ABSTRACT

Consider two strategies of musical representation for two very different South African-set films. In the first, an unjustly reviled extraterrestrial and his son return to their rusty spacecraft marooned above a dystopian Johannesburg—cueing a fervent high-tenor voice singing a wordless lament, replete with the Islamic-influenced microtonal inflections that characterize West African vocal styles, on a slow-moving bed of minor-key strings. The film is Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009), and its Canadian composer, Clinton Shorter, drafts in Guinean-born singer Alpha Yaya Diallo for an empathetic portrait of the stranded aliens. Diallo’s voice, like all voices, is at once universal—an expression of human commonality—as well as bound up with a specific identity, the West African characteristics signifying difference. If Shorter/Blomkamp seek to promote audience sympathy with the actual aliens in District 9, the film’s real, far more viciously imagined ‘others,’ Nigerians in Jo’burg, are very differently characterized with music—this time with diegetic kwaito, an urban South African house/rap hybrid that developed in the first decade of the post-apartheid era. Signifying energies around the music (that it is tough, aggressive, provocative, a celebration of heterosexual masculinity and consumption) are used to characterize the Nigerians, who are portrayed—through visual images and dialogue—as criminals, cannibalistic, overly sexualized, and barbarous. At the same time, the music is re-inscribed with the negative characteristics linked to the Nigerian characters.