Music Break
I love this track, “It Would Be,” by Cape Town’s Alleycat (government name: Enslin Grootboom) featuring fellow rapper, T100. The song is Cape Town for real: riding the Jamaican riddim, the transplanted patois and the stripped-down video. (Artists in Cape Town rarely do bling unlike their Johannesburg counterpunts.) I also recognize the milieu: The music video was filmed in and around an area, Elsies River on the Cape Flats, where I spent most of my school holidays as a teen a long time ago. (My cousins still live there.) Things haven’t changed much for the city’s poor. As for Alleycat, he’s been rapping since the mid-1980s. In an email, he describes his lyrics as “stirred by emotion – happiness, social welfare, love, fears, amusement, failures and achievements.” Bring that emotion.