Born To Kwaito

Born To Kwaito
Author: Esinako Ndabeni
Publisher: Blackbird Books
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2018-08-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1928337783

"Born To Kwaito considers the meaning of kwaito music now. °Now not only as in °after 1994' or the Truth Commission but as a place in the psyche of black people in post-apartheid South Africa. This collection of essays tackles the changing meaning of the genre after its decline and its ever-contested relevance. Through rigorous historical analysis as well as threads of narrative journalism Born To Kwaito interrogates issues of artistic autonomy, the politics of language in the music, and whether the music is part of a strand within the larger feminist movement in South Africa. Candid and insightful interviews from the genre's foremost innovators and torchbearers, such as Mandla Spikiri, Arthur Mafokate, Robbie Malinga and Lance Stehr, provide unique historical context to kwaito music's greatest highs, most captivating hits and most devastating lows. Born To Kwaito offers up a history of the genre from below by having conversations not only with musicians but with fans, engineers, photographers and filmmakers who bore witness to a revolution. Living in a place between criticism and biography, Born To Kwaito merges academic theories and rigorous journalism to offer a new understanding into how the genre influenced other art forms such as fashion, TV and film. The book also reflects on how some of the music's best hits have found new life through the mouths of local hip-hop's current kingmakers and opened kwaito up to a new generation. The book does not pretend to be an exhaustive history of the genre but rather a present active analysis of that history as it settles and finds its meaning

Born to Kwaito

Born to Kwaito
Author: Esinako Ndabeni
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2018
Genre: MUSIC
ISBN: 9781928337775

Kwaito's Promise

Kwaito's Promise
Author: Gavin Steingo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022636268X

In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country’s urban black youth developed kwaito—a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today—who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime—Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa’s crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them. Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Interacting with kwaito artists and fans, he shows that youth aren’t escaping their social condition through kwaito but rather using it to expand their sensory realities and generate new possibilities. Resisting the truism that “music is always political,” Steingo elucidates a music that thrives on its radically ambiguous relationship with politics, power, and the state.

Kwaito Bodies

Kwaito Bodies
Author: Xavier Livermon
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2020-04-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1478007354

In Kwaito Bodies Xavier Livermon examines the cultural politics of the youthful black body in South Africa through the performance, representation, and consumption of kwaito, a style of electronic dance music that emerged following the end of apartheid. Drawing on fieldwork in Johannesburg's nightclubs and analyses of musical performances and recordings, Livermon applies a black queer and black feminist studies framework to kwaito. He shows how kwaito culture operates as an alternative politics that challenges the dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. Artists such as Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza rescripted notions of acceptable femininity and masculinity, while groups like Boom Shaka enunciated an Afrodiasporic politics. In these ways, kwaito culture recontextualizes practices and notions of freedom within the social constraints that the legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and economic inequality place on young South Africans. At the same time, kwaito speaks to the ways in which these legacies reverberate between cosmopolitan Johannesburg and the diaspora. In foregrounding this dynamic, Livermon demonstrates that kwaito culture operates as a site for understanding the triumphs, challenges, and politics of post-apartheid South Africa.

Stand Against Bland

Stand Against Bland
Author: Sylvester Chauke
Publisher: Blackbird Books
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2019-11-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1990907016

ulti-award-winning Sylvester Chauke is a self-confessed Madonna crazy, entrepreneur and founder of DNA Brand Architects. After an illustrious career as the national marketing manager for Nando’s South Africa, Sylvester joined broadcasting giant MTV Networks Africa as its director of marketing and communication. In 2012, Sylvester established DNA Brand Architects, a marketing and brand consultancy that works with some of the most revered brands on the continent including Vodacom, Pernod Ricard, SABMiller, Boardmans and Steers. Being a change leader, Chauke has a unique approach, ‘stand against bland’, which has allowed him to stand out as a powerful creative and marketing force. His track record is undeniable and his reign as the country’s number one marketing maverick keeps teaching the rest of us why we must choose to Stand Against Bland. This book illustrates the colourful career of a man often referred to as ‘the dancing CEO’ – due to his tradition of bringing dancing into the office – and also takes readers inside the mind of a man who has stood out, brilliantly and consistently, from the rest.

Soweto

Soweto
Author: Jodi Bieber
Publisher: Jacana Media
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2010
Genre: Documentary photography
ISBN: 1770098062

"Acclaimed home-grown photographer, Jodi Bieber has created an open-ended essay which is a celebration and a portrait of life in Soweto today. The importance of Soweto in the collective consciousness is hard to overstate. It registers as a place born of resistance, perhaps even embodying the South African struggle for freedom. But the birth of Kwaito is attributed to Soweto too. And beyond the grand narratives, there is and always was a proliferation of dancing, art and fashion in this place defined by its energy and cosmopolitan nature. Labelling and un-labelling, claiming and discarding, Sowetans have created Soweto anew - a phenomenon that is celebrated in this photographic publication which contemplates daily lived realities where here, as elsewhere, South Africans are continually reinventing themselves and their urban space."--Publisher's website.

The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect
Author: Marcus J. Moore
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1982107596

This “smart, confident, and necessary” (Shea Serrano, New York Times bestselling author) first cultural biography of rap superstar and “master of storytelling” (The New Yorker) Kendrick Lamar explores his meteoric rise to fame and his profound impact on a racially fraught America­—perfect for fans of Zack O’Malley Greenburg’s Empire State of Mind. Kendrick Lamar is at the top of his game. The thirteen-time Grammy Award­-winning rapper is just in his early thirties, but he’s already won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, produced and curated the soundtrack of the megahit film Black Panther, and has been named one of Time’s 100 Influential People. But what’s even more striking about the Compton-born lyricist and performer is how he’s established himself as a formidable adversary of oppression and force for change. Through his confessional poetics, his politically charged anthems, and his radical performances, Lamar has become a beacon of light for countless people. Written by veteran journalist and music critic Marcus J. Moore, this is much more than the first biography of Kendrick Lamar. “It’s an analytical deep dive into the life of that good kid whose m.A.A.d city raised him, and how it sparked a fire within Kendrick Lamar to change history” (Kathy Iandoli, author of Baby Girl) for the better.

All Gomorrahs are the Same

All Gomorrahs are the Same
Author: Thenjiwe Mswane
Publisher: Blackbird Books
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2021-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 192070387X

This epic tale is narrated through the eyes of three women. Makhosi, who seems to be angry with the world and unable to find the language to make her mother, and sister understand her ‘anger’. Duduzile, Makhosi’s mother. A working-class mother who feels herself lose touch with her daughter. Nonhle, Makhosi’s younger sister, who watches her sister grow while the gap between her sister and mother widen and them continuously miss each other. This story lets the reader into the very complicated generational conversations within black families on a varying a range of issues, womanhood, parenting, sexuality, sexual abuse and most importantly, mental health, addiction and loss. Is this a heavy read? Yes! But it is also the most enlightening read you will come across this year. on and loss.

This Book Betrays My Brother

This Book Betrays My Brother
Author: Kagiso Lesego Molope
Publisher: Mawenzi House Publishers Limited
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 9781988449296

All her life, Naledi has been in awe of Basi, her charming and outgoing older brother. Their childhood was filled with jokes and secrets, alliances, and stories about the community. Having reached thirteen, she is preparing to go to the school dance when she sees Basi commit a rape. When the girl is shamed by the community, but Basi is portrayed as the victim, everything Naledi believes comes into question. -- adapted from back cover and online reviews

Kwaito's Promise

Kwaito's Promise
Author: Gavin Steingo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022636254X

Examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today - who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime - Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa's crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them