With its sniffy underground purists and predilection for vernacular lyrics Durban can have a obstinate hip-hop heart to be conquered; beating somewhere in an ethereal mix of idealism, perceived authenticity and fantasy.
When Jozi-based MC Zubz performed with DJ Hamma at the launch of his album, Headphone Music in a Parallel World (Outrageous Records) at the Bat Centre’s Sipho Gumede Hall recently, the acolytes were bouncing up close and personal, the dissenters holding back mimicking the American inflections in Zubz’s delivery and noting the similarities to artists like Talib Kweli.
The hall was a fifth full and the sound was adequate, in the way that a D-Cup can be for someone whose nom-de-porn is Pandora Peaks. It is a gloomy and acoustically hollow venue when not filled to capacity but two factors saved this gig: Zubz’s professional approach to hyping the crowd and DJ Hamma’s textural manoeuvres in the dark: the man does not scratch as much as pinpoint every aural lesion before ripping at it with precision.
The set was a mixture of identifiable songs from Zubz’s debut, Listeners Digest, like The Legend of the Golden Mic and newer tracks from Headphone Music like Premier MC, where Zubz’s infusion of the names of English and South African football clubs into the narrative is rather well done.
Tracks like the Fire Song underlined why Zubz is held in such high esteem by contemporaries, taking ideas of Africanism and identity away from the banal references to “Shaka Zulu,” “mother Africa” and “drumbeats” — which still predominate — into the more intelligent plain of, for example, African oral tradition and its relation to the genealÃogy of hip-hop.
Zubz says Headphone Music contains some of his most conscious efforts to date, which he attributes to a “mental and paradigm shift” while touring with his band The Origins in Finland and Norway earlier this year. Aside from performing, he participated in forums and panel discussions tied to African History Week in Norway and the Young African Project in Finland: “I met some very radical pro-Black and Pro-African people, and when you start speaking about what the reality is in South Africa, it hits you: ‘Is this how we are living?’ You realise that, as an MC, you have a role to play, to be like Morpheus presenting Neo with the choice of two pills in The Matrix,” he says pointing out songs such as Fight Back! and Get Out!, which ask uneasy questions about the new South African dream.
The fact that Zubz toured Durban and Port Elizabeth with just an MC is an indictment on the hip-hop promoters in the country — this is 2006. The MC/DJ combination may historically be the bedrock of hip-hop live performance, but it needs updating.
Zubz believes it “all boils down to money” and that despite the gloss of hip-hop cultures assimilation into decline” where infrastructure and professionalism has been neglected and creativity sacrificed at the alter of profit margins.