kagablog

b-girls, century city

Hip hop embodies the logics of self-empowerment and a conscious resistance which may start in the mind, but must permeate every aspect of day-to-day life (cf. de Certeau, 1984). As Falco and Dré point out, it provides an accessible distraction from the anomie experienced by many young people from disadvantaged areas, widening perceived possibilities and encouraging ingenuity. Participation does not demand much in the way of material goods, just total dedication and a substantial investment of time. It is a positive channel for energy which might well otherwise be diverted towards less innocuous criminal pursuits than painting slogans on walls.

Dré: Hip hop is much more than a music. It’s a form of expression. It’s a form of therapy for kids, you know, to get them out of trouble. It helps them to deal with their experiences. When they write about it, immediately they’re getting rid of a lot of stress and stuff. Focus that anger and use it to make music, and you know. So instead of killing someone or beating them up or something, they’re using that anger, focusing it and putting it into their lyrics. Using it in your productions; using it to keep your b-boying done – using your anger to get focused, you know; using it to get amped up18, that adrenaline pumping… And then you just use it to do something positive. In the states as well it helps a lot of kids out of the gutter, a lot of the kids. And…maybe I didn’t believe it did that to the same degree here [in Cape Town] ‘cos I hear it such a lot man - sometimes I think you get a little bit, you know, frustrated about hearing the same stuff time and time again. But then we had this group of kids last week who came in for a counselling session [at Bush Radio] and they told the counsellor about hip hop and stuff, but she didn’t understand – she was a thirty-five year old, and doesn’t know anything about hip hop. So they had to explain why they wrote the lyrics that they recited, why they did the graffiti and stuff like that. It was amazing just to see how much help it [sic] them get off the streets…

R: What did they say about it exactly?

D: Well, they hang around with kids their own age that’s doing drugs and alcohol and things like that, and when they’re doing their rhymes and graffiti they normally sit in a room by themselves, in their own space, and just focus on their art and stuff and that keeps them from doing that other stuff….

wotz crew, century city

Hip hop is not dogmatically prescriptive in the sense of an archetypal “invented tradition”, whose “object and characteristic…is invariance” (Hobsbawm, 1983:2)… or perhaps its “invariance” lies in its credo of constant individual variance. This makes hip hop attractive as a lifestyle, as it allows extraordinary flexibility compared to the “invented traditions” of more orthodox “cultures” or belief systems available to young people in Cape Town (such as the Islamic faith). Aside from the necessity of observing the “core” practices – emceeing, b-boying, deejaying and graffiti – hip hop promotes individual choice above all. While this may seem to amount to a postmodernist-style “anything goes” injunction, not well-suited to lending deep meaning to everyday experience or defining one’s character, hip hop is, in fact, quintessentially modernist in orientation. One’s intent can, and, it is claimed, should, differ from individual to individual, as it is something that must be personally defined, then lived out through the choices one makes regarding the roles one takes on. Informants such as Big Dré, remarking on their own notions of hip hop, comment on how flexible and personally salient hip hop can be as a result:

Rosemary: I’ve always found the question “What is Hip Hop?” a difficult question – to ask or to answer - for anyone.

Dré: It’s difficult because…it probably differs from person to person… Like I was saying, some people believe if you’re into hip hop you have to smoke weed19, have to have baggy jeans, have to be a bad guy, carry a gun and be Mr Toughie, and things like that…Those are just some impressions I get. But it’s so wide, man. It’s just like a microcosm of what’s going on in life. ‘Cos everything that happens in life happens in hip hop, and you put it into your music and your expression. But the thing is, you have to internalise it, you have to make it personal. Otherwise you gonna be into it for three years and after that you just gonna dump it.

R: So what do you have to internalise exactly?

D: What hip hop is, what it’s about, and how you put things that happen in your life… because that’s all emcees do – the things that they experience they put into their lyrics…into their perspective, ja, and… Try and find your place in hip hop – what is it that you meant to do in hip hop. Then you start expressing yourself through that.