About Us

Mixtapes is a joint-project by “Cutting Grooves” and “Tune Me What?”, two initiatives dedicated to the preservation and promotion of South African music.

Cutting Grooves is an interactive archive focused on the censorship of popular music during the apartheid and post-apartheid eras in South Africa. This is a forum for sharing experiences, memories, photos, documentary evidence and questions for musicians, fans, scholars, record company reps and anyone else with an interest in popular music censorship. Cutting Grooves is operated by Michael Drewett of the Rhodes University Department of Sociology.

Tune Me What? is podcast and blog by Brett Lock and Leon Lazarus which highlights South African music and artists at home and around the world.

Together we have teamed up to create a series of ‘mixtapes’ on various themes of interest which we hope you’ll enjoy. The debut project is the series on South African songs which featured on the Capital 604 radio charts in the 1980s.