Hip hop identity in a township reality. - Poppunt

apartheid state imposed before 1990 and how these constrained the development of
youth cultures.
“(…) and it was much harder for youth to plug into the global youth scene
and the commodities of youth culture were much harder to procure. You
had to go to great lengths to get hold of hip-hop tapes and videos, as well as
the other commodities that are so important to developing youth identities
such as clothes and drugs.” (Badsha: 136)
As already mentioned, rap music was not played on South African radio stations, so
one had to be reasonably determined to get access to hip hop material because this
was not readily available. In an interview with Patrick Neate, Ready D recalls:
“We used to get music from pen friends and family who’d been forced to move
out of South Africa. They’d send tapes, letters and magazines because you
couldn’t get the music here. If hip hop did come in it would only be one or
two copies and we’d fight over them. One copy would circulate through the
whole of the Cape Flats. If one crew got a tape from an aunt or cousin
somewhere else in the world, that tape or a copy of that tape or a copy of a
copy of that tape would circulate even if you had to press your ear to the
speaker to hear what was left of the music beneath the crackling.” (Ready
cited in Neate: 131)
Although hip hop was not readily available for these youths, Neate states it was still
a relatively accessible cultural form, because of the relative economic and political
privileges of the coloured community, at least compared to those of the black
community. They had to make copies of copies, but did manage to get original tapes
via their overseas contacts, which was more than their black counterparts could get
access to (Neate: 136). Eventually, the youths in the coloured community could
manage to link into international hip hop networks and could lay hands on music
tapes and videos, which were illegally copied and distributed through informal
networks (Badsha: 136), as Ready D explained.
Badsha states that it was only after South Africa had opened its borders and
international trade sanctions against it were lifted, commodities of youth culture in
general became more accessible to more people (Badsha: 137). This was also true
for hip hop. All of our black interviewees were listening to hip hop from the mid
nineties on. We do not wish to conclude from this information that this is because
they did not have access to hip hop music before this time. One reason is that they
are all a lot younger than our coloured interviewees. They were all about twelve to
thirteen years old when they started listening to hip hop in the mid nineties. This is
an average age at which a lot of youths’ musical tastes starts to change. In all of the