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| Yahkeem Ben Israel and Mama Iris Mqotsi. |
An award winning luminary in the Eastern Cape hip-hop scene, Yahkeem
Ben Israel is a highly respected lyricist who has been among a few who have
withstood the rigors of time in an art form that breeds despondency. He is a
proponent of what he and his colleagues call “Truth Music”, a sub-genre which
seeks to return hip-hop to its prophetic tradition; a tradition which has been
waning since its incorporation into capitalism.
Yahkeem has recently released an LP called Concrete Thought. A twenty track blitzkrieg that uses hip-hop as a
lens to assess what this country is and is not. From track one titled in-throw, which ends with a visceral
speech from what sounds like Khalid Muhammad, the temperament is an in your
face, no holds barred reckoning with black life. In the song, Yahkeem says
“zihlabana nje ziyalamba/ wonke lombhodamo uzalwa luphango”. Here he utilizes a
Xhosa idiom which speaks of cows in a kraal that fight among themselves because
of hunger. This hunger is what Concrete Thought
is about. A meditation on why there is so much internal conflicts amongst
blacks and equally why they (blacks) reside away from respectability as a race?
The album also functions to raise awareness on the life and times of
one Livingstone Mqotsi, an educator, lawyer and author; a veteran of the Unity
Movement and a committed anti-apartheid community leader who died dissatisfied
with how the lives of the people he loved remained relatively untransformed
after the advent of democracy. Apart from the mediocre song dedicated to his
memory, you are left thinking, shouldn’t the LP have probed more on this
remarkable revolutionary? I feel more needed to be done in the album in order
to popularize his ideas. The song is more biographical than ideas-centered, unlike
what the leader of Unity Movement, I.B Tabata once demanded of those engaged in
the struggle against apartheid. The Unity Movement which Tabata and Mqotsi were
a part of thoroughly respected ideas and I had hoped to get this coming out
clearly with the song in question.
There is an interesting language conundrum which seems to make itself
into a problem for the artist in question. The old colonial versus indigenous
language tension, which often burdens the artist. With a song like indaba kwamkhozi for example, which is the
strongest joint in the LP, Yahkeem sounds at ease with regards to delivery. On
the song he sounds like an old erudite man dispensing oral stories around a
fire whereas on some English songs like same
cause he sounds unsure and lacks the conviction of indaba. This is a problem that will continue to afflict South
African hip-hop for a long time until it is clearly and completely decolonized.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mmogcFBBNs
Black artists representing the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement,
i.e. the Black Arts Movement were already wrestling with this problem of
decolonization of the arts in the late 1960's. Larry Neal, one of its prominent
members, had this to say about this issue in his well-known essay, (Black Arts Movement by Larry Neal),
"It is the opinion of many black writers, I among them, that the western
aesthetic has run its course: it is impossible to construct anything meaningful
in its decaying structure. The cultural values inherent in western history must
be radicalized or destroyed, and we will probably find that even radicalization
is impossible."
What this means is that we have to decide at some point, do we stop
hankering for inclusion in the dominant white value system or do we seek to
reject them and construct a new value system as Biko intimated long ago?
This debate is the most important aspect of Concrete Thought. Apart from the stunning musicianship which drips
from every well-conceived song, what differentiates it from most LPs coming
from the margins of the music industry is its strong revolutionary themes. Most
‘conscious’ art these days resides at the ‘protest’ level. The grotesque thing
about ‘protest’ art is that it seeks recognition and inclusion in the dominant
structure. It is not for the total transformation of the system in order to
allow equal access for all according to merit.
From the onset Yahkeem eschews protesting. He seems to be listening to
the poet Etheridge Knight’s acerbic criticism of protest art which functions
like a sharp assegai stabbing the body of western aesthetic. Knight puts the
problem thusly, "now any black man who masters the technique of his
particular art form, who adheres to the white aesthetic, and who directs his
work toward a white audience is, in one sense, protesting. And implicit in the act
of protest is the belief that a change will be forthcoming once the masters are
aware of the protestor's ‘grievance’ (the very word connotes begging,
supplications to the gods). Only when that belief has faded and protesting end,
will black art begin".
The LP has its moments of weakness, like the rigid nationalist world
view with its homophobic rants of rejecting ‘sodomy’, and the naivety inherent
in songs like come out of here, where
the artist wants to drag misguided brothers and sisters out of the hell-hole
that is racist capitalism, as if it’s that simple. This is naive in that there
is no free zone or space within capitalism, what you have only are the systems’
inner contradictions which when destroyed can offer a new world.
What one gets to confront after the 20th song of a rather longish LP
is the realization that here is an artist who is done with protesting and is on
the road towards the creation of black art, the only art with an aesthetic that
can still offer the whole redemption. Yahkeem’s Concrete Thought is a must have, Shalom Yahkeem!
You will find the review by Unathi Slasha on the same album interesting:
http://www.yahkeembenisrael.blogspot.com/2013/03/concrete-thought-review-penned-by.html
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