Music Break / DJ Hamma and Jitsvinger

We liked the previous recent work by DJ Hamma and Jitsvinger. No surprise then the result of the two of them collaborating is dope. The track is lifted from the album we blogged about last year, but the video’s new. DJ Hamma says: “We shot it in August 2010. I was initially very disappointed with the shoot and the footage. Too much drama… The footage wasn’t enough, not what I asked for and didn’t follow the initial storyline we had in mind. I wanted to redo the shoot but got caught up in my life and travels as a dj and producer. I just about gave up on it but due to the mounting requests from people for this particular song I decided to have another look at the footage. The idea was to see if I could slap something remotely decent together to become the ‘unofficial’ video representation of this track. “Niks om te se nie” translates as “Nothing to say”. Jitsvinger expresses his views regarding modern day mc’ing. He feels that mainstream hiphop lacks lyrical substance and doesn’t really relate to the mind and thinking of the general listener or followers of hiphop music. In the end it’s all politics. It’s like he sees it as the common fast food franchise… no matter where you buy your meal it will taste the same… Mc’s became these carbon copies of what they see on tv. We believe in ‘doing us’… this song expresses that to the fullest and with no apologies nor shame.”

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.