When we started this media platform , we vowed and vouched to each other that we would be brutally honest in every detail reporting or reviewing aesthetics shaping the youth culture, in music, fashion or any other discipline that deserves our attention as young people and consumers of the culture.
The much anticipated album of Cashtime life’s number man KO, has left a bit of a taste of dissatisfaction in my mouth (opinion). Following the enormously colossal success of his single Caracara, we were obviously expecting a lot of kasi dialects and yes a lot of Dust on the stereo. I have to be honest, I am familiar with Kwaito from the 90’s, big as it was, it slowly got diffused and diluted by sub-genre that developed from this timeless genre”Kwaito”. What I picked up as soon as I was halfway into my listening session was a sense of one dimension in terms of production and delivery from the Skhanda rapper.
I am from the township and admire KO for making his sound 100% local and township focused, but as an audience and a generation of multi-screens and a plethora of sub-genres and cultures, we are exposed to many sounds, I was hoping KO would go out there and experiment with new sounds but all I heard were samples of old kwaito songs and catch phrases.
I have no idea, as to how panellists are picked over at MTVbase offices, but they unanimously made Ntokozo No.1 on their list #SAHottestMC , which caused an uproar in the hip hop industry and ultimately trended worldwide. Rappers got bashed on Twitter for airing and voicing their feelings of the list, sighting envy and perhaps an unsuccessful yea r. The president of Skhanda republic had an amazing year, we can attest to seeing him perform and wowing the crowd, the encores came screaming from the crowd to an extent that he had to do the songs 3 to 4 times.
My disappointment as a lover and supporter of SA Hip Hop and music, it just felt like Caracara the song was the album and the rest of the material was rather underserving step kids, who should sound and feel like their first over-achieving brother , it all sounds like any of these songs could have been Caracara but with a different tempo and tone.
The concentration span of kids these days is purely short, information is streaming from any and every direction, which means as artist you need to be ever changing and multi-faceted in your sound even in the same body of work, this is not what I found in Skhanda Republic, I found it to have the same sound monotonously, from the first to the last track. It’s all love to KO, I think he is a genius artist but this solo effort is lacklustre and below par. I repeat Skhanda Republic is one dimensional and doesn’t give you a sense of a republic boasting with diversity.
