing so it's only Lucky Dube that's got to do things here, but everybody can do what they want to make the show work better.
If Slave changed Lucky's life, Prisoner changed the South African recording industry. In five days, the album sold no less than 100,000 copies, and another 120,000 in the next three weeks. Ironically, in the week of its release, eight of South Africa's longest-serving political prisoners were released from jail, a major step in South Africa's slow road to democracy. As so many times before, Lucky had unintentionally tapped into the national spirit of freedom hungry South Africans. Yet, he has never regarded his songs as political messages.
South Africa: Rest in Peace
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"They are all dealing with true and real-life experiences in our day-to-day lives. That's what they deal with: social issues, even though some people see them as political things."
In 1991, with South Africa in the grip of political violence, the country's top reggae acts, led by Lucky Dube, decided to play for peace. The result was the Reggae Strong for Peace concert on May 2 1991, with 14 acts performing at an all-day festival, and coming together at the end to perform a theme song written by Lucky.
"It was kind of difficult to write a song like that which was going to be sung by a lot of different people. I don't just write a song from nowhere; I mean there's got to be something that triggers it off.
That's maybe why I have a problem writing a song for some other guy, because I write a song about something that has happened to me or to someone next to me, something that I know about, something that I've seen, something that I've experienced.
"With the Reggae Strong for Peace song, that was like maybe all my experiences in life and so I had to take it and give my experiences to other people to sing. It was a difficult one, but it was cool."
A few months before he put together My Son I'm Sorry, Lucky was reunited with his son, whom he had barely seen in 10 years. His former wife had refused to let him see the boy, but as strenuously as Lucky worked to push his career to new heights, he also worked as hard at trying to earn the love of his son. One of the results was the song My Son I'm Sorry.
Lucky explained, "I was maybe, what, about 21 or 22. I had a son at that time but we had problems between the mother and me, and so eventually I was not allowed even to go near this guy and we would see each other, like, from a distance. I didn't want to stay away, because I have experienced that, being without a father. I didn't want him to be without me. But the only way I thought I could talk to him in a way was through my song.
I was trying to reach this guy and say, 'I'm sorry, I wish you could understand, I wish I could talk to you, I wish I could tell you what happened.'"
Lucky never knew his own father, but in the same way he reached forward to make contact with his son, he reached back to "talk" to his father - as well as to other children in his situation - in yet another intensely personal song.
"My music is about me, my music is me. It talks about my fears, my joys and everything. Remember Me talks about my father. I don't know him, I've never seen him, maybe I saw him for two or three seconds one year, I can't remember, but I basically don't know him. I wrote that song not necessarily for me, but for all the children that would be in the same situation as me, because I know there are a lot of children out there who don't know their fathers, who have never seen their fathers."
On the House of Exile album, Lucky once again tapped into the national mood of the time as political prisoners were emerging from the jails and South Africa's exiles began returning home. But there was one "exile" in particular who inspired the song.
"We all have suffered as black people or whatever, oppressed and all that, but no one has suffered like Nelson Mandela. Even though we were oppressed and everything was happening to us, at the end of the day we would all go back home to our children, wives, and everything, all our loved ones there. But he did not have that. He was just locked up there somewhere... He was in that house of exile. And as the song says, in the night we dream of Romeo and Juliet; all he dreams about is the freedom of the nation."
Different Colours One People underlines Lucky's loathing for racism. He detested it so much he even rejected tribal identities that people tried to use to categorise him, saying: "I am just a human being. People would ask me if I'm a Zulu or a Swazi or whatever. I'm not that. God did not make Swazis, God did not make Xhosas or Zulus; God made people." It was inevitable that he would keep putting that ideal into songs.
This song was inspired by a tour of Australia. "They had a human rights association, and they had a campaign that they were doing there. It was called Different Colours One People, trying to get people in Australia together and just showing their different cultures and all the differences that they have there. I liked that title because it was exactly the same here in South Africa and that's what inspired the song."
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