A Spaza Shop Job

Postapartheid South African music culture is one big cut and paste job.

Still from Spaza$hop Boyz's "Rehab Tony" music video.

Spot the references in this music video by Ollie Nhlabatsi for South African duo Spaza$hop Boyz. (We can think of some.) In a way, postapartheid South African music culture is one big cut and paste job where one buys and appropriates, like going into a spaza shop where you take stuff off a shelf, you go home and cook it together. Spaza$hop Boyz’ first video for their single ‘Rehab Tony’ clearly rips off Die Antwoord and Spoek Mathambo. Sometimes the recipe works.

Via Amakipkip.

Further Reading

How to unmake the world

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.

What Portugal forgets

In the film ‘Tales of Oblivion,’ Dulce Fernandes excavates the buried history of slavery in Portugal, challenging a national mythology built on sea voyages, silence, and selective memory.

Quando Portugal esquece

Em ‘Contos do Esquecimento,’ Dulce Fernandes desenterrou histórias esquecidas da escravidão em Portugal, desafiando uma mitologia nacional construída sobre viagens marítimas, silêncio e memória seletiva.