About Me

I ramble about a number of things - but travel experiences, movies and music feature prominently. See my label cloud for a better idea. All comnments and opinions on this blog are my own, and do not in any way reflect the opinions/position of my employer (past/current/future).

18 September 2005

Problem with SA Music

The SATNAC closing dinner featured "Mean Mr Mustard" as the evening band. For the uninitiated, Mean Mr Mustard are one of the best rock bands in South Africa, having sold many thousand records and having a great following. Thus we were all quite excited at the prospect; although we were puzzled to how the "0u toppies" will mosh to Mean Mr Mustard. We were heavily disappointed ...

As corporate functions would have it; Telkom more or less decided what songs Mean Mr Mustard should play - the result being a glorified cover band! For years, South African music lovers have wondered why South African music is not really appreciated - and the answer is simple - because the really good bands are playing cover versions of imported music in their really important money earning gigs - the corporate functions. I would have understood if they played covers of South African songs; but when the covered bands like Busted it really left a bad after taste. In the approximately 2 hours that we did stay for; they played only 3 of their own songs! What was the point?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hear hear!

I must say MMM didnt leave much of an impression on me. I was really looking forward to hearing some good south african music in the drakensburg. there are a million bands (well nearly) which would have given a more african home grown feel to the whole affair. I guess when the opening evening starts with "Space...Space...Africans... Wozani!... AfricanSpaceafricaWozani"
you can be sure they are confused about the identity of the whole thing.

alapan said...

That opening function was crap - I don't know what they were thinking. In fact both functions were dumb and stupid ... and to boot the food was not as great as last year either.