One on One with Dookoom

They’ve ruffled the feathers of many South African listeners, celebrities and fellow musicians over the past month but Cape Town rap group Dookoom is standing by their word that they are merely artists expressing themselves.

The first track on their new EP, A Gangster Called Big Times, Larney Jou P**s tells the story of a farm uprising in the Western Cape, an area where tensions have flared regularly between farmers and workers.

It caused a stir on social media with many people calling the band out on promoting violence and hate speech so we caught up with the group’s rapper Isaac Mutant to unpack the latest controversies and find out exactly what the group intended with their ballsy release.

In the song, the Cape Flats rapper, who has also collaborated with Die Antwoord in previous projects, sings: “Farmer Abrahams had many farms; many farms had farmer Abrahams,” updating the children’s gospel song Father Abraham. “I work one of them, and so do you, so let’s go burn one down.” The music video ends with the band having branded their logo onto the farm.

Mutant says he had just returned from visiting family. “I was born in Vredendal , some rural area out on the R27. I didn’t grow up there but I was born there so from time to time I like to go out there. And I have lots of family that works in farms, you check and I have friends in Ashton and Robertson and I’d visit them time and time again, most of them work on farms,” says Mutant.

“So there are certain frustrations in the trials we go through, there’s so much k*k,” he adds. “That kind of inspire me to do the track but I wrote the second verse a while back and just didn’t get time to finish it. It was a few years ago I suppose,” he says.

In 2012, the Western Cape experienced one of the biggest farm workers strikes after a group of largely female workers walked off the job in De Doorns, it gradually spread to other areas and was described as an organic move not motivated by political parties or trade unions. The strikes eventually came to and end in December 2012.

Mutant admits that he was not really aware of them at the time he wrote the song and was merely responding to the frustrations of his own family and friends about life on the farms and the circumstances people had to live under.

“I was quite surprised when that popped up because actually because when I started writing the first words I really did not have that in mind. I was just thinking about all larney’s in general. That came like an prophetic type of thing,” he says.

“When farm workers thing popped up I was like ‘yoh check this k*k, but I never touched on it until recently when I went to Ashton again and Robertson. I had a girlfriend there and met the people and we talked about that period then that’s when I thought about the track again and thought this is brilliant time to bring it out,” says Mutant.

Everyone knows by now that timing is pivotal when releasing music on the internet, look at Die Antwoord? Their success came at a time when all eyes were on South Africa after Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 garnered critical acclaim and Oscar nominations. Sharlto Copley’s character was beloved and the the South African accent became a novelty for the rest of the world.

And though Mutant doesn’t like it when I mention Die Antwoord, the group has been called the wolf to Die Antwoord’s “boy who cried wolf”. They’ve become the antithesis to the caricature that Die Antwoord has created using a particular Western Cape coloured slang and aesthetic.

While Die Antwoord has had their own share of criticism, Dookoom found themselves in a sticky situation when minority rights group AfriForum laid a complaint of hate speech against the group with the South African Human Rights Commission, but Mutant says, “We’re not inciting violence. No one gets hurt in the video. But it’s about claiming the land and being angry, because we have a right to be angry.”

“We didn’t expect the song to blow up this big and people still can’t talk about the farm issue, what the F***k is that about?”

Perhaps a more interesting debate that this song has spiraled is how much freedom artists have to express themselves. Mutant says that many people in South Africa take things so literally and forget that music is supposed to inspire using metaphor and other devices to send out a message.

“We wanted to spark a dialogue, a form of communication. We artists first, yes we’re family members and parents aswell but we’re not military fighters or whatever. We artists so what we do is songs. So we write songs about certain issues that bug us so the song was never meant to incite any violence,” he says.

He also reiterates that Dookoom is not associated with any political group or agenda. “We don’t associate with anybody except the music. The only thing we’re probably most associate with is a shebeen, I don’t know, we like to drink a lot,” he jokes.

The group’s EP, A Gangster Called Big Times is available here. Watch the video below and discuss: