mahnmut | Josie Field

Last week I was at the oncert of Josie Field. She is one of the most remarkable phenomena on the South African music scene at the moment and sounds like Anouk, only softer and more refined. Here is some info about her.

Jozie's Josie Field

Here's a hot tip for magazine editors trying to attract 15-year-old readers. Today's teenagers don't want wire copy on Madonna and Britney — at least not the thinking ones. They want to know who Josie Field is.

Johannesburg's kids only know Josie via one song, Every Now & Then, which is on Highveld's and 5FM's playlists. Teenagers have flooded these radio stations with SMS and e-mail votes lodging Josie's song at the top of their local hit parades. That this has happened is, to quote a line from another song in her 15 track debut album Mercury, "a kick in the ass" for the powers that be in the local radio and music industries. Josie's sound wasn't radio-friendly according to them.

Some wanted to make her songs more pop, others more rock. But this 22-year-old singer-songwriter tenaciously got her album out with her music exactly like she wanted it, radio-friendliness be damned.

This youthfull idealism and unyielding artistic integrity is somehow picked-up by teenagers listening to her radio hit. I discovered local kids are so keen to find out about the creator of Every Now & Then, they're willing to stay up to 1AM on a school night to listen to a radio interview with her.

Josie was my inaugural guest on a radio show I started on community radio station 1485AM. As a radio newbie, my slot is Monday Midnight when I assumed nobody would be listening. I gave advance warning on the Internet, and subsequent e-mails indicated most of my listeners were 15-year-old girls starved for information on their heroine, Josie Field.

Labeling Josie isn't easy.

Paul E. Flynn of Sugardrive and Absinthé fame introduced her as "a female Morrissey" when he did a solo gig before her in Norwood's 88 Lounge. It was a sincere compliment from a huge fan, but Josie didn't get it.

"What did Morrissey do?" she asked me.

"Pommy whingeing set to music. Very big around the time you were born," I explained.

"But I don't whinge to music!"

She certainly doesn't. There's adolescent angst and introspection, but no whingeing in her lyrics. The line in her song You always get what you wish for, "you always get a little piece of your dreams" underlines what Josie is all about: ultimate triumph over adversity. The reason her music resonates so strongly with teenagers as well as cynical forty-something hacks like me is it strikes a chord with what's best in the new South Africa.

Polling Josie on her views made me think of the market research done for Nova, a failed attempt to start a new Joburg newspaper a year ago. The market research revealed Josie's generation don't have their parent's obsession with race, crime and grime, or politics. Josie entertains and is entertained by her fellow Joburgers. She's a vegetarian, anti-firearms, a gym goer, positive about the future, proudly South African... pretty much the exact opposite of Daily Sun supremo Deon du Plessis under whose stewardship Nova ignored all this market research and pitched itself at a tiny niche who found the Citizen too left wing.

In Josie, South Africa's healthily optimistic youth have found a voice, and what a beautifully strong voice.

A theme that keeps coming up both in Josie's lyrics and conversation is honesty. She dropped out of an advertising course after school because she couldn't stand the idea of lying to people.

During the radio interview, she said: "My first rule of songwriting is: stay honest. If you're not honest in your writing, the public will notice. People are not stupid and they can spot fakes. If you are honestly yourself, you can do no wrong."

While Josie was doing a soliloquy on artistic integrity during the radio interview, I as an old cynic was thinking: "Yeah, yeah you little 22-year-old, wait until the pimps who run media in this country force you to prostitute yourself, and let's see if you still have these ideals."

But Josie really is different. She has got to the top of Highveld's hit parade without yielding an inch to the arbiters of radio-friendliness. Under that soft feminine exterior is one tough cookie. She has demonstrated radio listeners don't want what the so-called experts think they do.

Her musical career started at around 15 when an uncle gave her a guitar and taught her a couple of chords.

"Because I didn't know how to play anything, I started writing with those chords and it kind of progressed from there and it's been a major outlet for all kinds of feelings and frustrations, so being able to write songs has definitely been an important part of my life."

One of the tracks on Mercury, White Girl, she wrote when she was 17. "I've lived in Jozie my whole life. That song White Girl I wrote when I was in school about being a white girl in this beautiful country we live in and talks about a fork in the road. It sums up when you're young what path you want to take in life and what you want to do in your life."

After the radio pre-record, Josie offered to take up my lunch invitation. She ordered something both vegetarian and cheap. I've been doing way too much male bonding since my divorce, where the only vegetarian part of the diet is beer, so I ordered the same thing.

Josie tried to insist on paying half the bill. Being number one on Highveld doesn't translate into commercial success, and like most local musicians, Josie barely scrapes by.

I wish I could say I have lunch dates with beautiful girls half my age all the time, but I'd be lying. I told Josie it was my pleasure to pick up the tab, and it truly was.

She's not just a heroine for Joburg's teenagers, but for cynical forty-something hacks like me too.

And a song: Josie Field - 10 Years

Josie Field

Jozie's Josie Field

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