COVER IMAGE
LP released: Feb 05, 2021
(Item no longer available)

Tracklisting:
1. Varikweru - Saturday Night
2. Margino - You And Me
3. Hot Soul Singers - Good Vibes
4. Brenda Fassie - No No Se Or
5. Supa Frika - Let's Get On It
6. Brenda Fassie - Love Action
7. Black Five - Wa Ikgona
8. Margino - Holiday
9. Soundburger - Ambiguously The Same
10. Supa Frika - Love Satisfaction
VARIOUS ARTISTS
SATURDAY NIGHT: SOUTH AFRICAN DISCO POP HITS!
Label: CULTURES OF SOUL
Cat No: COS031LP
Barcode: 820250003114
Packaging: LP (100g)

The 1980s were an epoch of upheaval and rapid change
in South Africa. The decade began with the country's
apartheid government fighting to maintain its
institutionalized racial segregation in the face of global
protests and demands for the release of human rights
activist Nelson Mandela, who had been jailed since the
early 1960s. By 1990, Mandela was free, and apartheid was
on the way to being dismantled. On the music front, things
were changing too; At the beginning of the decade, the main
music style of black South Africans was the jazzy
indigenous jive of mbaqanga, a provincial style that had
held its place as the sound of South Africa since Mandela
was first imprisoned. By the end of the decade,
South African music stars were making international waves
with bubblegum, a flashy variety of Afro-techno-pop.
In SATURDAY NIGHT: SOUTH AFRICAN DISCO POP
HITS, Cultures of Soul explores this period of change,
and the intermediary forms that filled the gap between
mbaqanga and bubblegum. The years when South African
musicians and producers wrestled with the incursion of
foreign disco and formulated their own style of homegrown
disco-pop.
Starting from the early 80s, when bands like Varikweru,
Black Five and Soundburger essayed local attempts
at boogie and jazz-fusion, through experiments like the
Madonna-cloned diva Margino, who domesticized the
burgeoning Italo-disco and NYC electro sounds, up through
the massive breakthrough of Brenda and the Big Dudes,
who arrived at the right mix between native and international
influences to point the way forward for South African pop.
The sound on these records is ostensibly familiar, drawing
heavily on models from the 1980s dance culture in Europe
and America, but if you listen closely enough you can
hear the distinct South African-ness of it all-from the deep,
burbling basslines, the brightly hypnotic melodies, and
chant-like lyrics-and with sounds as intoxicating as these,
you will sure want to listen closely. And often!