Best Clegg ever - I wore out my first copy and had to replace it. Absolutely love the album.
Excellent! - I had this cassette several years ago and wore it out. When the weather got hot this year, I remembered how much I missed listening to this summer music. I immediately ordered the CD, and when I put it on, it was like listening to an old friend. This music is really a love song to South Africa, with all the sadness of the apartheid days. It is also relevant to any place where people are fighting to be free of oppression. The lyrics are beautiful and the African rhythms guarantee you will be humming the music even when not playing the CD.
Cruel Crazy Beautiful World is Johnny Clegg s best. - Funky, fun and imbued with all the passion of South Africa just prior to the end of apartheid, this album deals with love, hate, parenthood, freedom, marriage and war always with a winning combination of powerful beauty and enthusiasm. Dela later became the funky love song everyone recognized from the movie George of the Jungle. This is simply a stunning work of art.
My favorite album of all time! - This was the first album that blew me away on first listen. From the opening tribal chanting of One (Hu) Man, One Vote I knew I was in for a musical journey my ears have never heard before. This album perfectly encapsulates the era of its time (the cautious optimism of 1989-1990 when communist regimes were falling in Europe and apartheid was heading in that direction), but manages to relate to current events as well, nearly 15 years later. The song Jericho could very well describe the conditions at Guantanamo Bay, the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the wall being built in Israel: standing at the gates/this is Jericho/and the walls reach up to the stars/and outside we were singing psalms/such a strange, strange place/for we are the prisoners of the prisoners we have taken/and the prophets dreams are now forsaken. In One (Hu) Man, One Vote, Johnny sings, the west is sleeping in a fragile freedom/forgotten is the price that was paid/ten thousand years of marching through a veil of tears/to break a few links in these chains/these things come to us by way of much pain/don t let us slip back into the dark. Its not all politics, though. His catchy, danceable love song, Dela is guaranteed to get your feet and body moving. It was featured in the film George of the Jungle and remains one of the best love songs I ve ever heard. My personal favorite song is Woman Be My Country, for its beautiful melody and lyrics, sweetened by a saxophone. This song is for anyone who feels like a stranger in his own country, an ex-patriot who disagrees with his government as it relates to the world. When we feel powerless to change the cold, impersonal bureaucracy, we seek refuge in the ones nearest and dearest to our hearts: woman be my country/ till my country can be mine/hide me deep inside your borders/in these dark and troubled times/remember me my innocence/before I drown in a sea of lies/woman be my country/ till my country can be mine. In short, this album is Johnny s most moving, brilliant, and best work. It is emblematic of an era in history, a soundtrack to the times, that transcends its era to represent relevancy in current situations. It is quite simply, Johnny Clegg s own Sgt. Pepper or Pet Sounds. On top of that, the album cover is also one of the best ones I ve seen and perhaps the best one of nearly 25 albums of his. Highly recommended, especially for any fan of world music, anyone who wants to hear a different sound than they hear on the radio, or people interested in the politics of Africa, the developing world, the Cold War, or the remarkable years that 1989-1991 were.
The Best Johnny Clegg Album - Johnny Clegg is a man caught between two worlds. On one hand, his music is so infectious that you can t help but get caught up in the sheer joy of Savuka s masterly blend of Zulu sounds and western pop. On the other hand, there is the dark heart of politics that informed Clegg s life as a white man leading a multi-racial band in South Africa during the clashes of that nation s violent struggles in change. This not a lightly made statement, Clegg lost a band member to street violence and close friends to political assassinations. It is that friction that informs Cruel Crazy Beautiful World. As soon as the insistent chorus of One (Hu)man, One Vote pounds out of the speaker, you can feel the urgency that beats behind it. Yet the heart that wants to find a better world for his children in the title song right after One Vote moves the urgency from the head to the heart and feet. In fact it s hard to not swing or dance while this album plays. It s like a challenge Savuka issues to your spirit and your social conscience. You need to think while you listen to Cruel Crazy Beautiful World. And more than that, you need to dance.