Enjoy.

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

Pop music is pop music. That’s what I’ve learned. It doesn’t matter where you are – the US, UK, Australia, France, Italy, or Germany. Take a look at the Top 10 on iTunes and dollars to donuts you’ve got some pretty similar lists. I mean really similar lists.

But South Africa is on a different continent, maybe we’ve got something different?

Nope. Most of the clubs here play straight Top 40 – Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, Ke$ha, David Guetta, Kanye West. You name it, and I’ve heard it here.

A few weeks ago, when I visited a middle school in Oceanview (a township outside Cape Town), we heard that some kids had a hip-hop dance troupe and were going to be performing. And I was stoked to hear some local hip-hop. There was a DJ there, who played with them. What did I he play? Top 40 hip-hop. Some TI, the David Guetta remix of Black Eyed Peas “I Gotta Feeling,” and a few other songs that just weren’t very noteworthy. They were amazing – apparently they’re internationally ranked – but I couldn’t shake the idea that middle school students in a poor suburb are growing up and listening to our incredibly materialistic music.

I think it’s interesting that South Africa imports music from the US like it does – it’s such a different culture, but they want the same things we want in their music. I don’t know if that’s escapism, or consumerism, or what, but I do know that they like our music, and absorb our messages. For us Americans, our pop music sometimes just feels like stuff we happen to listen to because its on the radio. But by importing it, are South Africans tacitly saying “I support that message, I like the lifestyle they’re selling”? Maybe, it’s hard to tell. Maybe it’s the same reason white kids love gangster rap.

As my hipster-ish professor of African culture likes to say, Cape Town thinks of itself as “a city in the world.” It wants to be global and cosmopolitan, which often has the effect of really pushes aside a lot of issues and local culture.

That’s the other thing – there is SO MUCH GREAT LOCAL MUSIC. Either the really rough kwaito sound or the incredible deep and jacking house sound, they’re so lush and emotive. They have a sound that is definitely not like the music of the US. Now I just have to find some places to actually hear it.

All of this is to say that I don’t really know how much any of this matters – is music just music? Are we making a statement when we listen to particular kinds of music? Is there anything even wrong with that? With the internet making the world global and the easy access to mp3s, is this even a valid conversation anymore? And maybe I’m just being ethnocentric.

Music:

This is kind of a weird selection, but I’m going through old stuff on iTunes and I felt like sharing. It’s hardly new, this song got leaked to a blog in October of 2008. The quality is terrible, because it samples a video game commercial. Seriously.

But it’s so good – I love how playful this thing is. I don’t have a direct mp3 link – I’d upload it, but there’s no way I’m paying $1 just so that you don’t have to wait 15 seconds.

Camron – Oh No You Didn’t [4shared link]