The Black Power Station: I rap what I like

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1:13Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen. Y 'all want to hear some hip-hop? We're on the corner of a dusty street in the small city of Makanda, South Africa. A young man with a mic and some giant speakers is doing publicity for a gig. Ladies and gentlemen, the event is going to be going on in the Black Power Station tonight. The event is called Euphoria. We want you to escape the troubles of this world and feel euphoria. My name is Lutando Zinghela, performing as Damage.

2:03I'm part of Euphoria alongside other local artists. I want to introduce you to some of them. But first, I want to tell you more about the venue, the Black Power Station. Where does that name come from? To find out, we need to leave our men with the mic and go to the edge of town.

2:47My name is Olile Madinda, known as X, the founder of the Black Power Station, an artist. A disused power station on the edge of the city. It's now a venue for local artists to make themselves heard. Growing up in Makanda as an artist, hip-hop artist, around 1996, we didn't have a place to perform. We didn't have a place that allows you to be an artist, to talk politics, even to talk about anything. We wanted to build a space, and I came here by accident because I was meeting a friend. It used to be a power station, according to my father, that powered only one side of the city. Electricity was not accessible to black people.

3:36We know that history. We can't erase it. Yes, it was an empty building with dust and it was run down. And other people were like, it's not going to work. I said, build it, they will come. Because of the idea itself, I was longing for a home. And X has created a space where everyone feels at home. Bookcases line the walls. You can pay for your ticket with a book if you don't have money. You can sit on sofas or chairs or beanbags. You can play the piano at the back. You can go outside for food or mkomboti, traditional African beer. There's a fire in the winter. Makanda is in South Africa's Eastern Cape.

4:21That's the province that produced Nelson Mandela and another famous struggle hero, Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement. He was a student activist in the town, and he was arrested here in August 1977. He was dead less than a month later at the hands of the apartheid regime. His book, I Write What I Like, inspired a generation of young black South Africans, including X. Steve Biko believed that we should be our own catalyst. We are better than what we are told to be. To him, black consciousness was not a political organisation, it was a state of mind. So I learned about Steve Beagle, how the Black Consciousness Movement organized themselves, how Steve Beagle himself built a clinic at the height of the apartheid, being chased by the system.

5:15So I was charged by saying, if I'm influenced by these people, I need to build something. So that's our venue, where euphoria will take place. The Black Pass station is up on a hill above Makanda which used to be called Gramstown and you'll hear both names Driving back into town there's a place you can stop and look out over the whole of the city If you do, you might notice something The houses here they have pools they have nice gardens and there's these trees that are so green in this town But there's a point where these trees stop, and beyond that is another totally different scene. The grass is brown, and it's gravel road.

6:10The houses are all packed up together. Some are built in mud. There are no pools. There are no gardens. This part of the town is called Ikhini. This is where the majority of the black people live. they make up most of the population of the town. These two parts of the town, the green part and the brown part, geographically are very close to one another. But in many other ways, they couldn't be further apart. I want us to get to the tempo of the song. I would usually go for a 90. I know that for me. Music is part of making sense of life on the brown side of town. and I'm trying to help others to do the same.

6:59My name is Ovayo Dandani. People know me as Father, the vocalist. I'm doing love songs in Afropop, so yeah. I found Ovayo singing in the street with his friends. I liked his voice and asked him if he wanted to come and do some recording at my studio. That's my bedroom studio in the backyard of my parents' house. He said yes, he's still at school, but he's passionate about making music. I was nine years old and I was at primary. I was always writing the lyrics on my notebook and my teachers always shouting me and calling my father to come to school. They were judging me and they were saying, you are very crazy.

7:53The thing that you are doing, it will not take you far. What was the chorus before? So it's where I started to recognize myself, what is gifted by God.

8:11Vava and I are working on a new song. It's about a girl he loves who has moved to another town and how he misses her. Because he's not just writing and recording, Now he's going to get a chance to perform on the stage of the Black Power Station at Euphoria that's coming up soon.

8:31I'm Dr. Alet Skern. I'm a senior lecturer at Rhodes University. My PhD was on the digital ecologies of hip-hop artists in Makanda. When I was doing my research between 2014 and 2016, most of the hip-hop artists were unemployed. Others had very modest jobs. They were living in little shacks at the back of their parents' small brick homes, washing from the outside tap, outside toilet. Quite difficult lives, and the computers they had did not have Wi-Fi connections, and they just had this sort of one wire connection from the main house. So there would be constant electrical surges that would blow their power units, etc.

9:23So they would always have a box which they'd cannibalized other computers with old power units and fans, etc. that they would reconnect.

9:36My name is Silubonile Kebe. I go by the artist named Lou Banks. We would record in a Wendy house. We created like a booth over a mic with egg boxes. And then we'd have to cover ourselves with a blanket and record through. So when it rains, the Wendy house is like... And then we have to wait. The town is economically being degraded. Everyone's leaving. No one wants to be here. There's no water. The service delivery is horrible. There's no electricity. We have power outages randomly and it can be gone for a whole day. There's a lot of corruption. The hip-hop activities were very much about asserting your worth in the world.

10:20That you were a human being, that you were not just subsisting, but you were creative. You had something to say and that it was valuable and you were finding ways to think through the difficulties of your community.

10:39My name is Tabi So. I go under the name Sir Saskavash. And the type of music I do is basically emo rap with a touch of trap. A huge concentration of artists now are coming out because they're like, hey, we can actually be something with this. You can talk about the situations that you're going through at home. There's a water crisis going on. You can put that in a song.

11:02My name is Nathan. I perform under NTR. It's hip-hop and sometimes it's gospel rap. Some people also don't have the sense of freedom of speech. They need it to communicate. So I think some people do it through music. I was speaking to God through music. Maybe they were speaking to the government through music so that other people in the world can hear them and what's really going on in Wakanda. My name is Kanyisa, but I don't go by the name CRISPR, RSA. It's hip-hop, boom-bap, like the culture's rap. That's where I get to get things off the chest. As much as I'm a good writer, I'm not good enough when it comes to vocaling out myself.

11:44So I would rather divulge a lot on what's happening around my community and amongst my peers and put that inner form of a song.

12:01Just listening, eh? For some people, you can't find a job, you can't find work, and you try and make it happen with the music. My name is James Erasmus. I'm a music producer and I'm also an event organizer, and I'm organizing the show Euphoria at the Black Power Station. I started just recording friends that I knew that rapped, and then it spread word of mouth. They heard, oh, James is recording people. OK, let's go.

12:36Let's add an ad lib on wise. The thing that is the most exciting and interesting to me is when you see somebody start hearing it come together and that excitement that they get and you're like, this is somebody that just loves music, that has so much ability but has never been able to express it before. I think you can write a better rhyme than all love. Or somebody like Scotty who had never recorded anything before and now they've got an outlet and it's just, yeah. Give me a second, I'm cooking. Oh, OK. I am Hilary Masikati. I go by Dollar Sign Scotty. I don't know, music just kept on choosing me.

13:12Even when I spoke, let's say I am presenting something in front of the class, this hand would always just be moving like this, to the point that somebody pointed it out, that you're a rapper. I'm like, what you talking about? So with the beat. It's a way of dealing with things either by writing directly to issues or by ignoring it and writing about sex and drugs and forgetting for a little bit. Family is something that gets spoken about. In South Africa within Xhosa culture, the family is such a big part of who you are. It's Ubuntu, I am because we are. You will see more songs about people's mothers and grandmothers.

14:00That's where you wanted back in. I was at my friend's house. So I'm like, yo, let's open some beats. I'm listening. But then I also saw the title was written Gogo, right? Which is grandmother. And it just started flowing.

14:18I come from like a misfortune type background, right? I never really got anything I needed, all of those things, right? I went to Joburg, I lived with my grandmother for two years. That woman showed me true love. I never went to no therapy. I don't trust nobody enough to tell them about my actual life. Through writing the music, I gained the healing that I've been taking.

14:52Just you know it's all love.

14:57So what are we looking at for today? Have you loved? No, no, no, not love. The Makana music scene is mainly filled with young men trying to work out how to make their way in the world. But it's not just men. My name is Azaseve Kwanza. I go by the name of Kwanza Jr. I'm also part of a group called Itole SA. The type of music I do, it's Afro soul, based on true life stories, things that people encounter every day. I'm thinking of... I prefer hearing the beat before I write. I want to hear the emotion of the beat and then it will tell me which concept I should write about. These are gonna be shakers.

15:45So the floor is like I think the song should be like more of a wake-up song to people, right? At some point you have to find your ground in life. So we're basically saying take off your coat and go get ready to find wherever they're closing the doors, go open them.

16:14I started doing music because we're healing music. Music heals us before it heals people. And that's where we find peace. That's where we build characters. Who we are today is because of the music we do.

16:33You know, I've worked with you for a couple of years now, and I still don't get over you. Like, I don't get used to you. and what you carry when it comes to music. Everything I write, I put myself in those shoes and I'm like, if it was me, how would I feel about it? Hence, you're able to tell the emotions when listening to the song. I feel like that's also why you don't get used to me because every time we record a new song, you basically get a new Kwanzaa based on the emotions of the song.

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19:00Vava and I are hard at work, making sure it's got something special for the Euphoria audience. Today, he's working on another song. This one is about the poverty he sees around him.

19:17The person that I write about, he's doing hip-hop. I don't feel good about the situation that he lives in. At his home, he don't have even a door to close. They live outside. Other people, they didn't see them as a human being, you know. So they even doubt themselves. Me as a good friend, I speak with them and motivate them, you know. I don't trust them.

19:59They spoke very strongly about a kind of sense of pride. and resisting the shame of poverty, and that they saw the hip-hop as a way of really creating a community that could resist that, and you could have something different.

20:24Vava is lucky. His family is relatively well off. It's a strong family, but there is a sadness at its heart. I'm the one who's grown without my mother. I was three years old when she died. I don't know where her grave is, and I don't know the story about her. How did it start for her to be dead?

21:02The challenges of living in this place where even basic needs aren't met, grief, anger, loss, hope, everything goes into our music.

21:21How are you, James? So I just sent you the location for where we're going to do the photo shoot. Euphoria is only a few days away and we have to tell people about it. posters, socials, word of mouth these all need great images yes exactly like that watch that, that's what I need Tando is the lens man making our artists feel like the real deal I need you to look like you're a bit flamboyant you're trying to dress the ladies I just wanted them to actually have the feeling of this is actually serious people need to know these artists they need to see these artists that's the reason why I would literally speak to the artist and ask them how do they feel about this picture which picture do you want I wanted them to have a voice as well.

22:02Let's go to you guys. Are we going with this one as well? Yeah. This one? Yes. Okay, we're going for this one for you. And the close-up. I want to do rehearsal for timing. Yeah. We'll do another soundcheck on Saturday because we're renting some days. The biggest worry that's always there is people not showing up. I've done, I don't know, like how many shows by now. Every time I'm worried that no one's going to show up. Almost no tickets are sold. It feels like nobody's coming.

22:38It's the day of the soundcheck, and I take Konzai and Vava to the Black Power Station. It's the first time that Vava has met the legendary ex.