Please can someone explain to me how the hell the SAMAs work?
When reading over the list of nominees for this year’s South African Music Awards, no — you are not having a stroke. There are indeed three separate Best Pop categories. There’s Best Pop Album, Beste Pop Album, and Best Afro Pop Album. Seemingly the distinction here is language. Except, you know — “Afro” is not a language.
Some of the artists nominated in the Afro-Pop category don’t even fit neatly into that distinction. Take CiCi, nominated for her heartfelt Busisiwe 2.0, an album that features both English and isiZulu. So, what exactly does “Afro” mean here? And what does “Pop” mean to the SAMAs anyway?
Pop music is a wonderfully strange chimera. It raids the closets of other genres without ever defining itself as one thing. It rarely stays still long enough to be pinned down. Our local Pop scene reflects this, and so do the nominees in the three Pop categories at the SAMAs. The Afro-Pop nominees find their groove in Amapiano, Soul and R&B; the Best Pop nominees lean towards contemporary Bubblegum and Pop-rock, while Beste Pop is a treffers van vergelyking of Country adjacent sounds.
Different in approach, but all still Pop. What makes Pop distinct from the genres it borrows from is its formula. Neat lyricism, mathematical earworm melodies. It is a cultural pastiche that defines the zeitgeist by giving it a hook. What separates the nominees of the SAMA’s three Pop categories isn’t their songcraft, but the language and cultural contexts from which they come.
That’s a strange way to categorise a fundamentally fluid genre. None of us need a history lesson on why exclusion on the basis of culture or language is straight-up discrimination in the context of this country. Yet the SAMAs divide Pop music — and, by extension, the communities presumed to consume it — into three distinct lanes by forcing it along racialised and linguistic channels. The three categories don’t distinguish different kinds of music; they distinguish different audiences.
This year’s Best Afro-Pop category is predominantly isiZulu. The only outlier is Smashing Soweto’s Touch Is A Move (Good Morning), an album which features isiXhosa, English and, yeah — isiZulu. These aren’t interchangeable cultural identities, nor are these artists necessarily making the same kind of music, yet the category makes them legible to the institution through one shared distinction: they aren’t Afrikaans, and they aren’t English.
This is revealing of the continued systemic divides in South African society. We like to think of ourselves as a country whose cultures blend freely, and in many ways they do. Our music is evidence of that. But beneath that veneer, we’re still divided culturally and sub-culturally into groups of listeners: Afrikaans, English and everyone else. No matter that “everyone else” makes up the majority of the country’s population, or that “everyone else” encompasses more than ten distinct official languages and countless dialects. According to the SAMAs, “everyone else” can be neatly summarised as one thing: Afro-Pop.
I wrote earlier this year about the Grammys’ tendency to homogenise Africa into a single sonic aesthetic through its Afrobeats category. The Grammys have since introduced another category, Best Asian Pop Music Performance, further separating non-Western Pop acts from its general fields. There is a legitimate argument for recognising specific regional musical traditions, but there is also something uncomfortable about what happens when cultural specificity becomes a reason to move artists further away from the perceived centre.
The SAMAs have a strangely similar problem, but in reverse. Rather than taking the music of an entire continent and flattening it into one genre, they take South Africa’s vernacular Pop and homogenise it under “Afro-Pop”, before placing it against two distinct language groups with charged histories.
The Grammys’ problem is that Africa becomes one sound. The SAMAs’ problem is that South Africa becomes three. Their lack of any general-field Pop categories makes the distinction even more apparent. Rather than allowing South African Pop to exist as the broad, culturally porous category that it is, the awards suggest that South African Pop music is inherently divided.
This exposes a problem: the SAMAs have no idea what they mean by “Pop.” Looking at some of the nominees in other categories — particularly Best Alternative — things get even more muddled. The term ‘alternative’ has traditionally been used to describe music that exists outside the mainstream conventions of a genre, but at the SAMAs it becomes an attempt to sweep Pop music’s fringes into one broad category with vague criteria. Take Mars Baby, for example, whose Handsome Luke and The Heartbreakers is without question a pop album, as is the bedroom indietronica of 44coles’ Furniture.
They sit in the same category as the progressive house of From The Hill by electronic musician Charles Webster, a dance record; the “Afrobalkan dance music” of Bombshelter Beast; and the bluesy alt-rock of Archi’s excellent Throwing Stones. The Best Alternative category is actually more reflective of what a Best Pop category should look like at an awards ceremony like the SAMAs. It would be easier to argue for these albums as “alternative iterations” of Pop if the SAMAs could properly define what Pop means to them in the first place.
Because that’s the delicious irony of Pop. It’s supposed to be the genre that refuses to stay in one place. It takes from Rock, R&B, House, Hip-hop, Country and everything else it can get its lacquered claws on. It absorbs culture, transcends borders, and becomes something shared en masse. The best Pop music doesn’t need its listeners to belong to the culture it reflects to understand it. It’s universal.
I’m not arguing that language shouldn’t matter. But it shouldn’t act as a divider. It’s the diversity language creates within South African Pop music that is worth celebrating.
If you think about it, South Africa is sort of the popstar of our continent. She’s had eras, she’s been cancelled, she’s made comebacks. If the population were a fanbase, we even have a name: we’re The Rainbow Nation, babe! Her signature hit is sung in five languages, not divided by them. United we stand — that’s what the SAMAs should be reflecting back at us.
Instead, their three Pop categories offer an uncomfortable reflection of the truth. We are a country that still hasn’t figured out how to exist together without putting ourselves and each other into separate boxes.
The 32nd South African Music Awards happen tomorrow night at The Sun City Superbowl. They will be broadcast live on SABC1 and streamed on SABC Plus at 20:00.
