Cultural authenticity or cultural contamination: American musical influences on South African hip-hop culture

Abstract

Research into the African music industry tends to be inward-looking in that it focuses more on the internal dynamics of music within specific countries. Little has been done to explore the influence or impact which external music has on African music. This has had the effect of not giving the continent a clearer picture of African people's consumption patterns of Western music. In the long run this ignorance of how African music receives ‘global musical flows’ can actually undermine the search for authentic African identities. The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of the influence some American hip-hop music has had on South Africa's hip-hop musical culture. It would not be possible to discuss all American rappers or their South African counterparts, therefore this article is inclined towards an analysis of the similarities or differences in content and method of rendition, between selected American musicians and the South African hip-hop rapper Proverb, who generally sings about the decay of social morals, his life experiences and growing up in South Africa. This article will mainly focus on his song ‘Sex, drugs and alcohol’. The article argues that although South African hip-hop artists borrow some of their cultural resources from America, the South African artists twist, recreate and even change some of the musical formats that they acquire. This means that the best way to describe South African ‘authentic’ musical identities is to acknowledge cultural ‘contamination’ as the condition of possibility of the South African hip-hop culture.