"Walking like a crab": Analyzing maskanda music in post-apartheid South Africa

This article addresses a South African music genre: maskanda, often marketed as “Zulu blues.” It describes the various ways maskanda is musically analyzed and interpreted by musicians, audiences, producers, and scholars, including myself. By treating music analysis as a form of participant observation (and indigenizing my own analytical conventions) the article aims, foremostly, to foster a cross-cultural dialogue about musical experiences (hearings) and the practices of fi nding words for these experiences (conceptualizations). Music analysis as participant observation also sheds light on local historiographies, critiques, and structural analyses of maskanda, and it bridges the artifi cial academic dichotomy of object-related observation (music analysis) and discourse related theorization (cultural analysis) that still impairs much music research.