Township Bubblegum

Township bubblegum is the synthesised pop music of South Africa's Black townships in the mid-1980s: producer-led records built on drum machines, bright keyboards and mbaqanga-derived basslines, sung in overlapping call-and-response by young solo stars. Forged in Johannesburg studios as apartheid entered its final decade, it replaced the live-band sound of earlier township pop with a cheap, glossy disco sheen, its lyrics mixing love songs, party chants and, in *Chicco Twala*'s work, coded politics. Its first stars — *Splash*, *Brenda Fassie* and *Yvonne Chaka Chaka* — became pan-African celebrities before kwaito inherited its machinery in the 1990s.