them mans make mad money down south, no doubt
(esp from a botswana perspective)
…
but who is this masked mzekezeke ??
bush? bin laden? mandela? tupac?
watch and find out —
(mp$)
like the moon
them mans make mad money down south, no doubt
(esp from a botswana perspective)
…
but who is this masked mzekezeke ??
bush? bin laden? mandela? tupac?
watch and find out —
(mp$)
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great! cheers
man oh man. i miss that station!
Heyy, the repetitive lyrics, the moronic pronunciation, the drawn-out wovels… Is this in fact the Kwaito answer to Chacarron? :D
which station is this from, Erin? i don’t recognize it.
as for kwaito’s “Chacarron,” Birdseed, I’m not so sure. it may partake in the same self-conscious spirit and sense of humor, but it doesn’t seem to be parodying the genre in the same way that “Chacarron” gives reggaeton the piss. Moreover, I really can’t speak to the “moronic” pronunciation, not being South African myself; the repetition seems pretty par for the course (ie, unremarkable), though you might be on to something with the drawn-out vowels. At any rate, it says something about “Chacarron” that you would hear other songs through it’s funhouse lens —
“Moronic” is totally the wrong word. I mean that extremely forced, almost vomit-out-the-words type performance that one of the performers in this video (I guess not Mzekezeke) uses – think Busta Rhymes, Elephant Man or indeed sometimes El Chombo, though I guess generally he’s more laid back. (It’s the other rapper doing the “muhana muhana” (or whatever) bit on “El Gato Volador”, right?) Who came up with that style anyway? Am I right in guessing it’s Jamaican in origin?
Seems to me that you’re seeing/hearing in these different performers something that goes back even further than Jamaica: the jester. I understand that you’re identifying a particular sort of performance style with it, though I’m not sure how easy it would be to locate that in any neat sort of genealogy. As much as I think Busta might be responsible for the recent globalization of such a style (esp as advanced through in-your-face videos), it seems just as likely that this sort of thing would arise on its own in lots of places. So, not so sure about the quest for origins here.
Erin reports via email: “it’s channel O out of south africa. i think it’s supposed to stand for ‘original african’. when i first went to ethiopia in 2004, i watched a fair bit of it and it was pretty much totally american pop music. it’s changed tremendously and in january of this year when i was again in addis, it was pretty much all kweito, all the time. much more true to the station name…”