The Movement that is Deep Soweto

Deep Soweto, known for their unrelenting vernacular lyrics, have become one of the fiercest underground hip-hop acts to spring out of the soil of this beloved kasi. Native Pitso caught up with the movement for a quick Q&A unraveling their secret for the game and turning a few pages of Deep Soweto’s history book.

CM: When did the idea of Deep Soweto come about?
DS: The idea of DS was given birth to by Salas on the 7th of September 2005, that’s when it all began. DS is a movement and not a crew as commonly mistaken. The movement is all about addressing isimo sa boDaki (black people’s situation) in the everyday community life we all live in. And because we love Hip Hop, we use it as a medium to convey messages and share knowledge of how to conquer our situations by standing up and actually doing things for ourselves, we say vuka uzenzele!

CM: How has Deep Soweto grown?
DS: We can’t really sum it all up but in terms of fan base it has grown tremendously! From the East to the West Rand, Orange Farm, Durban, Cape Town and even internationally, we have fans in Germany, Holland, USA (Boston in particular) and also in Dubai. Our music is even banged in prisons cells, you know! Its ironic that our hometown doesn’t grasp us like these other places, but more growth is yet to come. People have showed love to our clothing line, which is still to be properly introduced. Over and above we are trying to break into the mainstream and hope to reach greater masses!

CM: What do you think about the local Hip-Hop industry?
DS: The perception we share about Hip-Hop in Mzansi is that the real or true essence of it is being forsaken by a lot of heads, you know! More of hip-hop artists nowadays focus on ‘punchlining’ rather than being relative to their audiences, and it’s basically all about throwing the best punchlines and getting props for it, which is really not the entirety of hip-hop. Hip-Hop is greater than that, it’s about content, skill and relativity. Another detriment to the local industry is how the genre of hip-hop is handled by record labels; “you cannot treat a hip-hop artist as a Kwaito artist, you know!” the two are totally different. Hip-hop artist reqiure more investment that will go into the essentialities of promoting such an artist, gigs, videos, marketing all of these need to be done differently than in the case of artist in other genres. So we believe a lot of this record labels need to begin to understand that hip-hop is huge.

CM: How do you plan to change or contribute to the local industry?
DS: Deep Soweto has long begun to change some perceptions about hip-hop, especially within the South African context. To a certain extent, we’ve re-introduced rappin’ in our own languages. We’ve inspired a lot of up and coming heads to feel free and actually express themselves in vernacular and will continue to do that. Even the perception of wearing clothes seen on TV in order to be seen as a ‘real’ hip-hop head is untrue and we’re also trying to change that by the type of clothes we wear. Basically back to what we said before, hip-hop is about content, skill and relativity more than any other thing and we’re all about that!

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