‘Something else is possible’: Transcultural collaboration as anti-apartheid 
activism in the music of Juluka

Mutch, Caleb

doi:10.1017/S026114302100043X

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‘Something else is possible’: Transcultural collaboration as anti-apartheid activism in the music of Juluka

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Mutch, Caleb
Research Group Histories of Music, Mind, and Body, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Mutch, C. (2021). ‘Something else is possible’: Transcultural collaboration as anti-apartheid activism in the music of Juluka. Popular Music, 40(3-4), 450-469. doi:10.1017/S026114302100043X.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0009-FFC2-D

Abstract

This article illuminates the musical activism of Juluka, an interracial South African band active in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. Its analyses of three songs focus on intersections between Western popular music and a Zulu song genre called maskanda. By examining these cross-cultural interactions in the domains of harmonic progressions, formal structures and metric and rhythmic organisation, I demonstrate that the artistic fruitfulness of the band's collaboration was a powerful rebuke to the government's apartheid ideology, which sought to segregate not just people, but even their artistic expressions.