In the local context, the mother city is the birth place of the culture. But, it is pretty clear that for most of recent history JHB has been viewed as the SOLE hip hop capital in South Africa for those rappers and emcees to ‘make it’ beyond their dope skills. In 2015, that is not the case anymore. At the moment there are exceptional talents from different parts of the country representing every crevice of the landscape; but hats must be taken off for once city in particular, that has come to the table over the past 2 years as convincingly as LL Cool J licks his lips: the city of Durban.
Forget the bunny chows and Durban July, between the residents who are from the city and have relocated to JHB (OkMalumkoolkat, Riky Rick, Smashis, etc), the ones who are spearheading the culture from the city (Breeze, Aewon Wolf, Nasty C, Dreamteam, Gemini, WTF, Duncan etc) and the ones who helped to establish the cirty’s rapport way back in the day (Abdus, Raheem, Zakwe, Zuluboy and many others), the Zulu kingdom is lit right now!
So it should not come as a surprise that residents of the city have started to figure out who is the best and who is the rest. Yesterday, producer Sketchy Bongo shook Durban Twittter when he tweeted his very polarising opinion, stating that his frequent collaborator Aewon Wolf is a big part of the reason Durban is on at the moment.
As you can imagine, this got a good number of his music peers as well as fans a little riled up, eventually leading to a call for top 5 rappers and various other side discussions. With so much going on and so much good music coming from the city, is it too premature to start pegging rappers and musicians against each other? Or is it important to be competitive? Do it matter more that an artist is popular with national hits, or is it more important to have strong lyrics? We all know that it’s the one with the best gold grillz that’s the best rapper.
Look at the responses below:
On that note, Dreamteam are currently on the cover of the Oct-nov 2015 issue so make sure you go out and get it to ready what they have to say about their part in the rise of Durban hip hop.
Written by: Spaceboy P