The first-encounter aesthetic rush

If you're wondering what took us so long to say something about South African rapper Spoek Mathambo's new music video–for his cover of Joy Division's "She's lost control." Well, we're still not decided what we think about it. The video got a lot of attention when it first came out in late February as it was directed by Spoek's countryman, the photographer Pieter Hugo. Hipsters love the video, though we don't learn much from them beyond repeating the PR copy.

First up the positives: We're fans of Spoek Mathambo. Whether his music or his far out blog.  As for what he did to the original tune: Spoek infused a nice South African flavor into it ,which makes us appreciate both songs more. The choice of cover also makes sense. Spoek has spoken about his admiration for Joy Division's music elsewhere: "… I am into Joy Division more than rap … I went from being super into rap my whole life, to a point where I was specifically anti-rap, and then into obscure and avant-garde jazz. When I was probably twenty-one, I got 10GB of music which opened me up to this world of white music that had been hidden from me my whole life."

But like most things, the video also left us with more questions than anything else.

The selling point of the video is that it depicts the world of "township cults and teen gangs." That sounds interesting, but we don't see much of that in the video. Instead we get kids–apparently members of a Langa,  Cape Town-dance troupe–and Spoek. And lots of chalk-blowing. Also, we wondered whether the trance-like dancing featured in the video is really that big in Langa (or any other Cape Town neighborhood).

More generally, we're trying to figure out why the videos that generally make it out of especially South Africa and into popular "hipster" circles or sites based in North America and Europe, tend to be the crazy other-worldly type video?. Nollywood is a big reference and inspiration in these videos–Pieter Hugo, the photographer who did a book on Nollywood, directed the video. Some of us doubt that Nollywood retains a sustained interest amongst hipsters beyond the first-encounter aesthetic rush.