For some odd reason, the Afrikaans word snotkop is nowhere to be found in any of the three respectable bilingual dictionaries I consulted. Translated directly, it means ‘snot head”, but the actual meaning resides somewhere with brat or upstart, with a bit of the outsider thrown in. It is the type of irritating, cheeky character that works on the corseted tits of conservative and patriarchal Afrikanerdom.
This is what Jo’burg singer Francois Henning had in mind when he appropriated the name Snotkop for his latest project of Afrikaans dance-punk, with its loads of sneering kak attitude, sleazy-seductive tunes and beats the size of a sumo wrestler force-fed on koeksisters.
It’s leftfield, yet commercial enough that you once you’ve slotted it into your car stereo, it’s windows down and volume up type of music. It brings a smile of recognition to your face when Henning sings his spiced, witty, albeit angry lyrics.
Even though he is 32 and this self-titled album is his fourth (the first three were as Lekgoa, when he caused quite a stir as a white boy doing kwaito in fluent Sesotho), dressed in his urban-township gear and with his clean-shaven face, Henning still looks the 17-year-old snotkop who had a difficult time fitting in at sports-crazy suburban Hoërskool Randburg.
‘I wasn’t very good at sport and immediately you are labelled either a drop-out or your sexuality gets attacked,” says Henning.
At Randburg, kids were divided into classes based on their academic achievements. ‘The A class is the intellectual kids — down to the J class where I was,” he says with a smile, ‘— that is usually associated with the retards, the rejects, basically kids with no hope.
‘That is where a lot of the frustration and anger come in that is evident on the album.
‘I thought: what name was given to me that I remember the most as a youngster, as somebody that doesn’t really fit in or know much or is looked down upon, brushed aside? And Snotkop was the perfect, perfect symbol of my experiences.”
When we did the interview, Henning and his backing vocalists, the ‘Loslappies”, three sexy young women subversively dressed in school uniforms, had just finished a recording for Stook, a magazine programme on alt-Afrikaans DStv music channel, MK89, where he is hugely popular. It is no surprise because his music expresses eloquently what many young Afrikaners feel.
‘A lot of people of my generation feel: ‘I have a lot to say, I have a lot of creativity, I have a lot of stuff to give but there aren’t a lot of people prepared to give you that opportunity’, so basically that embodies the feeling of the album, the experiences I had as a younger guy,” he says. ‘Even today because I have different opinions, because I do things differently, people immediately put you in a box, saying he’s a ‘Snotkop‘ because he doesn’t do things the same way I do —”
Back to translations, but in the opposite direction: Rebellion translates very well into Afrikaans. Snotkop follows in the footsteps of subversive shit-stirrers such as Anton Goosen, Johannes Kerkorrel, Koos Kombuis, Bernoldus Niemand, Battery 9, Koos, Kobus! and Fokofpolisiekar.
But even in that otherwise company, he took a unique road into Afrikaans music with his kwaito roots.
‘Kwaito and Afrikaans punk-rock are very close to each other,” he says. ‘Kwaito originated off the streets — the subject matter the music deals with is the same stuff.
‘Kwaito is street music, it speaks about issues that touch the youth and frustrates them, makes them angry, but at the same time it also is music you would get drunk on, party with and get rid of all that anger and frustration.
‘The similarities are there, but the difference is that it is in a different language and it caters for a different market. Kwaito has the tendency to push the boundaries and that it what I’m doing with this music.
‘I can speak Sotho fluently and I have a great love for mbaqanga and Eighties bubblegum music, but I also have a great passion for punk music.
‘I decided I am Afrikaans, I have done and lived the kwaito experience for six years, I had a great time and success, but also as a career move I had to move on.”
Even though he has moved from kwaito on to this music, which sounds like a musical potjiekos with the Beastie Boys, AC/DC, ZZ Top, Basement Jaxx, Goldfrapp and Madonna as ingredients, his dress style still says township cleva with his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes.
But in the sexy video of his latest single Vrydagaand (Friday Night), he joins the Loslappies in school uniform.
‘I thought of a couple of institutions and situations where you can find yourself in, where individuality is curtailed, you have to be a certain way, you have to wear a uniform, your voice isn’t really heard — there are lots of institutions like that but the one that affected me the most was school and visually it works well,” Henning explains. ‘Also, you have to be in an institution like that to be able to break the rules.
‘I’m using it as a symbol, I’m not the first, a lot of people used it before me, but in my genre music and the market I cater for I think it is quite a powerful way of saying ‘see how you can change things — this is the box, climb out of it’.”
His fans come from small dorpies or big urban government schools where there are limitations of freedom or individualism. But there are fans with surprising demographics.
‘At one of my shows, a 45-year-old woman came to me and said: ‘You know what, I have waited for something like this for so long.’ I could see the excitement in her and I could see there was somebody who wanted to break loose and say ‘fuck it, fuck everybody!’; that kind of thing I enjoy.
‘There are also kids of 14 years old — in everybody there is somebody that wants to break out and show the middle finger to a person … that is where I hopefully touch people and say it is okay, you can say it and get rid of that kind of stuff. You’re speaking like they speak, the same issues, emotional stuff gets addressed.”
Like any rebel rocker worth his salt, Henning gets up fans’ parents’ noses. ‘At Aardklop a lady came up to me after a show and said, ‘You have to be very careful because you’re corrupting my son.’ He’d bought the album and she could hear the stuff I’m singing about and the language I’m using, and that the kind of direction I’m steering her son in is the wrong direction — I must be very careful, she said, of what I’m doing to young kids in this country!
‘But what she doesn’t understand is that they are already doing it — I’m just a voice for that, saying, ‘It’s okay, you need to do it.’ You can’t live in this illusion that everything is cool, when it is not.
‘She can’t tell me her son doesn’t swear, shag, drink, scream or that he doesn’t feel or question. He does all of that stuff! But now she’s found someone to blame — that’s me.”