Empires have risen and fallen in shorter periods than the amount of time Refiloe Phoolo has spent trying to convince the world that he is the messiah of new school African music. Figuratively speaking, usually 15 minutes is all one gets. And after subtracting the time you spend convincing the promoter to pay you, as well as arguing with the sound guy because your mic is bad and the volume in the venue is too low and distorted, you’re looking at about 3:57 minutes left on your clock. In that time you can either produce an entitled rant about how the industry don’t love you and how you’re too ‘ahead of time’ for people’s taste; or if you’re Cassper Nyovest you can produce a ‘Doc Shebeleza’ and completely take over the game.
Throw in the facts that his age is the same number as the basketball shot clock and he’s carrying his family and his city on his back, and it’s easy to see why the prince of Maftown is living each day like it might be his last. The time on this particular day happens to be 14:08. We’re posted up on the couch of his cosy new apartment in the northern suburbs of Jo’burg where he has found refuge upstairs from a family who constantly complain about the amount of noise that comes from his crib. “Eish, that’s the thing about the ‘burbs, you have to keep quiet. In the hood, there was noise outside 24/7. You’d wake up and hear a taxi blasting music and you bopped your head and peeked out the window to greet the timer whose car it was coming from.” Outside the apartment a scene from Touched by an Angel with lush landscaped flora, swimming pools and the kind of security that will make your kush dealer nervous. Inside the apartment? That scene from Boyz n the Hood where Doughboy and his homies are playing video games, snacking, talking smack and using the kind of language that would make both their mothers and their pastors cringe.
FIFA is the game of choice. And quite frankly, It’s not looking good for Cassper. It’s just a few minutes after halftime and he’s losing 3-0 to the technician who’s come by to help him figure out the controls of his massive new TV (slightly bigger than an obese nine-year-old) and his homies are not giving him a break about it. “I’m great with comebacks though. Just this morning I beat Carpo in the last few minutes and he couldn’t believe it. Just watch,” he reassures. Long story short, he lost. But luckily for his sake (and ours), in the real world, being a musical prodigy with the nation at your feet is a much stronger currency than being a don at FIFA on PS4. “I used to work with a dude by the name of Beat junkie from Maftown. He and I had a falling out and after that I had no choice but to start making beats,” he explains, as we sit down in a section of the house he’s turned into a home studio. “I started to remember things from my time witnessing Beat Junkie produce. So I would go on music programs and just throw drums on that sh*t. I’d get loops from the net and when I’d release the songs, people would be like ‘who
produced this?’ and then I started to think that maybe I could do the producer thing too.” Emerging from trying circumstances to attain success is nothing new to Cassper. Many of his major achievements presented themselves as career-damaging challenges, leaving him backed into a corner with a choice to either admit defeat or gather himself and fight his way out tooth and nail. “I know it’s cheesy because every rapper in the
world says it these days, but I dropped out of school early. I was 16. I always knew who I was and that I was going to make it in this path I’m pursuing right now,” he says with conviction. “And I don’t say that in order to preach to kids that education is not important. It is. Both my parents were teachers so you can imagine how crazy that must have been for them and for my family. But I was determined to be an entertainer; I knew that since I was a young’n.
And after I made the decision to drop out I had that much more to prove to myself and everyone around me.” The fact that Cassper was once upon a time able to bag the subject of half of the nation’s wet dreams, actress and presenter Boity Thulo, earns him mad respect. And for a while after that information surfaced, it was enough to get him some daps from all the industry dudes whose fantasies only ever came as true as damp tissues and sticky magazine pages. But even the Boity effect has its limits and can only take one so far. Back then no one was trying to hear anything from a supposed rapper who dressed like a kwaito star and was the only man on the planet not named Steven Seagal rocking a ponytail in the 21st century. And during a time when South African hip hop was in the early stages of forging an identity next to more respected genres like house and kwaito, there was no way he was going to get a pass from the OGs if the memo wasn’t hip hop beats, Supras (as opposed to All-Stars) and fresh fades. Not until Jabba came along. “Yeah, I still go through it. People look at how I dress, how I speak, the delivery of some of my lyrics, the fact that my videos are shot in the hood and not in the club, and even the sound on songs like ‘Wahala’ and say that I’m not a rapper. They say I’m not hip hop. Remember Jabba went through the same sh*t. Now he’s the biggest thing on this side of the planet,” he defends.
Hailing from Mahikeng, Cassper naturally gravitated towards an alternative sound of rap that was forming in the early 2000s, now known to all as motswako music, championed by rappers like Khuli Chana, JR and HHP. And three years ago when he seemed to be at a stalemate in his career, HHP came along and lent a hand in the form of a feature on a song called ‘Wam Tseba Mtho’ and subsequently took Cassper under his wing, taking him on tour and schooling him in the game. This came to help define his sound. “What people don’t understand is that kwaito is our sound. Not just a genre, but our tradition, it’s part of who we are. It’s the same as the beads around our ankles and our necks. It’s the beat that Africa moves to. Hip hop started in the States and its sources were jazz and soul because there was nothing before that. So when the sound of hip hop developed overseas, it ended up sounding the way it does now because of the jazz samples. With us, it’s house and kwaito; those have always existed here. Our hip hop is not going to sound like theirs because our musical and cultural origins are not the same as theirs. When we create an identity for our sound it will be based on indigenous music that already exists here in Africa. And maybe for now it’s hard to draw the line of what’s kwaito and what’s hip hop but that’s part of the process of finding ourselves. As long as we’re making quality sh*t and we’re growing.” He continues: “Growing up my heroes were not really Nas and Pac and all those guys; they were Doc Shebeleza and Mandoza and other cats from the hood who I viewed as being cool because they represented something that was real to me. The fact that I choose to express myself using hip hop as a medium at this stage in my life doesn’t mean that all those things rom my childhood disappear. That’s who I am so that’s what you will see from the way that I carry myself to my attitude. I know a lot of the hip hop OGs are always like ‘nah, we need that real sh*t back’ but that Kwaito-house tempo is our identity. We can’t abandon that.”
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