Watch YoungstaCPT's New Music Video for 'Kleurling'
YoungstaCPT explores, with great profundity, the complexity of Coloured identity and culture in his latest music video for 'Kleurling'.
South African rapper YoungstaCPT has released the music video for his track "Kleurling". The song features on his debut album 3T, the 22-track project which dropped in 2019. While "Kleurling" translates from Afrikaans to "Coloured", a member of a specific racial group in South Africa, the rapper has revealed his aversion to the term because of its historical implications. The visuals for the track, however, are an exquisite passage through Coloured identity, culture and origin with the cinematic execution to match.
READ: YoungstaCPT Releases Visuals for '1000 Mistakes'
The director of photography, Dale Fortune, captures the richness of Coloured culture in several scenes. The opening scene shows YoungstaCPT, appearing regal in his attire, in the District Six Museum. The museum was established in memory of the thousands of inhabitants of District Six, a former residential area in Cape Town, who were forcibly removed from their homes by the Apartheid government in the 1970s.
Through close-ups of symbols of Islam, images, old photographs and newspaper clippings as well as instruments and other artefacts, the music video highlights just some of the history of Coloured people and their place in South Africa. Shot in both Mitchell's Plain, Cape Town and Westbury, Johannesburg, the rapper says he chose these specific locations in order to "show the similarities in our environments even though we are separated." The way of life, the housing reality and diversity of Coloured people speaks to this very sentiment and is aptly portrayed.
YoungstaCPT poignantly and profoundly speaks to the essence of the track and the accompanying visuals saying:
"I wrote Kleurling in 2018 as I felt as though an authentic coloured narrative hadn't been properly decoded yet...I had done songs like SALUTAS and Wes-Kaap which detailed the lifestyle but as far as the coloured condition and what it was like to be coloured and have our thoughts and anger and knowing where it stems from through years of systemic oppression, I had never tapped into that before...South Africa has labeled coloured people as the bastard children of the nation and in some cases it maybe true but that doesn't makes us inferior! [sic]"
Watch the music video for "Kleurling" below:
YoungstaCPT - Kleurling www.youtube.com
