Spoek Mathambo
I am coming to accept that I live a life on the periphery. I am not quite in the in circle, and not cool enough for those on the outside. So I set up camp in the margins and oscillate between the two. I am aware that I am about to sound very clichéd, nonetheless I feel the need to share this with you. Cue the sighs — I have this deep fascination with, and envy of, the ways people choose to express themselves through art.
In my peripheral life, with music as my base, I have come to appreciate the top 40 as much as the underground; however, I was not always able to share the two in the same space. Luckily for me, I have seen the margins grow over the past few years. Not only are there more oscillators, but music has morphed into this third space where popular and underground lines have blurred, and there is no better place to see this than in the new energy coming out of American and South African hip-hop.
Hip-hop has always spoken to, and about, those in the margins. It was, and still is, a creative outlet, a means for artists to address society as it exists as much as an entertaining escapism. Before hip-hop purists have me at the stake, we should remember that Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” shared the same space as Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Forces’ “Planet Rock.”
The past few years have ushered in a new school of hip hop artists. They are young, daring, and sometimes uncomfortably obscene. They have introduced a new sound and flow that mostly runs parallel to but occasionally dips into the underground and the commercial. Most importantly, they embrace the periphery much more than I do, and are lauded for it.
2012 has been another good year for hip hop, and one of the best, if not the best, hip hop albums of the year came from a peripheral member, Kendrick Lamar, in “Good Kid, m.A.A.d City.” His popular leading single was the catchiest anti-alcoholism song yet, and we gulped it up with gusto.
Artists such as Odd Future, Danny Brown, the A$AP Mob, Schoolboy Q, and Childish Gambino have challenged hip hop norms by fusing new sounds, flow patterns, and are speaking from a not-so-popular but still impactful space. Artists such as Azealia Banks and Mykki Blanco arguably deserve their own analysis as they defy the artistry in other terms. These artists are yet to command the commercial hip-hop scene; nevertheless they have created this new genre-bending blueprint and have definitely influenced their musical counterparts, and pop culture as a whole.
I have been excited about South Africa’s urban music scene for a while. The sounds coming out of the region suggest a new direction for it. For those of us in South Africa, there is a spring in our step that I believe always existed but was suppressed by this falsely projected African story à la W.E. Du Bois’ “double consciousness.”
For years, South Africa has struggled to tell its story, especially in literature, outside the confines of Apartheid, its horrid legacy, and in recent years the crisis of HIV/AIDS. As a result, there developed an expectation that our music should lament the same woes. The music that became popular outside of South Africa was often sentimental, and in some ways carried the historical grief. More notably, the music was for an older audience — no disrespect.
We have finally broken the “World Music” barrier, injected some youthfulness, and produced a sound that is as much hip-hop, europop, dub, and dubstep as it is uniquely South African. Our music is as much Ladysmith Black Mambazo as it is Spoek Mathambo, Dirty Paraffin, Die Antwoord, and Zaki Ibrahim.
This musical rebirth is telling of the new energy coming out of South Africa. What were once stark lines of divide have blurred into this alternative space for collaboration. The new music is experimental, funky, and at times provocative, shaking us out of our comfort zones and challenging us to rethink anew. The music speaks to a group who are aware of and shaped by South Africa’s past but are not bogged down by it. They are dancing to a new drum beat and expanding this third space to meld what was once divided.
The periphery has spoken and instead of oscillating between the two worlds, they have created an alternative where the popular and underground live simultaneously. This new energy is young and exciting, and shaping pop culture in tremendous ways. It is becoming cool to not be cool, and I am comfortable with that.
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