The official video for ‘Liberate Yourself,’ the first single of the (upcoming) album of Cape Town rapper, Terror MC (coming soon, according to the producers) — is finally online.
Shot entirely in Kraaifontein and Bishop Lavis, two coloured Cape Town townships, the video, according to director Mustafa Maluka, ‘… shows people and places that are rarely seen on television.’ Thomas Gesthuizen (better know for his work on Africanhop.com) took care of the camera work. (The image illustrating this post is by Maluka).
You can see the video here.
For a fresher’s course on Terror MC’s sound, check his myspace page. I have blogged before (on my old blog) about the impact of Terror MC — ‘… the illest Afrikaans language rhymespitter on the Cape Flats’ — on South African hip hop. Here it is again:
Hip hop have always thrived on Cape Town’s Cape Flats; that vast expanse of coloured and African working class neighborhoods on the periphery of the city’s mostly white and wealthy center.
Rap pioneers Prophets of da City (the subject of a recent documentary by Dylan Valley and Sean Drummond), Black Noise (reinterpreting Afrika Bambataa on African soil), and Brasse vannie Kaap (probably the closest thing to hip hop rockers; their song ‘Cape Flats’ a romp with reggae rockers Nine the best example) are all products of the Flats’ townships.
The success and visibility of these bands — in the days before Youtube, MySpace, MP3s, streaming and the partial democratization of technology — was tied down by legal apartheid or uncertainty about how to access the post-1994 mainstream music industry more dependent on television and radio spins. A group’s popularity and success was also dependent on how fanatical their local followings were (I saw Brasse in civic centers and school halls all over Cape Town). Finally, a band or artist’s impact or success was measured by their mainstream breakthrough (playing at overwhelmingly white venues or festivals was the key to mainstream media pick-up) or international recognition (mainly in Europe). These artists often got plenty of attention (and got paid also), but also struggled to be artists in their own right.
Artists like the late Devious present a transitional case: Attuned to the new technology (but with limited access), Devious faced up to a skeptical record company environment (kwaito’s bling guaranteed huge returns, so did Pop Idol-type ‘bands’), but seemed to make a breakthrough using new technologies. Unfortunately he was murdered before he could really take advantage of new opportunities.
The new artists and bands — as varied as Jitsvinger, Ben Sharpa, Konfab and Kallitz — may want all of that, but could care less.
They can make music, despite and at the expense of record labels, commercial (and what’s left of community radio) or mainstream acceptance. For one, technology has changed. They’re all over Youtube, MySpace, Mp3, flickr.com — and some put all their music online for downloading, while others sell online to fans from Reukjavik to Brooklyn.
The most exciting exponent is Terror MC, set to emerge as the representative of the genre’s hard-core. Rapping over dancehall beats, full of braggadacio, and doing so in his mother tongue Afrikaans, this 21 year old MC from Kuilsriver, to the northwest of Cape Town, seems to have the farthest reach and a grasp of the technology and access to Cape Town’s mainstream and underground artistic set.
[…] hop performers around language, class and race. Think for example of Isaac Mutant, Jitsvinger or Terror MC.) It is also present in how Hip Hop Pantsula incorporates Afrikaans into their music (see Proverb […]