Busi Mhlongo - Amagugu

Описание: Originally released in 2009
Amakholwa Album
Musicians on (all voices) Busi Mhlongo (backing vocals on "Udlala ngami) Shaluza Max Mntambo (bass) Fana Zulu (lead guitar) Lawrence Matshiza (maskandi guitar) Mnothi Ntuli (Rock guitar) Serv Blumer (Percussions) William Ago *Ghana (rap poems) Talla Niang *Senegal and Tumi (keys,organ) Thuthukani Cele (keys) Nduduzo Makhathini (drums) Kwazi Shange.

Among the believers

The Zulu rock legend Busi Mhlongo’s latest album earned her three SA Music Awards nominations in 2010. Exclusively invited to the studio during its making Bongani Madondo bore witness to the alchemist at work.

SHHH! The service or ritual is about to begin.

Today’s recording: the making of her latest and last album release Amakholwa [The Believers] promises an evocation of all four key pillars of epic rituals: water, earth, wind and fire. In short, the studio session today will serve as a space in which to call forth ancestral spirits.
It’s way too early in the morning, but the air is pregnant with some sort of meditative and esoteric feel.

Victoria Busi Mhlongo, the electro-Zulu rock star and multi-genre vocal stylist and spirit medium, has been on a journey to hell, heaven and back. And on every step of the blue note, her stairway-to-heaven negro spirituals, shrieks and howls; you and I, signed and honorary members of the Busi Mhlongo tribal sect, have been with her. Hooting, screaming singing along all the way to real and imagined rituals.
Busi Mhlongo doesn’t record music; she conducts a “service”. She doesn’t perform music, she carries out “libations”, with all the due diligence and science of a trained alchemist. Busi Mhlongo gets possessed almost on cue. She’s omni-alert: alive to voices and images with which you’d rather not deal, or be visited by.
“I dreamed of a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death.”Her stage performances demand total devotion, almost a negotiated surrender from her fans.

Busi Mhlongo doesn’t compose music. She dreams in surreal sonic layers. I suspect she also “sees” music through a filter of multiple colours. One that constantly comes to mind listening to her is the “dark blue”, and purple, dashed with bright
While the stage is a platform for an artist’s creative nudity and showiness, the studio is his or her shrine.
“This is not gospel,” she corrects. “It’s more like amahubo. Amahubo are music expressions drawn from African spiritual traditions and not necessarily the Western ideas of Praise The Lord. We praise both the Lord and our three-tiered intermediaries: the unborn ancestors, the physically alive ancestors, and those who have gone before us – o khokho.”

And that’s the thing with Mhlongo’s art. You have to be ready to hear it, so even when she’s not singing, you can hear her melancholic, sometimes angry, and exasperated songs; a woman scorned, a woman abused, a child given a raw deal, couples in desolation row... often, her music is full of couples on the skid rows.
Thus, when I heard her vocals’ elasticity; the whisper-like chords, the sudden rapture of tenors and sopranos in parallel, all springing from a single source, climbing to octaves worthy of an opera diva amid full orchestration, I get a kick in the solar plexus.
Perhaps with Amakholwa, and on hindsight, with the better part of her discography, Busi Mhlongo is forcing us to rethink the notion of “hits”-based music.
The whole album is one long hit [heat] narrative of a saved soul.But then Mhlongo comes from this very contemporary tradition.
Mhlongo is way beyond a performer. She’s a symbol.Insofar as vocal style, pain, beauty and endurance goes, Mhlongo’s healer’s brew runs the full generation gamut of black torch-singers. From Princess Magogo, Letta Mbuli, Oumou Sangare, to those on whose vocals the future is yet to be etched: Simphiwe Dana and Thandiswa Mazwai.
It’s there, you just have to hear it. “so surprised I’ve recorded this album at all. I mean, aren’t I supposed to be dead?”
Silence. She winks and laughs. And if you’re tuned in, you’ll feel the pump-pump beat of her heart, her total relief that she is, after all, very much alive.
The joke’s not on her but on cancer, the disease that nearly hijacked her just 18 months ago.
Though she’s still dealing with it in many ways, including through medication, Busi Mhlongo has, by and large, really wagged the middle finger in Mr Cancer’s face.
And this joke, this new lighter self, this pond of ceaseless creativity, this new gospel tinged music, heck this entire album... it’s all, in her own words: “My way of conveying appreciation, of thanking those who’ve crossed multiple bridges over troubled waters with me.”
Think of Busi in silent prayer, eyes “wide-shut”.
The results? Gonna make you sweat!
With Amakholwa, Busi Mhlongo has come full circle. The lady’s done gone back home, but also back to the future. Her eyes, certainly, are looking at God.

May her Beautiful soul continue to Rest in Power. ❤❤⚘🕯🕯