kagablog

23 June 2008

Last night I compounded the average melancholy of your basic Sunday night by going to watch “Joy Division” at the Encounters Film Festival in Hyde Park. A documentary film about the band of the same name that arose from Manchester in the late seventies, the film is the latest offering from Grant Gee.

Aside from being a gut-wrenching peek into the inner world of one of rock’s more tortured proponents, “Joy Division” really got me thinking about where we as South Africans sit with culture and its importance in our lives. In one interview snippet, the legendary photographer Anton Corbijn remarked that he was surprised when he met the guys from Joy Division because they looked so pale and thin and undernourished. Coming from the Netherlands as he did, where the social system really looked after the people, he spoke of these young northern English lads as you might of a poor cousin or distant relation. And what the film made me think was that in a key way, South Africa is like that poor cousin to the rest of Africa. But it is our culture that is destitute, not our economy.

The Present Has Passed…

We may be an economic powerhouse, but our concern for culture is often a minimalist and alarming feature of our day to day lives. The lament from our artistic community is almost universal: we are starving and we are battling to make a living. Sitting as we are, in the middle of a social revolution and re-invention, it is a telling indictment of our leaders, ourselves and our structures that it only the economics of our world that receive attention. It is revealing that our artists suffer. For is not the artist the mirror of society? Are we not then all suffering under the aspirational yoke of the new consumerist madness that has taken over our collective consciousness?

The Future Is Uncertain

I would love to see an Ian Curtis rise from the ranks of hip hop, kwaito or Afro-pop. Someone that would not be scared to stand up and bare their tortured soul, confide the devastation that living the modern South African life is wreaking. A powerful voice that expresses the discontent that is all around us. The economic view of art is so pervasive that many seem to feel music’s ability to act as en effective social catalyst is exhausted. But as music moves rapidly out of the commercial mainstream, and onto the internet and peer to peer recommendation, perhaps its ability to galvanise, inspire and inform can be re-ignited. If one artist could appear and shout out loud about the injustice, the iniquity, the need for real change, is it not possible that our youth might listen? Might start worrying more about the state of the nation than the likelihood of a new BMW?

It certainly is possible, but likely remains contentious. But in our wild-west landscape of here-today-gone-tomorrow chances, there is very little that MAY not come to pass. All it takes is a vision….

this article originally appeared on dave’s blog at thetimes