How the need to slay is making SA celebville oh-so anti-woke
Our celebrities are obsessed with fitting in
In 2017, Riky Rick had an interesting interview with UK based YouTube channel The Ubinufu Space. In the interview, he detailed his relationship with fashion as a child of the township.
Riky details how he saw a need for those around him to attain wealth through wearing Italian brands. This is also where he shares his love for Gucci, which was a brand that was inaccessible to him, but now it is.
What you wear, drive, eat or where you party is essentially a great display of wealth we black folk still clamour after. Somehow, we are still reliving the excessive behaviour of the 1980s. It is almost as if we are stuck in a never-ending story of American Psycho.
In the movie adaptation of the novel, Christian Bale plays Patrick Bateman, who is an investment banker battling with envy and a compulsion to kill.
The materialistic world around him is not only a trigger for his greed and violence, but also cashmere-wool over everyone’s eyes that allow him to quite literally get away with murder.
In one of its dramatically ironic scenes, Bateman packs a dead victim into a duffle bag and while piling it into the trunk of a cab, his colleague is more concerned with the bag’s label than the obviously suspicious contents of the bag.
When a number of local celebs, including fellow rapper AKA, ridiculed the idea of “woke” folk in SA speaking out about the recent blackface from Gucci, I was reminded of American Psycho. It is almost as if our woke behaviour and brand consciousness is constantly destroying the need to accomplish success in a material world.
Riky’s reality is that slaying in a certain label earns him street cred, a duffel bag many South Africans still carry today.
From Bonang’s champagne, Somizi’s display of grandeur,
AKA celebrating a homophobe dressed in LGBT-friendly
Versace, holding major brands and businesses accountable for problematic behaviour disrupts the definition of capitalist success that has defined our black existence.
Why band together with unknown and unglamorous activists when you can preach capitalism with Diddy or make life-changing speeches at the UN?
Our celebrities will continue to support problematic brands. Black Coffee will most likely jet back to Israel for a performance, Riky will forever wear Gucci and Nomzamo Mbatha is very likely to take another selfie with celebrities she forgot are cancelled, because our below-the-poverty-line lives are not threaded in the right labels to hold them accountable.
There is no deposit paid to a black tax account like bragging rights and we would be foolish believing wokeism could ever dismantle that.
The attention economy is real, and ours is one of the cheapest.
‘‘ The attention economy is real, and ours is one of the cheapest