Bastard Jargon
Nakhane’s last album, 2018’s *You Will Not Die*, was a deeply introspective chronicle of trauma the South African artist encountered during their formative years. “*You Will Not Die* was all about closing old chapters,” Nakhane tells Apple Music. “When I finished writing it, there was this complete sea change in my life. I no longer believed in certain things that I believed in. I asked myself, ‘What do *you* think? Not what your mom told you, or your church, or school.’ I performed the album for about two years, but there came a point where I needed to fill my tank, and I wanted to make music that made me happy. The sound had to make me dance while I was making it.” The result is *Bastard Jargon*, a sonically buoyant yet thematically raw 10 tracks that seek to define what follows a pivot out of survival mode. Written over 18 months, the album finds Nakhane at perhaps their most outspoken, against a backdrop of pulsing beats and gritty, intimate vocals. It’s an idea of reconstruction captured by the project’s title, born from a term Nakhane encountered while studying linguistics. “Before a language is standardized, before it becomes a pidgin or even a creole, it’s called a bastard jargon, because it’s neither here nor there, it belongs to no one,” Nakhane explains. “What I loved about that was A, I’m a bastard. And B, that it was talking about starting again. I’m much more interested in being a beginner than I am in somebody who is a virtuoso. And I think because I knew that on this album I would be much more involved in production \[alongside co-executive producer, Chic legend Nile Rodgers\], there’s the sense of newness. It’s to \[challenge\] this idea that people can have about an artist—‘*This* is who you are’—but then let’s just start afresh.” Here, Nakhane talks us through key tracks from the album. **“The Caring”** “The title is sarcastic. ‘I’m so glad, I’m so glad to be sharing the world with the caring.’ It’s all about this idea that human beings are all so shocked by things that they know. For a long time, people thought racism was normal. Men thought that it was normal for women to be subjugated. For LGBTQI+ people, it was normal for them to be in hiding, and that’s why people are so angry right now when they see a film with representation. It’s always existed—but it was illegal. Human beings having to hide who they are. For so long, things were subtle. But I am at a point right now where I can’t deal with subtlety. Too many things are at stake.” **“Tell Me Your Politik” (feat. Moonchild Sanelly & Nile Rodgers)** “The first two tracks are tone-setting and world-building: ‘You can opt up now or you can stay.’ The Western world is becoming so fascist. Audre Lorde said, ‘Your subtlety is not going to save you now.’ Things are too hot. Nuance is very important, but I can’t deal with it now. No, I have to save myself. And one of the reasons the album is so hard and so brutalist in its sound is that lack of subtlety and an aesthetic decision not to be subtle, to be rude, to tell you, ‘Fuck you.’ It goes beyond sexuality. I’m talking about race, I’m talking about immigration, I’m talking about all of the minutiae of life. I’m talking about family.” **“Hold Me Down”** “‘Hold Me Down’ is where you realize that sometimes you’re not the best judge of what you need. I mean it literally: ‘Hold me down. I will ask you to let me go. I will ask you to let me go because all I know is leaving. But now, I’m staying. I’ve chosen you. And in that choosing, I don’t want you to ever doubt it, even when I doubt it.’ And there’s such incredible work there. The bass is actually by Raphael Saadiq. It’s simple, but it travels, it walks, it walks around the melody, which he’s so good at \[doing\].” **“Hear Me Moan”** “This was such a mixture of influences. The opening part, which is so instrumental, was me pulling from Zim Ngqawana and Herbie Hancock. I didn’t want to sing; I wanted to say the thing; I wanted to speak. It’s all about sex, obviously. It directly references kwaito. I wanted to have that sensibility because I missed home, and that was the first type of rhythmic ‘dance’ music that I knew.” **“Do You Well” (feat. Perfume Genius)** “I thought there was too much of the sour—you need something that’s just going to be so much fun. The joke is that it’s \[about\] a nightclub: The lighting is a little bit dark, and everyone is so sexy, and they’re a little bit drunk. And then you go outside or it’s time to go home, and they switch on the lights, and you go, ‘Awww.’ It’s also a self-reference to ‘We Dance Again’ \[their 2015 collab with Black Coffee\]. That song was about being pulled out of depression, and in this one, I’m actually enjoying being in this moment. I’m not using it to get out of something darker—I’m just in it. I’m having such a good time.” **“My Ma Was Good”** “It means exactly what it says: ‘My Ma was good. Pa misunderstood.’ He took that goodness for granted. ‘Why should I be good?’ Why can’t I fuck someone over?’ Because it’s a shitty thing to do. But it’s that thing of, whose standard am I being held to—and pulling away from \[that standard\]. I don’t want to be well-behaved because the person that I love the most in the world was so well-behaved—and she got fucked over, so why should I do it? ‘My Ma Was Good’ is one of the songs that deals with family trauma, and how it impacts us in our lives, and the decisions that we make, and the partners we choose, and what we allow them to do to us, and what we do to them.” **“Standing in Our Way”** “‘The problem, the problem, the problem is me.’ But on the other hand, I’m sweetly saying, ‘But I’ll have another day.’ So softly. It was so important for me to layer that moment. My therapist said, ‘You would never accept someone else speaking to you the way that you speak to yourself.’ When you start looking at yourself and being mindful of how you speak to yourself, you think, ‘What the fuck \[am I doing\]?’ And I wanted that in my album. I wanted that sense of, ‘Oh, you’re a piece of shit,’ almost like I was treating it like a novel and having the \[narrative\] arc—but the arc is not neat. I wanted the arc to happen, but with complication, almost in real time as it does in the world in our lives.” **“If You Were to Complain”** “Here, I’m done explaining \[things\]. It’s a thing of speaking to oppressive powers but going, ‘I’m not going to be explaining this again.’ Oppressed people have been told over and over again, ‘Don’t live just for your pleasure \[now\]; live for the next life.’ But we want it now. I want my pleasure now. And I just wanted to put that there and just close the door.”
Where the South African singer-songwriter’s work was tinged with melancholy, their new album, executive produced by Nile Rodgers, renders carnal ecstasy in bright tones and major keys.
On their debut album, Nakhane dealt with change and sadness, this time around they're here to fuck with Bastard Jargon removing the mask of apprehension and becoming more assured and unapologetic.
Bastard Jargon by Nakhane review: an ambitious new work from the shapeshifting South African alt-pop songwriter
Slowthai is in his own lane, Kali Uchis is a modern day Billie Holiday, Nakhane delivers a message of liberation, the Lathums want catharsis