Freshlyground and the possibilities of new identities in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Popular music and indeed popular art forms struggle for critical attention in the academy (Larkin, 1992). Relegated to a focus on performance, or to peripheral sub-disciplines such as cultural studies, the study of popular art forms is risky terrain in higher education (Wicke, 1990). Instead, and particularly within the humanities, it has been claimed that the study of canonised art forms (Viljoen & Van Der Merwe, 2004) may enable the student to analyse a range of texts with equal skill and superior insight. This paper deals with both the popular and the interdisciplinary in relation to a theorisation of the lyrics of popular South African contemporary music group Freshlyground and the possibilities for a post-Apartheid identity explored in these lyrics through the theoretical lenses of New Historicism and Cosmopolitanism.