Township music

[4] Marabi is seen as the very first form of township music that evolved from makwaya in the late 1890s and arose between the 1920s and 1940s in the Johannesburg slumyards of South Africa.

[2] Marabi was commonly considered by non-lower-class people as a rebellious style of music in its time, being associated with illegality, police raids, sex, and a desperately impoverished working-class.

[2] Also, as Robinson references the Johannesburg 1936 Empire Exhibition, marabi music was not allowed to be a part of the show, indicating the selective enthusiasm of white audiences for contemporary African performance.

[7] Marabi was easy to criticize because it reflected the dangers, dynamics and hardships of urban life in slum-yards along with the fact that it was associated with a heavy drinking culture as well.

[2] Other analyses, aside from Coplan’s, regarding Marabi lyrics appear to be lacking within this field, which could be attributed to the obscurity of this subject as well as the age of this style of township music.

[2] Coplan states that this particular style makes use of a unique combination of instruments including the string bass, the guitar, drums, and several penny whistles to construct the strong repetitive melodic line.

[2] According to Coplan, mbaqanga groups are mainly multi-ethnic, which could be attributed to the blending varieties of music in this specific style.

[2] It is the continuation of the marabi and kwela styles, coupled with its own freshness, analogous to its new place in African music history.

Mbaqanga appears to be relatively unexplored in its field of discourse, which can be attributed to the general obscurity of the township music genre, along with the styles within it.

Vocalists, in mbaqanga, are considered the core unit of all the performances, while instrumentalists depend on the demands of the recordings or live shows.

[2] A specific opening for the typical mbaqanga number is provided by Coplan in that the songs appear to begin with a lead guitar introduction, followed by the bass melody pattern based on the F-C-G7-C formula played over a bouncing 8/8 township rhythm.