Skip to main content

Beyond entertainment: urban music and situational representation and conditions (re) creations

Tomorrow, 31 August, I will be going back to my Alma mater in Zomba (at Chancellor College, University of Malawi).

The English department will be hosting me where I will be presenting my paper on urban music and how it presents situations as well as create conditions of the hard-to-reach youth in Malawi.

For today, and now, I will just share the abstract and the details:

Popular culture as a mirror: contextualising the music of Mafo within the situation of the youth in Malawi

Urban music in Malawi has become one of the most followed popular culture products, especially among young people, owing to its easier accessibility and experimentation (mixing genres that young people are familiar with). Despite this being the case, it is one of the under researched areas in Malawi with most of the academic research on Malawian music focusing on old and established musicians such as Lucius Banda and Joseph Nkasa. One of the urban musicians who has mostly been reviled owing to what is said to be obscenity or suggestive lyrics in his music is Mafo. At the same time, Mafo is one of the urban artists who has a considerable following among young people with most of his releases generating conversations in the spaces of the youth including the social media. My paper will focus on urban music as a popular culture product, specifically arguing on the relevance of urban music, precisely Mafo’s, as a resource for academicians, researchers, and policy makers.  My paper considers Mafo’s music as a mirror of the hard-to-reach young people in Malawi whose voices are mostly outside the traditional spaces of conversations on youth. I show in this paper how Mafo (re) presents the fears, aspirations, hopes and wishes of what Fanon would call “the wretched of the earth” among the youth. The paper concludes by highlighting the opportunities that such music presents to the wider public in understanding the situation of young people, especially those outside of ‘mainstream youth’. 

I will be presenting in the Language Laboratory, from 3 up to 4 pm. 

The paper is expected to be published later this year so, for now, it will just be the presentation and PowerPoint slides. 

For those around, please join me if you can. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The hate that hate produced: the John Chilembwe story

1915 : a middle-aged man in his mid-forties stands amongst a group of his loyal followers. They are about 200. Perhaps, it is a chilly rainy night with the silence of a graveyard surrounding the church. “The white man has sat on us for so long,” declares the tall man with obviously a mild temper. “We need to do something, we need to act. We must send him packing from our land.” Possibly, the men listening to him shake their heads in unison. Others are yet to comprehend what is driving the man of God in front of them for they have known him as a quiet man for a long time. Thus, the story of John Chilembwe’s rebellion begins, in the January of 1915, years long before the wind of freedom and change begins to sweep in the 1960s. Many years before the bells of freedom begin to ring on the African continent. John Chilembwe, writes Robert I. Rotberg in a 2005 Harvard Magazine article, was not a radical man such that nobody could expect him to stage a rebellion. He appeared
2 comments
Read more

What would Jesus do?

The sun was just beginning to burn the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Some weeks before, four fishermen had been fished from their trade by the carpenter’s son to be his disciples. They were now with him. Sitting on the shores of the sea they had always regarded as a home. Their past, forgotten; hope erected in the future. Jesus, for that was the name of the son of the carpenter whom the church had denounced, was busy preaching to his congregation. His voice was small, his frame was little – almost frail. The cloth he had used to wrap his body in was dirty such that in within his congregation you could hear some little whispers of people wondering what made this man believe he was the son of God and not just Joseph, the carpenter. His voice had no charisma. It lacked that magic and fire that John the Baptist (now in prison) had had in those days when he had baptized people in this very same sea, calling them of the wicked generation, calling them to turn away from their sins
2 comments
Read more

DNA's feminism

The song that placed DNA on a pedestal, Mukandipepesele , was not – at least in gender relations – ambivalent. It was clear. It was a song that portrayed the world of men: a world in which they make mistakes that leave a trail of hurt – unintentionally; and, thereafter, they seek to make things right – with little success most times.   Now, he has returned. This time, his album is called Dziko la amuna . In recent years, an album has never been ambiguous as the 13 track album that DNA has released. The literal translation of Dziko la amuna is twofold: one, it is a world for males; two, like in the song that introduced him on the local music scene, it is a world of males – that invisible yet occupied space. In the song that introduces the album, Odala , there is little that relates to the album title. It is, however, in the second song that DNA takes his audience through the world of males. A world in which value is based on the monetary possessions of a man. Not his intention
Post a Comment
Read more