Item Details

South African Dialogue

Issue: Vol 5 No. 1 (2018) Hip Hop Activism and Representational Politics

Journal: Journal of World Popular Music

Subject Areas:

Abstract:

The potential for hip hop artists to express dissent, to question socio-political inequalities and contest authoritarian structure is most notably conveyed through lyrical means. Think of the lasting impact of Chuck D’s verses in ‘Fight the Power’ or, more recently, Eminem’s contentious freestyle performed at the 2017 BET Hip Hop Awards. This article explores a different form of lyricism, but one that is no less effective in its activist directive to highlight the need for social change. Through contextual and music textural analysis, I interrogate the transcription of a solo performance by South African turntablist Deon “Ready D” Daniels. In this 2006 piece entitled ‘Krap Kommentaar’ (‘Scratch Commentary’), Daniels carefully selects and manipulates vocal excerpts to challenge the hegemony of standardized over vernacular Afrikaans. The former is primarily associated with white Afrikaners (white South Africans of ostensibly Dutch descent), while the latter is identified with Cape Town’s working-class “mixed-race” or “coloured” population (also the social demographic with whom hip hop in the city is linked). Coloureds are a social grouping actively marginalized by apartheid legislation, and for whom a sense of continued exclusion in the contemporary moment is deeply felt. Thus, by re-contextualizing his source material through sampling and scratching, Daniels (re)inscribes Afrikaans language to suit his own purposes, demonstrating a mastery of the speech form. With this musical intervention, Daniels also confronts received notions of entrenched power, effectively critiquing linguistic barriers to socio-political inclusion.

Author: Warrick Moses

View Original Web Page

References :

Alim, H. Samy. 2016. “Introducing Raciolingustics: Racing Language and Languaging Race in Hyperracial Times”. In Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes our Ideas about Race, edited by H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford and Arnetha F. Ball, 1–30. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Alim, H. Samy and Adam Haupt. 2017. “Reviving Soul(s)with Afrikaaps: Hip Hop as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in South Africa”. In Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, edited by Django Paris and H. Samy Alim, 157–74. New York: Teachers College Press.

Alim, H. Samy and Geneva Smitherman. 2012. Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language and Race in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ariefdien, Shaheen and Rico Chapman. 2014. “Hip Hop, Youth Activism, and the Dilemma of Colored Identity in South Africa”. In Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa: Ni Wakati, edited by Msia Kibona Clark and Mickie Mwanzia Koster, 94–111. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Auner, Joseph. 2003. “‘Sing it for Me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music”. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128/1: 98–122.

Bobel, Chris. 2007. “‘I’m not an activist, though I’ve done a lot of it’: Doing Activism, Being Activist and the ‘Perfect Standard’ in a Contemporary Movement”. Social Movement Studies 6/2: 147–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742830701497277

Byerly, Ingrid Bianca. 1998. “Music, Mediator, and Prophet: The Music Indaba of Late-Apartheid South Africa”. Ethnomusicology 42/1: 1–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/852825

Coetzee, John Maxwell. 1988. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. Connecticut, CT: Yale University Press.

Haupt, Adam. 2003. “Hip-hop, Gender and Agency in the Age of Empire”. Agenda 17/57: 21–29.

—2004. “Bring Da Noise: Youth Culture and Freedom: Identity”. Rhodes Journalism Review 24: 20–23.

Kajikawa, Loren. 2015. Sounding Race in Rap Songs. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

King, Debra. 2004. “Operationalizing Melucci: Metamorphosis and Passion in the Negotiation of Activists’ Multiple Identities”. Mobilization: an International Journal 9: 73–92.

Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384632

Nthodi, Motshile. 1988. “South African Dialogue”. In Explorings: A Collection of Poems for the Young People of South Africa, edited by Robin Malan, 47. Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 2015. Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge.

Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Connecticut, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Roth-Gordon, Jennifer. 2016. “From Upstanding Citizen to North American Rapper and Back Again: The Racial Malleability of Mexican and Poor Male Brazilian Youth”. In Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes our Ideas about Race, edited by H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford and Arnetha F. Ball, 51–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625696.003.0003

Schloss, Joseph. 2004. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Seeger, Charles. 1958. “Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing”. The Musical Quarterly 44/2: 184–95. https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/XLIV.2.184

Willemse, Hein. 2003. “The Black Afrikaans Writer: A Continuing Dichotomy”. In Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft, edited by Steven G. Kellman, 223–34. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Williams, Quentin E. 2016. “Ethnicity and Extreme Locality in South Africa’s Multilingual Hip Hop Ciphas”. In Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes our Ideas about Race, edited by H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford and Arnetha F. Ball, 113–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, Olly. 1974. “The Significance of the Relationship between Afro-American Music and West African Music”. The Black Perspective in Music 1/2: 3–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/1214144