I dug this track when I first heard it a few weeks back, but after seeing the video, scraaaatch! Whoever produced this, must have been drunk having just come out of a heavy seance with the spirit of Joseph Conrad. Post-World Cup South Africa fever someone thought it wise to cast Chipmunk on top of Lion's Head, Cape Town and have what looks like Zulu dancers all around him whilst dropping phrases in Swahili.
I really hope you have a map of Africa while reading this: Zulu - KwaZulu Natal on the eastern side of South Africa, Swahili - Central and East Africa, Lion's Head - in the most southern city in Africa. Some people, Africans included, would just pass this over and wonder what's upsetting me: well for a start, the continued misrepresentation of Africa as a monolithic space where cultures, languages and peoples are all melded into one. This image is constantly being produced and being profited because Africa is still packaged and consumed in the Heart of Darkness format no matter how many Chinua Achebes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies and Binyavanga Wainanas 'write back' and deconstruct the myth, the parasitic profiteers just won't stop.
Also it's one thing to show the traditional and natural side of Africa in a hip hop video, but it's quite another to continue to produce images of Africa as a place of eternal natural exoticism that holds Whiteness as the most valued. What's that about?
Chipmunk is still okay with me, but this video just sucks. I dump it in the same pile as Shakira and Akon ft Keri Hilson's nonsense during the World Cup Africa Fever.
BTW when it cuts to the dark haired girl, does he say dykie or am I mishearing?
...On the grime scene, I bet Lowkey's laughing at 'the industry's very own Amy Winehouse.'
...On the grime scene, I bet Lowkey's laughing at 'the industry's very own Amy Winehouse.'
4 comments:
Point taken blud, hadn't even thought that far, I thought WTF when the white gal in tiger print came out and Munk is checking for her.
Chipmunk sold out to the game long time ago. Man can't hold a bar to Lowkey, he got murked on Warning!
OMG he had to use all the stereotypes didn't he? Didn't he get the memo, Africa doesn't need his kind of exposure. Obviously, money is not a measure of talent or brains.
ST
Chipmunk's a pregant head twat, he makes plastic music then tries to diss Dot Rotten, dat wuz weak. Man no match 4 Dot, man got chopd dwn n Lowkey rippd him, still. Dis wuz proper shot at Pinewood Studios and he was put on Lion's Head and blended into them bush scenes, by computr it aint real.
Brizzy
Thankks for this
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