Developing a retro brand community: Re‐releasing and marketing anti‐apartheid protest music in post‐apartheid South Africa

Abstract

1980s South Africa was a constrained context within which to produce protest music. Apartheid censorship prevented protest music from reaching a mass market. This was an especially dire situation for white protest musicians who (unlike black musicians) were restricted by a small potential audience and also limited by the cultural boycott, precluding the possibility of an international audience. In the post‐apartheid era some of these earlier protest recordings have been re‐released by independent labels hoping to profit from the recordings but also in search of broader audiences for this important aspect of South Africa’s musical heritage. Yet it has been difficult to do more than market to “retro brand communities” of former fans. This paper considers marketing strategies used to promote re‐releases of anti‐apartheid protest songs, given the peculiarities of the convergence of retro time and space with present spatial dynamics, in a society willing to forget its musical heritage.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• popular music
• brand community
• anti‐apartheid
• retro‐marketing

Notes

1. For a more detailed account of the cultural boycott in South Africa, see Drewett (2006).

2. Live at Jameson’s in one quintessential moment brought together all the central components of the white anti‐apartheid music brand community and related cultural ethic – Shifty Records, the Jameson’s venue, James Phillips (as one of the most influential white protest musicians) and a vocal audience whose interaction with the music is clearly captured in the recording. As such, it stands as an iconic reminder of the interweaving of cultural politics and consumption.

3. I am indebted to one of the anonymous referees for suggesting that I include this point in the paper.

4. Freemuse (an abbreviation of Free Musical Expression) is an international human rights and music organisation based in Denmark (see www.freemuse.org).

5. Importantly, in the South African context, such ties have never been strictly along racial lines, and this is more so the case now than ever before.

6. Ballantine’s (2004) article “Rethinking ‘Whiteness’? Identity, Change and ‘White’ Popular Music in Post‐Apartheid South Africa” provides a detailed account of racial typecasting and slurs aimed at white South Africans since 1994. He provides an interesting account of the “self‐reinvention” of white popular musicians through music in the post‐apartheid era.

7. Located in Port Elizabeth in the Nelson Mandela Metropole and catering for the Eastern and Southern Cape regions of South Africa.

8. The transformation of the object from contraband to celebratory item is not dissimilar to the changing representations of homosexuality in film as outlined by Andrew Keating and Damien McLoughlin (2005, 146). Over time, there was a move away from representing homosexuality as threatening, unadjusted and destructive to more positive representations that depict homosexuality as natural and unthreatening.