South African Musicians Are Reclaiming the '80s — No AI Required

A trend is currently circulating across social media, most visibly on X and Instagram, where people post bright, colorful AI-generated images of themselves inspired by the ‘80s. 

The poses and settings vary: a man in his living room wearing a brown two-piece suit, surrounded by the markers of an upwardly mobile Black South African family; or a woman posing casually in her bedroom, hair blown out into an afro, wearing color-blocked and mid-sized gold hoop earrings with an "I ♥ 80s" poster visible behind her. 

The person is wholly themselves, but the world they inhabit is AI-generated. It’s role play, in a way: imagining a version of ourselves, constructing alternate realities as indulgence or escape.

This love for everything '80s is apparent in music, too. Earlier this year, South African artists Msaki and Jesse Clegg released Entropy, a six-track collection shaped by the big, sprawling sounds that made that decade so memorable. It features undulating synths that creep forward until they become the focal point; choruses built for a stadium; melancholic lyrics about longing and heartbreak, so forlorn they ache from the inside out; and snares and kicks straight out of the disco playbook. Nostalgia is not only back, but it's also doing cartwheels by the side of the road while onlookers mistake it for something brand new and good for you.

The EP took three years and passed through a spread of producers working in separate rooms in separate cities — Greg Abrahams, Nicholas Petricca, Dolf, Damian Taylor, Batundi and Tresor. "The coherence is almost accidental, because everybody's doing their own thing in their own pockets," Msaki tells OkayAfrica. Clegg locates the decade somewhere more specific, in the person who mixed it: "The guy who mixed the album, Damian Taylor, he's a student of the '80s. He was Björk's keyboard player for a decade. He's a noise-maker, a sample guy. He's also produced some of my favorite contemporary bands — Temper Trap, The Killers, Arcade Fire. He's got a very eclectic palate."

It helps, too, that Jesse Clegg has the ‘80s in his family. His father Johnny Clegg's work with Juluka is ‘South African '80s music’ in the most literal sense. Songs like 1981’s "Impi" and 1982’s "Scatterlings of Africa" set the scene for a definitive decade, one that went on to shape so much of what came after. It was also a tumultuous time, a period of great uprisings, when people were disappeared, mass killings enacted, and life turned topsy-turvy under the crushing arm of an apartheid regime standing on its last legs. It was the onset of the AIDS epidemic, too, which wiped out a generation of queer and heterosexual cultural workers alike and left the next one to raise itself. In this climate, bubblegum emerged.

The music earned its own vocabulary and asserted its dominance through the rattling kick of the TR-808 drum machine, cheap sharp synths borrowed from disco and boogie, mbaqanga and marabi underneath, and call-and-response vocals. Brenda Fassie's "Weekend Special," released in 1983, shifted more than 200,000 copies and made a teenager from Langa in Cape Town the biggest pop star in the country. 

The next year, in 1984,  Sipho "Hotstix" Mabuse — who had come close to stardom before his band Harari imploded on tour in America — went into the studio in Johannesburg to work on "Burn Out," a song that would become one of the defining records of the decade, and that still puts people in a daze when he plays it live today. 

Built around a relentless, biting bass line, Mabuse's unmistakably smooth vocal and Steve Kekana's unforgettable ad-libs, it turned the dancefloor into a place where resistance met release, where the pulse of Black South Africa lived, loved and felt free. The single sold more than 500,000 copies, making Mabuse one of the country's biggest stars and helping push the genre past the boundaries of the townships meant to keep Black and brown people permanently encircled. 

"I think it was around midnight,” Mabuse tells OkayAfrica about how he wrote the song. “I was traveling with a pianist, you know, but I decided to play piano while the sound engineer was doing something. And for some reason, I was feeling this riff in my head, and I started playing it, and I realized I was looking at the pianist and he was really popping, you know, and I could feel the same way," Mabuse tells OkayAfrica.

"I said to the recording engineer, ‘listen, can we put this thing down before I forget it?’ And we stopped everything that we were doing. We put this track down, and I started writing things. And lyrically, what you're hearing literally took me about 10 to 15 minutes. The whole song was recorded in less than 20 minutes," he says. 

"It was almost like I was provoking a revolution with 'you're going to burn [out],' because people had a way of interpreting songs covertly. It was at that time when the status quo was really heavy, and people were using some of these songs to make a statement. But for the SABC to ban it, they had to listen to all the lyrics, and we would disguise the lyrics so that it sounds more like a commercial track. And when things started getting burnt, people attributed that to the song as well."

Then there was Chicco Twala, who in 1987 wrote a song about a family missing someone named Manelo — really a song about a whole country missing Nelson Mandela, by then more than two decades into his imprisonment. The censors let it through. Everyone else knew who Manelo was.

Things are still burning, though the fire no longer answers to a jurisdiction imposed from outside but feeds on a government that continues to fail its citizens, on officials who have misused funds meant for the betterment of people's lives, and on an ongoing femicide crisis.

The influence of the ‘80s continues today with new releases from the likes of Msaki, Jesse Clegg, and Umzulu Phaqa.

Umzulu Phaqa released Volume 1 just under two months ago, a body of work steeped in the glory, charm, and excess of the '80s, and pointed squarely at the present.

"My sound is about bridging the old and the new. I take the language and cultural richness of isiZulu and present it in a way that even someone from across the world can connect with. As we say in isiZulu, 'Sifaka isintu estayeleni' — we bring tradition into style. Times are always evolving, so I stay true to what defines me while still moving forward with the world," she tells OkayAfrica.

But unlike the ‘80s-inspired AI-generated images, Umzulu Phaqa’s work involves actual human beings, collaborating in the studio, pressing knobs, co-writing songs, and creating magic in real time. “Currently on TikTok, I’m being accused of using AI. Nothing on that [album] is [AI-generated] — from the lyrics, to the voice, to the production of the beats [...] everything that you hear on there was compiled by real human beings.”