Laughing, sunny and talented, the South African singer Pilani Bubu is overflowing with projects for 2022. “I tend to be the workaholic type”, she says, from Port Saint Johns, a city in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, where we reached her shortly before the holidays. She spent a family vacation there with her grandparents. His father was born there, in that part of the country once called the Transkei. It was a Bantustan, one of those regions “reserved” for black populations, created during the apartheid era. Pilani Bubu was born there, in Mthatha, in 1984.
Among the singer’s goals this year, to seduce France. At the beginning of May, his folk fusion album will appear there, Folklore : Chapter 1, already published in South Africa on her label Bupila Publishing, and awarded a prize (Best African Adult Contemporary Album) at the South African Music Awards in 2020. She sings there in a limpid voice – and sometimes slame – her own texts in Xhosa, Mpondo, Zulu and English: Home, for example, in which she denounces “The escalation of domestic violence and that suffered by children”, or Boom Che, which pays homage to “The strength of women”.
Some songs are also inspired by the traditional heritage of South Africa. “Folklore is stories, tales wrongly considered as already acquired, but which are not. My goal is to pass this heritage on to future generations ”, explains the singer. The release in France of his album will be followed by a Folklore : Chapter 2 – volumes 3, 4 and 5 will be released over the next three years -, concerts in Paris and at summer festivals.
France, Pilani Bubu passed there in a gust of wind, in September 2021, guest of the 45e edition of the Métis music festival in Angoulême, as part of a program labeled Africa2020. After a trip to Paris to take a look at fashion week, where she joined designer friends, she then returned home to Johannesburg. The creative energy of Pilani Bubu is not satisfied with a single playing field. Beyond music, composition and songwriting, she claims her eclecticism, says she is passionate regarding design, decoration and interior design, his initial training. She also regularly presents TV shows devoted to it.
Constant desire to create
This year, in addition to her intention to conquer the French public, she would also like to share everything she has prepared during the last two years, since the start of the pandemic. “A very difficult and sad period, but one that I took advantage of to create. The first few months, when everything stopped, I felt a strange euphoria, I was excited to have more time. “ From January, alongside a tour of Ghana and Kenya, she released the first single from her next album, conceived and recorded during the first confinement in South Africa, Lockdown Love Story.
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