A Year of Blind Spots: Miriam Makeba

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Miriam Makeba

Miriam Makeba

1960

What 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die has to say about Miriam Makeba by Miriam Makeba:

Traditional Xhosa wedding songs swing into airy African jazz moods, mellifluous Indonesian lullabies, and infectious Calypso romps—myriad influences and styles working to enormous effect. Recorded a year after the international hit musical King Kong (1959), which provided many black South African musicians with the opportunity to escape apartheid, Makeba's debut album paints a compelling portrait of the artist in exile.

Building on the rapturous reception she received performing at New York's Village Vanguard, Miriam Makeba showcases a 28-year-old singer stepping confidently onto the world stage. To Western ears, much of the album's magic lies in the "exotic" timbres of her Xhosa vocal "clicks" on Afro-pop breeze like the "Click Song" and the melodic lilt of "Mbube" (featuring the Chad Mitchell Trio). Time Magazine immediately tuned into this marriage of authentic African sounds and polished Western pop, hailing Makeba as "the most exciting new singing talent to appear in many years."

Yet the album failed to translate critical plaudits into sales, and her record label declined to renew her contract. Granted, novelty pop ditties ("The Naughty Little Flea") and folk standards ("House of the Rising Sun") were tailor made for crossover success, but earthy ballads like "Umhome" remained too quintessentially African for mainstream audiences to fully appreciate.

Less roots-driven offerings would soon reward Makeba with "Mama Afrika" status as the continent's premier diva, but here, it is the sound of a South African émigré channeling her yearning for her homeland through an exiled lens that most captivates.

What Joe has to say about Miriam Makeba by Miriam Makeba:

Interesting to compare my experiences here with my experiences listening to the Ray Charles album earlier in the week. My thesis for that album was that it was too old, and thus it had become inaccessible to me. And yet here's an album just one year older, but which seems pretty fresh to my ears, even after all this time. I'm not saying that I'm going to be obsessed with Miriam Makeba, but it was pleasant listening throughout the week, no doubt. This probably has to do with how far outside my comfort zone Miriam Makeba arrives from. I'm familiar enough with Charles' style of R&B that is sounded generic to me, but I don't know Afro-pop / African folk music at all, so how could this possibly sound generic? It couldn't.

Unfortunately, my clearest touchstone for this style of music is "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." Fortunately, a cover of the original version of this 1930s song, known as "Mbube," can be found here. So I'm not too far off the track! And then we've had a few strong African showings in Record Club, most notably Amadou Balaké, to whom you can trace a direct line from Miriam Makeba (just add a lot more sunny guitars). These connections, not weak but definitely few in number, should show you just how out of my element I might feel, trying to listen to a Xhosa-language vocal pop album from 1960 Africa.

But for real, I don't have many complaints. There's a huge difference between something that feels old because there have been too many improvements made to the sound over the years, and something that feels old because it feels disconnected from pretty much anything else that exists these days. I hate to lean too much into the description of this album as having "exotic timbres," but that's pretty much the story hear, ya know? It's exotic by definition, as I am not familiar with the culture that led to the music's existence, and so listening to it really does feel like a "discovery," in a sense. 

The cultural divide rarely seems impenetrable. I like the "clicking," I think they add to the overall sense of style. I like some of the cornier traditional songs, like the one about the flea—what otherwise might be dismissed as a nursery rhyme is in this context something I take seriously. Probably the only song that made me recoil was the penultimate track, "One More Dance." Featured artist Charles Colman obnoxiously laughs throughout the entire song, which I found weirdly inappropriate in a song about someone's husband dying. I'm not saying it was "wrong" "morally" or any such shit like that. I'm just saying that it didn't work as part of the song. The tonal clash was just too great.

I don't know if Miriam Makeba is an artist I would return to frequently, but I am glad that I had this experience with her. At the very least, to prove what I need if I'm going to listen to albums that are more than 60 years old—in a sense, they need to seem timeless.