To whom does a music genre belong?

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In Christian Lander and Hagan Engle’s book Stuff South African White People Like, the authors maintain that the annual Oppikoppi music festival is a defining feature of white culture. The book would have been a blatant perpetuation of racial stereotypes was it not meant as a form of satirical commentary. Nonetheless, I recently discovered that such superficiality indeed exists beyond the scope of constructive social criticism.

Let me elaborate. When I began my studies at the University of Cape Town, people from my community prophesied that UCT would change me. Or, to put it in their own words, it would have me turn out “stirvy” (street slang for “fancy” or “uptight”). Now, almost five years later, their anticipation seems to be confirmed. No, I didn’t start calling my peers “dude” instead of “my bru”; rather, a couple of guys whom I grew up with, recently heard that I would be accompanying a varsity friend of mine to the upcoming Synergy Live music festival. “Are you serious? Rock music?” they said with facial expressions of those of someone who has just swallowed some unpleasant medicine. Needless to say, I was then facetiously labelled a coconut.

Rohan Magerman

The thing is, growing up in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, we were enthusiasts of hip hop culture. Some of those boys from my community are skilled breakdancers, freestylers and graffiti artists. As teenagers we sometimes wore silver chains, oversized T-shirts and our caps front to back. We had a particular way of speaking, and we thought that made us cool. But most importantly, we listened to the likes of Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube and Tupac. Yes, we identified with the rhythmic beats and crude lyrics of American rap music.

We rejected other music genres and would often tease those guys who listened to rock or Britney Spears.

Today, the bulk of my iPod playlist comprises hip hop music. Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Drake, Kid Ink and Wyclef Jean, to name a few. But aside from being the genre that appeals to me the most, I now realise how much it appears as an institutionalisation. As a coloured male from a lower socio-economic upbringing I am expected to have a preference for hip hop. If I listen to rock, then I’m a coconut – according to my friends’ standards, at least.

Music can play a part in shaping one’s personal identity, but when it is a fixed indication of race and ethnicity, it becomes problematic. Music preferences, unlike an individual’s skin colour, are not genetically inherent.

In 2013 researchers at UCT administered what is known as Imitation Games – a study that required participants to fake their cultural and racial identity. Prompted by questions like “What type of music do you listen to?” a student’s fabricated identity could easily have been in accordance with their ideological frame of reference. For example, if a coloured student had to pretend to be white, the most obvious answer to the music question would have been “heavy metal”, purely because it is so easy to accept that white people take a liking to rock music. This, however, is a flawed paradigm that should not influence how we understand popular music, for it often leads to categorising certain groups.

Steve Hofmeyr (source: LitNet)
Goldfish (source: www.all4women.co.za)
Mandoza (source: beat-vreemdeling.blogspot.com)
Freshlyground (source: www.meetup.com)

We do not live in a country where music is not produced, performed and received at a slight level of racial division. Lander and Engler could be on point in their book: whites usually outnumber other race groups at rockmusic festivals. Moreover, some compilation albums, such as Ons Eie Country, Konings and Goue Sokkie Treffers contain the music of white musicians only. In music stores the South African rock, country and pop sections prominently feature white artists; much of the kwaito, hip hop, jazz and soul sections consist of black artists’ music. Visit any shebeen in the townships and you’ll most likely be surrounded by black patrons and entertained with kwaito and hip hop. I remember when a group of varsity friends and I once had a night out at an upscale pub in a small Boland town. The majority of its patrons were Afrikaans-speaking whites – for this reason the DJ considered Steve Hofmeyr, Kurt Darren and Juanita du Plessis to be appropriate music for the night.

Controversy recently surrounded the female rapper Iggy Azalea for her racist remarks on Twitter. At the same time hip hop fans and artists lashed out at Azalea for (mis)appropriating what is considered to be black culture. Being a small-town white girl from Australia, rising to fame in the American hip hop industry in a matter of two years surely sounds inspirational, yet, there are those who believe that Azalea’s personal brand and musical pursuits are nothing but pseudo-hip hop. This despite Azalea’s having earned herself the honorary headline in Forbes magazine, “Hip hop is run by a white, blonde Australian woman.”

The aforementioned instances raise the question: To whom does a music genre belong? Is it politically accurate to speak of “white” or “black” music? Why do we commonly designate hip hop to gangsters, reggae to Rastafarians, gospel to converted Christians, and bubblegum pop to teenage girls?

This unfavourable notion of music ownership stretches back to the roots of certain genres. Kwaito and hip hop, for instance, have each developed within black culture and been introduced to the world by black people. Kwaito – a mixture of traditional African music styles such as kwela and mbube – was fundamentally about celebrating life in underdeveloped black urban areas during the apartheid regime. Kwaito musicians from the townships sang about the townships and found a natural audience in the streets and shebeens of the townships. Hip hop emerged as a cultural phenomenon in the 1970s among African American and Latino youths in the marginalised parts of New York. Since then it has spread to many countries, including South Africa, where it has established itself as a popular genre amongst local black musicians. The message of early hip hop and kwaito was often an expression of group values and the social injustices that musicians and their audience experienced at the time.

Music does not, and ought not to, have barriers determined by skin colour. No racial group can claim a music genre as their own, or presume they can produce it better than other racial groups because they invented or dominate the genre.

South African music is perhaps a matter of language, one could argue. Kwaito and house are typically not performed in Afrikaans, while it is uncommon for rock and its subcategories to draw upon Bantu languages. We normally think of local pop, rock and country as English and Afrikaans genres, whereas kwaito, jazz and soul take mainly to indigenous African languages. But there is no such thing as “black” and “white” genres, since cultural shifts and hybridisations happen frequently in contemporary music. Below are some examples that prove that South African music is, in fact, not exclusive anymore:

  • Hip hop artists nowadays tend to sample classical and jazz music in their songs.
  • Goldfish produces electronic dance music that incorporates jazz and African sounds.
  • Crazy White Boy’s music is a mixture of house and kwaito.
  • Danny K and Mandoza’s joint album Same Difference (2006) blends pop, R&B, kwaito and hip hop.
  • Interracial bands and collaborations such as Freshlyground, Mi Casa, Beatenberg with DJ Clock, and The Parlotones with Zolani Mahola.
  • White Afrikaans rappers Jack Parow, Die Antwoord and Snotkop.
  • Coloured rock bands Playing With Reason (who introduced me to rock music, may I add) and Southpaw.
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