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Lucky Dube-2000
On March 30 [2000], South African Reggae star Lucky Dube began a 16-date US concert tour in New York. He hit the road with his 12-piece band, a well-oiled machine after years of heavy touring. At 36, Dube is Africa's best selling reggae artist, and near the top for the genre worldwide. Now promoting his 11th international release, The Way it Is (Shanachie), Dube looks back on an impressive career, recalling that he started out singing in the South African township style, mbaqanga. He has no regrets about the switch to reggae. "With mbaqanga," Dube said in a telephone interview shortly before his New York concert, "the music would have only been known in South Africa because that's where people speak Zulu. I wanted to be heard all over. Everywhere you go in the world, there's reggae. It's not the kind of music you grow out of."
Dube's reggae has reached across ethnic, national, and language lines in Africa like nothing else on the market. Dube speculated as to the reason for that. "Maybe it's that the message in the music talks about what most of the people in Africa have been through. It's not just love songs or stuff just out of my head. It's real stuff that people see every day." It doesn't hurt that Dube has a sensational set of pipes capable of Smoky Robinson soul crooning and also the raspy ire of his favorite reggae singer, Peter Tosh. But a number of songs on the new album do attest to Dube's professed feel for the universal African experience, particularly that of becoming disillusioned with corrupt leaders. Sorry to say, South Africans have had a crash course on that, and Dube has not shied away from the subject. "A lot of people were thinking that once we had this black government, everything would be fine," said Dube. "Maybe we were only fighting the past government because it was a white government. But that's not the case with me. I was just fighting the system. It's the same now. If there's injustice or any sort of nonsense toward the people, I sing about that."
And he has. As Dube sees it, the Mandela government failed to deal with the country's skyrocketing crime rate. Leaders even encouraged the phenomenon with public statements that apartheid had taught blacks to steal. "In other words," said Dube, "it was okay for them to steal, and that sparked off a stealing spree." On his last record, Taxman, Dube took aim at corruption, wondering where large sums of "disappeared" public money had wound up. "I got calls from people who worked closely with the government," said Dube. "They called me up to say, 'Now how can you sing a song like that?' They accused me of being unpatriotic."
The title track and accompanying video from the new album take on the way elected leaders look after themselves rather than the people who elected them. The song says, "Be good to the people on your way up the ladder, because you'll need them on your way down. That's the way it is." Dube worries that his country is sliding towards a one-party state. He also worries about saying that directly in a song. "I still want to live, you know," he said frankly, adding that it would actually be more dangerous now than under apartheid to say certain things. Then, you might have gotten your song banned. Now, you might wind up on the obituary page. Dube says he doesn't go looking for negative things to sing about, but he doesn't shy away from them either. On the brighter side, the new album has songs that celebrate life ("Let The Band Play On"), and reflect on love ("Crying Games") as well as the millenium ("Man in the Mirror"). Musically, The Way it Is is as punchy and melodious as Dube's best work in the past.
As an African reggae star, Dube enjoys a unique perspective on reggae subculture. Many Jamaican reggae singers romanticize Africa, even though they've never been there. Over the years, Dube has butted heads with Jamaicans over such matters as the Rastafarian deification of Ethiopia's autocratic Emperor Haile Selassie. These days, Dube leaves such disputes alone. "People need to identify with Africa, because that's where their roots are," he said. "Sometimes they think they know about Africa more than we do. But you cannot tell people in Jamaica that Selassie was not God. I ended up saying, if that's what they believe, it's okay."
Contributed by: Banning EyreFirst published: The Boston Phoenix
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