Last week, a youth culture archive named Staticphlow went live two days before Youth Day. I joined heads with some scholars, activists and hip-hop DJs and MCs to finally do something about our complaints that youth culture is both exploited and neglected. You might say that youth culture suffers from a sort of double negative. […]
Adam Haupt
Adam Haupt writes about film, media, culture and copyright law. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town and is the author of Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion (HSRC Press, 2008) and Static: Race & Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media & Film (HSRC Press, 2012). In 2010, he was a Mandela Mellon Fellow at Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
Posted inNews/Politics
Crush Occupy Rondebosch Common
It’s been a glorious summer in Cape Town. The heatwave had one and all at swimming pools and beaches all over the Cape. Long Street was packed with clubbers and tourists from all over the world. Drinks flowed freely: Hennessy, Bacardi, Hunters, Carling, you name it. Sadly, it was spoiled by talk of our beloved […]
Posted inNews/Politics
DA, the new UDF…
Helen Zille’s letter to City Press editor Ferial Haffajee on News24 raises interesting new possibilities for the DA. Zille writes, “The DA is the new UDF.” The letter is a response to a News24 column (“How the ANC lost the coloured and Indian vote”) by Haffajee, a former Mail & Guardian editor. In her piece, […]
Posted inNews/Politics
For Andries Tatane
Paper rights with blood splatters over them. The new Rorschach test. What do you see? I see black empowerment. I see Strange Fruit falling from the tree of Ubuntu. I see blue is the new black. What did I do to be so black and blue? I see Tumi singing “My black president does me […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Max, the TRIBE has spoken
I must admit that I am enlightened by the insights of so many racial identity experts who make their views known in the variety of media available to South Africans of all shades and persuasions. It seems that every time I read a newspaper or log on to a social media site, I can read […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Make Poverty History (Bono Remix)
Despite what John Pilger, or any other investigative journalist might have to say, I have always been a big U2 fan. I was hooked with Sunday Bloody Sunday back when Radio 5’s Barney Simon would play it practically every night, along with The Cure and other alternative gems. By the time I made it out […]
Posted inGeneral
Born-frees will learn the ‘value’ of freedom
Since 1994, there has been a lot of talk about South Africa’s lost generation — the Y generation that is apathetic, apolitical, consumerist and vulnerable to a range of social ills, such as substance abuse and Aids. More recently, we have heard talk of the so-called born-frees growing up in ignorance of the hardships that […]