Donald Glover’s critically acclaimed Atlanta is showing on the Fox Life channel on DStv.
The Playlist
Distruction Boyz (Iybhengane): In the world of gqom and related sounds, Distruction Boyz, the production wizards behind Babes Wodumo’s Wololo, straddle a few strains. Their song Iybhengane has both gqom and sgubhu elements, crafted for crossover appeal and dance-floor readiness. The single comes from a Contento Music compilation called Aziwe: KZN Game Changers. The title of the compilation, and the timing of the release, is a signifier of what some folks in the warm province might be listening to this December. (KS)
Atlanta: I have just started watching Atlanta, starring Donald Glover, about two scrubbish cousins, rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) and Earn (Glover), his wannabe manager, trying to climb their way up in the music world. Glover is also the executive producer of this laid-back foray into the grainier side of hip-hop. (MB)
The Reading List
Poisoned Pasts: Legacies of SA’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme. The Nelson Mandela Foundation and Institute for Security Studies’s exhibition makes for hair-raising reading and listening. Using replicas, videos, collected artifacts and installation, the show drives home the fact that this era of apartheid’s genocidal streak is something that cannot be stashed away. The show is exhaustive, and fatiguing, but demands attention, as we wait for the slow turn of justice’s wheels to seal Dr Death Wouter Basson’s fate. (KS)
On the Perils of Market Driven Education: The most recent thing I read was an article in which Noam Chomsky, in an interview with political economist CJ Polychroniou and Lily Sage, talks about the ideological dangers of a market-driven education. The article goes into, though not enough, how modern education is geared towards creating business people to serve a neoliberal, capitalist agenda and not to develop the mental and other capacities of our understanding the world. (MB)