A South African gatecrashes a Cleveland Moondog Ball

Answer: among others, rock fans, for the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, the world’s premier museum dedicated to the quintessential global music of the past half-century.

Do South Africans like the rock? Are we close to it? The question seems absurd until I look at sources like Encyclopedia Brittanica’s entry on “South African music”, which mentions township jive and Johnny Clegg, but not Voëlvry or Die Antwoord.

For this expatriate white South African, though, think 1987, a teenage party on a farm near the Swaziland border. Berholdus Niemand and The Cherry-Faced Lurchers sing Shot Down. We are the moer in at apartheid — hell, yes, we are. A white boy who looked at his life, we sing now — and look at our lives, we do, with this music opening up the view.

Or even 20 years earlier, my parents and aunt and uncle sitting around a swimming pool, tuning into Radio Lourenco Marques to hear the Top 40. Not for nothing has the state broadcaster banned this new music. African-American blues and gospel have combined with white country and bluegrass to generate a racially integrated sound — one that is already being echoed in the dance halls of District Six and Sophiatown, where artists like Makeba blend indigenous rhythms with the beats coming out of Motown and Stax.

But Cleveland! Why Cleveland? Why not Memphis, Detroit, Liverpool, or even New York, where Patti Smith and her punk rockers once riffed, crooned, and strummed?

To answer that question, let’s rewind the cassette tape — lift back the LP needle; scroll back on the playlist — to 1952. A young white DJ named Alan Freed has just moved to Cleveland. He’s making a name for himself with a show called Moondog Hour, which, or so the story goes, maybe the first show in radio history selling black rhythm and blues for white fans.

Freed calls this craze “rock ’n’ roll” and it’s such a hit that Freed now agrees to help MC a Cleveland concert titled the “Moondog Coronation Ball”, featuring Paul Williams and the Hucklebuckers, Tiny Grimes, and the Rocking Highlanders.

Counterfeit tickets are sold; the 10,000-strong stadium is overbooked. So many bodies heave in the arena that the fire authorities shut it down after the first song, and in the ensuing media controversy, a new genre is born.

When I step inside Cleveland’s Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame today, though, the first thing I notice, below the loud, sloping glass walls designed by I.M. Pei, are the dangling East German automobiles. These, an information plaque informs me, are from the pathbreaking 1992 Zoo TV concert, by U2, which blurred news, entertainment, and art.

Cool, man! Here we are, after all, a quarter century later, and who can argue with that concert’s stirring up of reality and satire, which seems to prophesy the times we live in, where a reality TV star can become president?

Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland. (Photo: Michelle via Flickr)

But the Hall of Fame’s orientation is historical rather than contemporary, and, at least on the day I visited, no odes to the contemporary anti-Trump resistance in music were on display.

The Hall of Fame contains six levels, the two most interesting being Zero, with the rock history exhibits, and Three, with the wall of plaques honouring the Hall’s 330 or so inductees, from ABBA to ZZ Top.

The cultural politics of the Elvis display seem more contentious: A movie about Presley, projected on to a screen right behind one of his zoot suits and his custom-made “supertrike”. In it, the King croons and sways with his gorgeous, natural charisma, while a parade of white rock stars praise him for his progressive racial attitudes.

Bruce Springsteen: “Elvis Presley was a revolutionary figure.”

Joe Perry, from Aerosmith: “Elvis didn’t get enough credit for the walls he broke down.”

As a 1980s synthetic-pop fanboy during high school, I enjoyed the four-page handwritten letter from Madonna to her friend Ondina Sweet, saying that “I really don’t think I’m into the college scene” and talking about her dreams of wild, fast-paced life.

Even better was the handprinted, hippie-style invitation to Janis Joplin’s funeral. How those of us in the late 1980s South African counterculture sanctified that overdose! Dreamed, although we would never have admitted it, of similar tragic romances — perhaps a beautiful death, crushed by Botha’s bulldozers at a Group Areas Act protest, all while letting organic Transkei mushrooms transport us to shining strawberry fields in the sky.

But there it was, just “Drinks at Pearl” — just a few close friends, toasting a beloved fellow traveller.

There was a giant room with the Beatles exhibit squaring off against — who else? — the Rolling Stones. Both were, of course, icons for my parents’ generation, who spent countless adolescent hours debating their relative merits, while their Moral Preparedness teachers lectured them about “communist subliminal messaging”.

What about Boney M? Growing up in Skukuza staff village in the Kruger Park, they were the rock stars par excellence — bigger than the Beatles, I’ll wager, if not quite more popular than Jesus. Many were there at the night we braaied under the Cape ash trees, shaking our hips to Ra-Ra-Rasputin or Daddy Cool.

When I lived in Miami, though, the joke was always that if you heard Brown Girl in the Ring blaring from a convertible, it was being driven either by a middle-aged Russian or a Brazilian — someone shaped, in other words, by a dictatorship.

But the German-Caribbean vocal group doesn’t receive a mention in Cleveland. When I asked a guide about them, he retorted, as Americans always do: “Boney who?”

As I left the Hall of Fame and headed north along Lake Erie, on what they call America’s North Coast, the seagulls did their own strange, stiff dances on the frozen waves. That day in Anchorage, Alaska, the temperature was 5°C, five above its historic average: cold comfort in an Arctic wind shaking the trees along the Cuyahoga River. DM