Mebo, Winky D and Karl Marx

A church type from the countryside sneaks out of Zupco, his place in life disagreeably summarised by the catapult around his neck and the apostolic badge on his pocket. He looks around as if flustered by city lights and is, in fact, soon blown away by one: an uptown sweetheart called Mebo who chooses him over her unimpressed digital-vixen friends.

With the rest of story, Obert Chari, the Romeo who got away with treason against the capitalist laws of love, ably debuts atop the National FM 2018 chart and crowns it all with a Nama (2019) Song of the Year nomination. “Mebo” is an instant classic that, along with Winky D’s “MuGarden”, Jah Prayzah’s “Chengetedza” and Pah Chihera’s “Runonzi Rudo” invites us to think anew love and art in a time of alienation.

Even if Chari does not sweep the Namas, he has already won something. It is not every year that a new artist racing up the charts gets to light up a wholesome feeling for listeners to come back to on rainy days.  “Mebo” is the fairy tale that affirms what Karl Marx called our species essence, that is, what makes us human outside the omnipresent claims of capital, what makes us human outside instrumental reason.

Mebo is not Jesus but her miracle has a touch of Cana. Her love turns the sand currently silting the economy into sugar – at least in Obert’s life. Angels have gone on strike, leaving no one to switch on the sun for Zimbabwean millennials, but Obert still wakes up to crushworthy Mebo’s infectious, gap-toothed smile.

And, because her love is not a checklist of practical goals, Obert is not in a hurry to build Mebo a house of lies like Xtra Large, carpet-interview her like Paul Matavire, promise her a dubious Joina City booking like Freeman, shift blame to the accounting department like Leonard Zhakata or cart away the whole boutique except mannequins for her like Lupe Fiasco. He can stick to his happily-even-before love story – his sanity gratefully spared the game theories of social mobility that instinctively take the place of love.

Chari, Winky D, Jah Prayzah and Pah Chihera did not invent the princess-and-pariah motif but, unlike any songwriter in recent times, they have taken the love song back to the mythic days of “Yeukai”, “Madhebhura”, “Magobo”, “Furuwa”, “Murombo”, and that golden age of innocence: early 2000s’ urban grooves. Lovers are from Chamhembe; jerks are from Chillspot.

The primitive triumph of love, contrasted to the checklisting of unsentimental goals – contrasted to “money and power, the Mecca of marriages,” as Mr. Lamar puts it – is where art meets heart. In Chari’s 13-minute sungura epic, life is beautiful because love is not an instrumentalist contract.

In “MuGarden”, Winky D and his Eve, Gemma Griffiths, inhabit a paradise where there is no rule except love, where the contaminating influences of money, family scruples and friends are to be hedged out by cherubs with flaming swords, as in Leonard Zhakata’s “Kingdom Yevaviri”.

The garden itself is a symbol of insular, pre-materialist innocence, even if the snake stereotypically dangling on Gemma’s chest and the Steve Jobs tree swinging succulently overhead introduce a vibe of capitalist precariousness to the setting.  The fact of the song dropping on Valentine’s Day, the high day of the emotion industry, adds to the precariousness.

Is it a guilty fantasy that in the princess-and-pariah love songs, the underdog finds spiritual comfort in the arms of a rich, uptown or white woman – perhaps subconsciously craving in her the capitalist adornments that life has denied him? I juxtapose love’s paradoxes in Rhyme and Resistance, my New Dispensation burlesque with a grain of autobiography.

Despite the notorious Rastaman-white woman narrative, Hegel would have been cool with Gemma. The princess who only sees a pariah cannot feel fully recognised in the eyes of the pariah who sees a princess, both poorer for missing the spiritual signal in the titular noise. Hegel would have also been pro-Mebo because Obert’s girl is all about humanity, taking no thought of his lack of grooming, grind and gadgetry.

“Mebo”, “MuGarden”, “Chengetedza” and “Runonzi Rudo” are special moments in a music industry that increasingly reflects the money-minded and self-interested values of our alienated society. A refreshing interlude from the gold-flossing commercialism and chest-beating individualism of dancehall and hip-hop, from the street realism and false consciousness of pop art. Ironically, gospel music is lately the go-to genre for both me me memes.

While sonically iodising the wounds of austerity, where love in the downtown scheme of things unpredictably turns out to be a flash of fantasy punctuating the damaged life, these classics took me back to Karl Marx, the unlikely patron saint of romanticism.

Marx describes alienation, the running out of our species essence, as the fact of our being separated from the fruits and meaning of our work, separated from each other and separated from our own selves.

In such a post-human setting, musicians have to keep reminding us how much money they have, how better they are than everyone else and how their statistics, rather than people around them, prove how much love they enjoy. That is because our lives and loves, alienated from us, can now only find expression through money and appearance.

Few remember Karl Marx as a love poet but long before the shaggy economist was the poster-boy of regime change, he was an impassioned lyricist, smitten with the mortal madness of love like the rest of us. Despite his documented hate for capitalism, he concluded his love poems in cheesy capitals like: “LOVE IS JENNY, JENNY IS LOVE’S NAME.”

Although, in later years, he would frown at his poems as sins of his youth he would rather not be reminded, I want to say Karl the love poet foreshadows Marx the revolutionary philosopher. That is because the link between love and war is essential rather than incidental.

Understanding how messed the world is for the underdog, young Karl tells Jenny not of his ambition to be a colourful stroke in the pattern of things but to destroy the world and its boardrooms, “Since my call they notice never,/ Coursing dumb in magic whirl.”

If Marx had to be the brother who walked out of a rundown bicycle repair lot to meet a Mebo, it is not hard to tell how he would have dealt with the fact of his poverty. Whereas Chari turns to religion to make peace with his alienation, the U.S’ pop-star president, John F. Kennedy, tells the story of how Marx, then an underpaid freelance journalist, turned to revolution to shrug away his alienation.

“We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley (New York Herald Tribune publisher) and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the ‘lousiest petty bourgeois cheating.’

“But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war,” JFK recalls.

For Marx, money is the chemical power of society, the go-between binding two, and equally the wedge separating two. Without money, love is just a tormenting imagination; with money, it is not only sensuously but also spiritually realised; this because capitalism has tangled the very roots of the heart and soul of humankind.

As Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, the problem is to get money. Getting it from the rich and redistributing it to the rest of us is the Promethean mission would Marx dedicate his life to, one that is more recuperated than referenced in our increasingly unequal societies.

Even in the world of love, nothing is quite what it looks because money, having truly turned the world upside down now confuses all things, transforming, according to Marx, “fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.”

“If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune,” Marx reflects in conversation with the plays of William Shakespeare.

In the hopelessly perverted paradise of capital, love is a wish away, and essential human powers have each a price tag at their very heart. Like states locked in the game theories of trade, debt and charity, all possible forms of love and kindness are piled on the counter for the reason of greater profit, while selfishness remains intact.

Our souls are emptied so that we are what we have, and as Guy Debord would later observe, we are what we appear. “Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do,” Marx writes in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Zimbabwean music has no shortage of Marxian romanticists, particularly sungura, which carried on a decade of conversation with the first round of austerity. Whereas Leonard Zhakata turns to religion to survive his alienation, Simon Chimbetu – whose band was named The Marxist Brothers, after all – turns to revolution. Both are branching away from love in the time of Esap.

In fact, Zhakata turns his religion into revolution, as Bob Marley, Lupe Fiasco and Kendrick Lamar do with theirs. Secular Marx never foresaw this holy detourment.

By the era of Zimdancehall, street realism leaves no space for great love songs. Killer T’s closest aims at the form are didacticisms against puppetmasters on Venus’s turf.

If Marx is right, the love stories Chari and Winky D blessed us with are as beautiful as they are precarious. We will never know if Winky D did not go on to pick up the apple in the editor’s cut, or if Mebo gave in to her digital-vixen friends’ pressures. Meantime, who is praying for Chari to take the Nama home to Mebo?

Adapted from Rhyme and Resistance, the new poetry and prose collection by Stan Mushava