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It’s as if Isaac Mutant and Pieter Hugo have been galloping towards each other for all eternity. Mutant violently sceptical of anything masquerading as publicity or even decency; Hugo clawing his way to some outer edge where he can transmit raw human experience, free from the hand-wringing of intellectuals.
Both are close to breaking point as a result of the constant misunderstandings of their work and intentions – Hugo the Fetishiser, Mutant the Misogynist.
Dirty, the music video, is that, then: the two men breaking. A temper tantrum right out there on the outer edge: juvenile, filthy, unnecessary, gloriously crass and downright beautiful – if not visually, then for the purity of its rage. In it, Mutant takes himself places you never thought possible. The mistake has been to think of him as a “Cape Flats rapper” instead of a “mercenary poet”. In much the same way, Hugo’s profession presents a set of presumed ideologies: white man photographing in Africa equals fetishising and appropriation.
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I find Dookoom, Mutant and the others scattered around Lefty’s, Cape Town’s famous dive bar, just after they’ve wrapped shooting Dirty. They’re covered in various layers of grime. Hugo, who directed Spoek Mathambo’s breakout video, Control, is trying to explain the stills on his iPhone of two Mutants making out.
“We thought really long and hard about this, and, for me, this is a video about the lack of acknowledgment in the coloured community of the homosexual nature of the prison gangs.”
Mutant pricks up his ears, scratches his chin, remains silent. Hugo continues: “I’m doing it because, when they first sent me the song, I honestly felt unsettled. I was so drawn to it, but acutely aware that this was the voice of a sexual predator.”
Later Mutant says to me: “Actually this motherf*cker has a point. You get gay people, right. But when you go to jail, a heterosexual dude, the 28s like, they’re not gay but now the straight rules don’t apply.”
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The video for Dirty puts front and centre the spectre of menstrual blood, narcissism and sexual fetishisation; Mutant so resplendent in agency that any notion of exploitation becomes laughable.
“I wanted to present myself as that thing, that idea of the black man you whitie intellectuals are always gaaning aan about, you know, like what that Gillian Schutte woman said.”
Mutant is referring to the columnist’s reaction to last year’s Larney Jou Poes video. She wrote: “He is the black man whom racism was constructed for – to keep in check; to keep shackled and away from the pristine white women; the man with the animalistic sexuality; the man with the huge, hard, throbbing cock; the man who threatens the colonial male’s self-esteem and sense of sexual prowess.”
It is, of course, the “hard, throbbing cock” that mostly impressed Mutant. “I looked at myself differently after that. Because I would never act like that. I wouldn’t have acted like that [in Dirty], definitely, if she didn’t write that thing...” But of course, in the tangled mess of looking at each other, Schutte, in her referencing of white fears, could be accused of fetishising Mutant, as much as Mutant could be accused of fetishising Lilith in Dirty, the track he constantly refers to as a “love song”. “It’s a sexy track,” he says. “It’s all the wrong things but it’s not necessarily wrong.”
“I don’t expect people to like this,” says Hugo. “But I want people to talk about it ... The art I’m into is stuff that pushes boundaries. I’m interested in expanding my experience and my mind. To me, it’s taking the piss. It’s undermining that machismo in hip-hop.”
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Dirty is hard to watch and, for that reason, I think there is a strange beauty to it, in its righteousness of anger, in the celebration of menstrual blood, in its raw horror. But by playing with stereotypes to comment on the colonial gaze, many will see it as reinforcement of that stereotype.”
It is ironic that the genius wordsmith Mutant – denied practically every opportunity for full self-expression in his life – will in this moment, where he took control, be crucified. Already there has been talk that he has been exploited by Hugo’s white gaze.
“There’s no way I can feel exploited,” says Mutant. “Pieter presented his ideas to me and the crew, and I was down with what he suggested. The whole point is not being afraid to explore new shit. And having the freedom to do so ... No, not every person of colour is a victim of racism, just because he does something that is not considered in good taste.”
Says Hugo: “Everything I am interested about in art is confrontational and about enlarging my understanding of the human experience. Which is messy. And opaque. That is why political correctness is phoney. Dishonest.” - Roger Young
Watch the video, which is extremely explicit, here
Dirty’s rapey tropes
By Gugulethu Mhlungu
‘We have been nurtured in a sick, abnormal society, and we should be in the process of reclaiming ourselves, not the terms of that society. This is complex. I speak not about condemnation, but about recognising what is happening and questioning what it means...”
So said feminist thinker and author Audre Lourde when asked about her thoughts on bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism.
She went on to explain that the origins of sadomasochistic sex were as important in our personal lives as in public. That we must be willing to ask: “What am I doing? What am I choosing?” Her point was that, even when we exercise what little agency we have, we can and often do choose to partake in the power structures that oppress us.
In their Dirty video, Dookoom employs the racist tropes of jungle porn, the fetishisation of menstrual blood, the harmless but desirable white woman, as well as the image of the virulent black man with his dangerous throbbing penis in an attempt to subvert all of these. However, they show why Lourde insisted that the political ought to be personal too.
In an attempt to subvert the stereotypes of coloured maleness, Dirty in fact only seems to reinscribe them. This is particularly important in the context of a privileged, white, male director like Hugo, where even if they “collaborated”, which they no doubt did, the end product traps any intended subversion or counternarrative in a trope created by white-supremacist heteropatriarchy. And this is the danger of using the master’s tools to destroy the master’s house: it requires that we must enter the house first, and risk being co-opted, which is always a very real possibility, and clearly occurs in the Dirty video.
Lourde was also the same thinker who presented a paper called The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Lourde said: “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
At no point does the idea that we can easily be co-opted by supremacy and existing power structures deny that agency is not possible, but the presence of agency (of choosing) does not make structural oppression irrelevant. So Mutant wanting to be the guy he is in the video, to stick it to Gillian Schutte, does not make Dirty’s lyrics less rapey, make the video’s imagery less stereotypical. In fact, in the end, Dirty will be perceived as stereotype and little else.
