#the album is clearly about being abused as a child. so. resonates.

[casekt]

Wunschkind

[madamspeaker]

Hillary Clinton on where it all went wrong | The Sunday Times Magazine

The woman who lost to Donald Trump reflects on the failure of her presidential campaign and coping with crushing disappointment. Interview by Christina Lamb

First comes a man to switch the chairs. Then a young press officer to arrange their position. Two men in grey suits with tell-tale earpieces, the Secret Service, hover at the doorway. Stylists flit in, pleased the weather is overcast as it is “kind for photos”. It feels like the entourage of an ageing movie star or the forward party of an absolute monarch. “She’s just coming,” I am repeatedly told, followed by: “She’s held up.” I keep getting my notebook and tape recorder ready, to no avail. And then, when Hillary Clinton finally walks in, I am helping the photographer prepare his shot, crouching down pretending to be her and making angry and devastated faces; she did, after all, lose the election to a womaniser whose candidacy she considered a joke. Fortunately, she appears not to notice and immediately moves the chairs closer. “I feel like we’ve met,” she says, warmly. This is odd, as she is the one who is familiar, if a bit softer, blonder and bluer-eyed in person. At 69, she has been on the world stage my entire adult life. First lady, wronged wife, senator, secretary of state, first woman to run for president for a main party. Even her pantsuits are familiar; today she wears black trousers and a blue top as shiny as a Quality Street wrapper.

“I’ll bet you know more about my private life than you do about some of your closest friends,” she says in her new book. “You’ve read my emails, for heaven’s sake. What more do you need? What could I do to be ‘more real?’ Dance on a table? Swear a blue streak? Break down sobbing?”

That, of course, is exactly what I want as I wait in the hotel in Chappaqua, the small, leafy town north of New York that she and Bill call home. At the end of a nearby cul-de-sac stands their large white clapboard house, where she has been doing yoga (favourite position: Warrior II), praying and downing chardonnay to drown her sorrows. Today, it’s strictly iced tea (it’s not even midday) and she is so much nicer than that brittle woman on TV that it feels mean to ask her to relive her pain. Instead of cursing or sobbing, she is keen to discuss why child refugees are going missing in Europe, and the implications of last month’s Kurdish referendum.

We establish that we met in the bar of a hotel on a trip to South Korea in 2010 that included a visit to the demilitarised zone, where she was literally eyeball to eyeball with a soldier from the communist North standing outside the window. I was surprised then by how funny she was over gin and tonics.

Korea, of course, is very much in the news. The day before, the president had prompted gasps in his first speech to the annual UN general assembly in New York by threatening to “totally destroy North Korea” and taunting its leader, Kim Jong-un, as “Rocket Man”.

You must feel you should have been the one standing there, I say. Her smile is part-grimace. “Put aside what I would have said, how I would have conducted myself, I just found it hard to believe he was standing there as president and saying what he was saying,” she says. “It was a distressing speech — dark, dangerous, selfish, incoherent — and left as much room for misinterpretation and confusion as I ever heard in a speech by a president of the United States.”

She was particularly worried about Trump’s suggestion he would undo Barack Obama’s hard-won nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump derided as “an embarrassment to the United States”.

“They want to blow up the Iran nuclear deal just because we did it,” she says. “I think the Iran nuclear agreement was a stellar example of multinational co-operation, but more than that, it certainly put a lid on its nuclear programme. So when I hear President Trump talk in such a bellicose manner, threatening not just North Korea but Iran, it raises the potential you will have two extremely dangerous nuclear challenges in two regions of the world with unforeseen consequences, which will be horrible for people in those regions.”

Trump’s repeated use of the word “sovereignty” (21 times) in the speech and insistence that he would “always put America first” seemed intent on undoing all the effort she put in as secretary of state in the Obama administration to — as she sees it — restore the international reputation of the US after the damage caused by George W Bush’s War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. “It’s not about me,” Clinton insists. “It’s about the message that sends to the world and what his priorities are, what he values and doesn’t.”

Of course, it is also about her. Rather than accept defeat and go quietly into the night, as many believed she should, she has written a 494-page angst-ridden book, titled What Happened. Though she laughs a lot in our interview, her bitterness resonates in every mention of the T-word — and there are many. A close female friend of hers tells me that “Hillary is utterly devastated”. “I have developed the hide of a rhinoceros,” Clinton insists to me, but I can’t imagine what it is like actually Being Hillary.

In the 1990s, she had to endure the whole world knowing about her president husband’s affair with the intern. Who can forget Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained Gap dress? Then, when she contested the Democratic nomination in 2008, she had to watch the job go to the cool younger guy with far less experience. After that, she had to swallow her pride to work for him, which she did with great aplomb. Then, to run again and lose to a reality-TV host who boasted of sexual abuse, and tweets insults to everyone from the mayor of London to the Pope.

Clinton clearly can’t get her head round the fact that her fellow Americans voted for Trump rather than her own supremely qualified self. “I thought I’d be a damn good president,” she says. “I did not think I was going to lose.”

She admits she had prepared for her first 100 days with binders full of policies, and had written her victory speech, which she planned to give dressed in white, the colour of the suffragettes. Indeed, so confident was she that, as the results started coming in on election night, she went for a nap in her suite at New York’s Peninsula hotel. She woke before midnight to find husband Bill and her team ordering in whisky and ice cream for the shock, as the key states of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Iowa all fell to Trump. By 1.35am it was all over. The victory party was cancelled, the white suit packed away, and the specially built platform in the shape of the United States under a symbolic glass ceiling a terrible embarrassment.

Instead, she and Bill lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Does she still wake up every morning, wondering how it happened? “Yeah,” she replies. “I’m not living it every minute of every day, but every day I live it.”

Does she sometimes want to kick something? She laughs. “A friend gave me a little sign that says, ‘I do yoga, I meditate and I still want to kick somebody.’ I know that feeling.” It wasn’t just losing, she adds, but to whom. “It’s deeply troubling, because if I had lost to what I’d call a ‘normal Republican’, I would have disagreed with them — I had deep disagreements with George W Bush, but came to understand his worldview. I knew his father, I knew Reagan, I would have a lot of political differences, but I wouldn’t have felt the same sense of real loss for our country, that we elected someone who knows so little, cares even less and is just seeking the applause of the masses. I feel a terrible sense of responsibility for not having figured out how to defeat this person. There must have been a way and I didn’t find it.”

Instead, in the early hours of November 9, she made a concession telephone call that she describes as “one of the strangest moments of my life — weirdly ordinary, like calling a neighbour to say you can’t make his barbecue”.

After addressing shocked and tearful supporters the next day, she and Bill drove home in silence. Desperate for distraction, she decluttered all her wardrobes, arranged photographs in albums and remodelled the adjoining house they bought last year. In between, she went for walks with Bill and their dogs, read all the Elena Ferrante novels and went to weepy Broadway musicals such as Les Misérables.

But it was impossible to escape. Even the wallpaper in their bedroom, yellow with pastel flowers, was a copy of that in their old bedroom in the White House.

Then there was the inauguration that she and Bill were expected to attend as former president and first lady. Knowing the eyes of the world were on her, she steeled herself to “breathe out, scream later”, and tried to imagine she was in Bali.

Over and over, she asked herself “Why?”. Astonishingly it came down to just 77,744 votes out of 136m cast. “If just 40,000 people across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania had changed their minds, I would have won,” she wrote.

“I thought, ‘I have to understand what happened,’ ” she tells me. “That’s why I wrote the book.”

Yet the writing process was so painful, she admits, that “at times I had to go and lie down”.

Shouldn’t she just accept defeat and shut up? She gives the very idea short shrift. “I am perfectly willing to take responsibility for all the shortcomings I can identify about myself and my campaign,” she says. “But that wasn’t the whole story. I’ve been in campaigns for decades, nobody runs a perfect campaign. People make gaffes, missteps ... This was of a different order in terms of forces at work and I think that’s one of the biggest threats to democracy.”

The “forces” blamed in the book include misogyny whipped up by Trump, the American electoral college system (which meant she got 3m more votes than Trump, yet still lost), the spreading of fake news through social media as well as other interference by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, that she describes as “more serious than Watergate”. This includes Putin’s alleged involvement in the dumping of her emails by Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder.

Most of all, she blames the FBI director James Comey for firing off a letter to Congress just before the election — in which he revealed that the bureau had uncovered emails “pertinent” to a previously closed investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email address for classified information during her time as secretary of state. “What happened was almost a perfect storm,” she says. “I think I would have won without the Comey letter. I think the combination of the letter 11 days before the election, and what the Russians did weaponising WikiLeaks, raised enough doubts right at the end among a couple of tens of thousands of people in three states to vote differently.”

I point out that the former vice-president Joe Biden criticised her campaign for its lack of economic message, while Tony Blair said the anger that buoyed Trump “is not unjustified. You can’t just sit there and essentially blame the people.” They are not the only ones who accuse her of being elitist and out of touch.

“I knew that [anger] was out there,” she replies. “But I believed — and the popular vote proved it — more Americans agreed with the direction we were heading than not, and I believed Trump was temperamentally unprepared and unqualified to be president.

“I think there was lots of justified anger and distress over the financial collapse of 2007-2009,” she adds. “People’s savings were wiped out, they lost jobs and homes. But Barack Obama stabilised the markets and navigated us through it to the point that now incomes are beginning to rise and jobs are being created again.I don’t think Trump’s principal appeal is based on economic insecurity. It was a combination of playing on the fears of people who are worried about losing out in the future by fuelling sexism, racism and anti-immigrant feelings.

“The whole campaign he ran, from the very first day, was aimed at scapegoating. So if you are not in the place where you think you should be in society, that’s because someone else has taken it.”

In his campaign, Trump talked about how a victory for him would be “Brexit plus plus plus”. Did the British vote, less than five months earlier, not make her think that a similar populist earthquake was possible in the US? “Brexit should have been a bigger alarm than it was,” she admits. “It was some of the same people working for Trump, advocating for him. They thought, ‘Hey, we’ve got this figured out, just tell a really horrible lie over and over again, keep people off balance and make them think that this will, if not make their lives better, make them feel better.’ They voted against modern Britain and the EU, believing that somehow this would be good for their small village. It made no sense. The same thing played out in my race, but I didn’t think we were so vulnerable. But it turned out we were wrong — in part because the Russians played a much bigger role.”

By the “same people”, she particularly means Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, who was an enthusiastic advocate of Trump. Indeed, he was the first foreign politician to be received by Trump after his election. She speaks of Farage with disgust. “He came to the US to campaign for Trump and spent half of his remarks insulting me in a very personal way and talking about Trump as the alpha male, the silver-backed gorilla. Think of those images and what that says about what’s acceptable and what’s not.”

The real Bond villain in her book, however, is Putin, who she believes wants revenge for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the expansion of Nato. She also insists he has a personal grudge against her, describing him as “manspreading” in their meetings.

“US policy of the 1990s, to help democratise and protect former Soviet states, was something Russians didn’t like,” she says. “Putin said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst catastrophe in human history. But he never personally attacked my husband.

“There was that famous encounter Bush had with Putin when he said, ‘I can do business with him, I looked into his soul.’ I said, ‘He’s a KGB agent — by definition he doesn’t have a soul.’ So I sparred with him from a distance and as secretary of state. It was a personal grudge.”

To try to improve the situation, she says she would always go to meetings with Putin trying to find something they could actually engage on, but “as President Obama once said, [Putin] is like the bored guy in the back of the room”. She finally got his attention by asking him about wildlife conservation. “He came alive!” she recounts. “He takes me down the stairs — all of his security guys are jumping up, because we weren’t expected — into this inner sanctum with a huge desk and the biggest map of Russia and he started telling me he’s ‘going here to tag polar bears’. And then he says, ‘Would your husband like to come?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll ask him, but if he’s busy, I’ll go!’ ”

The invitation never came. Instead, last October, the US government formally accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic Party’s computer network, and said that Moscow was trying to “interfere” with the US election. Russia also used its own state-run media, such as RT and Sputnik, to generate anti-Clinton stories, as well as internet trolls to post fake stories on Facebook and other social media.

Last month, Facebook admitted that Russians had spent at least $100,000 on some 3,000 ads on US issues, posted on the site in the past two years. If people clicked, they received a stream of provocative news stories.

“No country has attacked the US with so few consequences,” Clinton writes. Should the Obama administration have done more, I ask. “Aagh,” she sighs, “that needs a whole other session.” She continues with a plea for the British authorities to investigate Cambridge Analytica, a behaviour-profiling company run by an old Etonian that reportedly received £5m from the Trump campaign to help swing voters.

“I hope the UK are investigating,” she says. “You know they were involved in the Kenya elections and Brexit, and are the subject of congressional and special counsel inquiries. The question to be asked is: how did they, the Russians and the Trump campaign converge?”

Grudges aside, what did Putin hope to achieve by supporting Trump? “I think it has exceeded his expectations — except for the unpredictability of it,” she replies. “He thought he was backing somebody who would immediately lift sanctions, be quiescent about Syria and Ukraine, and he’s got a lot of it.”

The Russians may have spread fake news, but why did so many Americans believe it? This, it seems, is the question that haunts her. One particularly improbable story that gained traction involved Clinton and her campaign chair, John Podesta, running a child-trafficking network from a pizzeria in Washington.

“Why would people believe that? Do they despise me and my politics so much that they are willing to believe the most horrible lie? How, in democracies like ours [can] people believe nonsense and lies on the side of buses about how much money the UK government paid to the EU? How did we let this happen?”

Clinton not only feels she inflicted Trump on the world, but that she let down women who had thought they were going to see America’s first female president.

Whatever you may think about Hillary, it was unedifying, to say the least, to see election rallies in the world’s most powerful nation chanting, “Kill the bitch!” How did that make her feel? “Sexism and misogyny are endemic in our society, so of course they are present in our politics,” she replies. “What I found so despicable was that it was stimulated by the candidate himself. In that campaign we had someone who advocated violence, who said all kinds of terrible things, who smirked at other terrible things. It was hard to believe it was happening.

“I got an honorary degree a few years ago from St Andrews in Scotland,” she continues, “and one of the other honourees was Mary Beard [the Cambridge classics professor]. She pointed out that some of the really horrible things people said about me harked back to ancient Greeks.” For example, the campaign mugs depicting Trump holding up Clinton’s severed head recalling Perseus holding up the head of Medusa.

“And Margaret Atwood, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, told me it reminded her of puritan witch-hunts of the 17th century.”

In the book, she describes how it felt as Trump followed her around the stage in the second TV debate, two days after the release of a tape in which he bragged about groping women. “He was literally breathing down my neck,” she writes. “My skin crawled.”

“Trump was running a reality-TV campaign filled with personal attacks, giving people a great show,” she says. Yet people didn’t just watch it — they voted for him, women too. While Clinton won the vote of black, Latina and Asian women by large margins, 53% of white females preferred Trump. Was she surprised? “No, because these forces have been around my entire life. But both through legislation and broad consensus, starting in the 1960s, it became less and less acceptable in our politics to run on race or be overtly sexist. But that didn’t mean everyone agreed and all of a sudden became feminist and opened the circle of opportunity.”

This, she says, presents a huge challenge for any traditional politician. “When people come along and say we just have to figure out how to get along with voters who voted for Trump, I say, ‘At what cost? At the cost of turning our backs on refugees and immigrants? At the cost of permitting discrimination against blacks and women?’ No, that’s not an acceptable cost. How do we do a better job of conveying, instead, that we are going to grow opportunity in society, so more people can realise dreams? That has to be the message.”

She made that pitch, though, and it didn’t work. Has America now had enough of the Clintons? “I am not going anywhere, but will be active in politics, which I care deeply about.”

She is setting up an organisation to recruit and train young people — particularly women — to go into politics. “I will do not-for-profit work, working with universities and writing and speaking out [against] what I see as a global backlash against women’s progress.”

Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, recently said: “Things that are seen as strengths in a man are seen as weaknesses in a woman.” Does Clinton agree? “I met Nicola this spring in New York and we had a great conversation,” she says. “There’s a commonality that exists among women who reach a certain level in politics.”

Has she met Theresa May? “No,” she simply says.

Do women lead in a different way? “I think I do. I am very comfortable in a more collegial way. I like to listen, I don’t like to brag or lie about what I can do, which I think put me at a disadvantage this time!”

After all she has endured, would she encourage her own daughter, Chelsea, to enter politics?

“I don’t ever think like that, because she is an independent, incredibly accomplished person. She has written a couple of very good books, I don’t think she’s at all interested in office.”

In the meantime, spending time with Chelsea and her two young children is one of the bonuses of losing. “Grandchildren are the best!” she exclaims.

Bill, she says, is a wonderful hands-on grandfather to Charlotte and Aidan. It’s an unexpected image — almost as unexpected as the affection with which she repeatedly refers to her husband throughout the interview. When I was a Washington correspondent in the Obama years, everyone told me the Clintons’ was a marriage on paper and the couple had struck a deal that she would stay with him in return for him helping her become president. She vehemently denies this, saying she is “fed up with people speculating on the state of my marriage”. In the book, she admits there were times she doubted its future, but she decided to stay with him because “I love him with my whole heart”.

Family aside, there’s always the chardonnay and a strange relaxation technique she describes as alternate nostril breathing.

It’s time for her photos, and what Clinton calls her “glam squad” appears to touch up her hair and make-up. She worked out she spent 600 hours — or 25 days — getting ready on the campaign trail. It’s not over. Next week she comes to the UK, where she will go to Swansea for the naming of a law school in her honour. “I am blessed with a strong constitution and am resilient,” she insists. “I am not going to spend the rest of my life looking backwards.”

The smile breaks and for a moment she looks as crestfallen as the 13-year-old Hillary who wrote to Nasa saying she wanted to be an astronaut. “Sorry, little girl,” came the response. “We don’t accept women into the space program.”

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Simon & Schuster £20) is out now

Hillary Rodham Clinton makes exclusive UK appearances at both The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival and Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival on Sunday 15 October

[veereadsandstuff]

Critical Analysis: Is AKA Resolving an Identity Crisis in Touch My Blood?

A conversation with writer, Tseliso Monaheng, and hip-hop activist and photographer, Rushay Booysen, about AKA finally reaching out to the coloured community in his latest and last album, Touch My Blood.

If this is really Kiernan Forbes’s last album, the South African hip-hop industry has lost a gem. Forbes is a force to be reckoned with. Politics and Beyonce aside, Forbes is genuinely a hard working individual, and Touch My Blood (TMB) could easily be one of the best albums in South African Hip Hop today. The album is a medley of fresh tracks and tracks released since his last offering. The first time I listened to the album I had some political bias but a conversation with Tseliso Monaheng quickly changed that, and I had to go back for a second listen. At first, my review was very much based on womanism and my perceptions of what hip-hop culture is meant to represent. Of course, this is based on the Beyonce track.

Not to take anything away from his last two albums, TMB is easily Forbes’s best work thus far.  Forbes is committed to his rhymes. Each song is well crafted, and when Forbes commits his soul to a beat he sees it through. I wonder if I’d be reaching if I dubbed him a young ODB – the wit, the raw charm and the skill. Jealous down, “AKA is one of the fewest artists who have made multiple hits across the continent, Fela in Versace is the next hit… He has collaborated with Africa’s finest artists… ” to paraphrase Monaheng. Fela in Versace has all the elements of hit we’ll probably be jamming to in December and features Kiddominant. Next year Forbes is likely to collect an award for that song, on an international stage. Speaking of awards Forbes takes a jab at the SAHHAs stating that he’s the one that put one of Osmic Menoe’s project on the map in Me and You. Forbes is the face of leading brands we grew up wearing, and booze we mostly drink on special occasions. To me, Me and You, is a toe-to-toe jam where rappers do what they do best, FLEX. Apart from flexin’, it’s no lie Forbes is a man with clout. In Star Signs, featuring Stogie T, Supamega GOES IN! Star Signs is a signature track, and it’s a bop for any hip-hop head. Right off the jump, Forbes points out not fucking with “backpack to the city and rap activities.” Supamega has come a long way since his breakthrough in the industry, “In this album, AKA actively reaches out to coloured community.” Monaheng mentioned when I was listing complaints about Forbes. “Why is no one talking about that?”

I know absolutely nothing about being coloured, therefore I cannot speak nor reference the culture with confidence. The song Mame is clearly paying homage to his roots and he interrogates current affairs; he is not shy about ambiguous space coloureds occupy in the ideal of the rainbow nation, the fact there was no real conversation around this new freedom and being granted access to resources. Of course, Forbes is about the money – “Even Madiba pulled up in a Benz…” and later concludes, “Fuck you, pay me.” Mame is easily one of the best songs on the album; the song is reminiscent of KO’s Pretty Young Thing. Monaheng pointed out that In Touch My Blood, Forbes fortifies his position as MVP in South African hip hip, never forsaking his coloured roots and occasionally sending shout-outs to Brasse vannie Kaap throughout the album.

At the foundation of South African hip-hop is the coloured community; I chatted to Rushay Booysen about the role of the coloured community in hip-hop and on how Forbes has positioned himself, “A couple of months ago, I wrote a post on Facebook about how AKA doesn’t reference coloured culture and his music never referenced his community. This can be viewed as a class issue because of the coloured community historical elements influence the classism. I felt he intentionally disassociated from being coloured in order to resonate with all races. As opposed to YoungstaCPT, who directly references coloured culture. However, over the past few months, he has tried to reconcile his place within the coloured community. On his interview with Sway, that was the first time I heard him reference coloured culture.”  

In TMB, Forbes uses a lot more coloured slang and references communities such as Eldorado Park, Rushay points out. “There are certainly clear attempts at reconciling with his community. AKA is a product of the rainbow nation ideology, he does not really subscribe to the notion of race, coloured identity in particular. When you come from a Model C background, you tend to take on different personas and speak a certain way and adopt a culture different from your community so I think that’s what occurred with AKA. His biggest market is black and perhaps, he tries to resonate with them but he has confessed to feeling unaccepted by black people. AKA’s biggest struggle has probably been finding his place within a certain community. Reaching out to the coloured community is claiming his place.”

The opening track being the title track is brave. Most artists typically lower the title track to somewhere in the middle or at the end of the album, but Forbes is not here to fuck around with your little peanuts. In Fully In he asks: “What’s a Rand to a Dollar? …Is you gon’ dala what you halla?” and later states that “numbers don’t lie.” According to Recording Industry of South Africa (RiSA), the album sold over 20 000 copies within a week. Elated, he shared this beautiful piece of news on Twitter, and his statement about being able to succeed without being signed touched Shane Eagle. Mbali Ndlela summed the beef up in one of her Twitter threads, and this has left us wondering whether Forbes will return to the studio to put Eagle in his place.

If we can learn anything from Cardi B and Nicki Minaj’s altercation over Minaj’s Motorsport verse it’s that there is a hierarchy in hip-hop. You don’t go around picking fights with emcees who have spent years building their brands, dealing with record labels, taking time to understand the business and observe the politics of it all. In the Tweets, Forbes’ reinforces his perception that Eagle is a kid, and as we all know, in the hierarchy kids don’t eat with the grown folks.

“It’s a shame that no women feature in the album,” I said to Monaheng.

“Probably because there are no female artists he resonates with? Can we separate the art from the politics?” Monaheng tells me.

Tough one. For me at, at least – does his daughter count as a female feature? Speaking of separating the art from the person, in Reset Forbes features JR and Okmalumkoolkat (not Smiso Zwane, okay?). This is one of those 21 Questions types of jams. I guess a man of Forbes’ stature stays questioning the women in his life, and women he dates. Almost every rapper has a love jam of this nature and I wonder what kind of response can be expected to the questions posed in the song. In the fragile economy of retweets finding talent to feature for an artwork like TMB must be an exhausting task. The list of rappers is endless. All the features are stellar. L-Tido is clearly a fantastic choice for Amen and he clearly commits to the flow, sampling a classic house track. Sampling in South African music has escalated to plagiarism, but the sampling in this track is smooth and simple, yet possesses a mysterious vibe that reminds us why we are so in love with Supamega. Kwesta really came through on Magriza. This is the jam you play when you roll up in the hood in your fresh ride to pick up your grandmother and take her to church. Gangsta.

His production team, boasts another stellar crew featuring himself, Master A Flat, Tweezy, Tazzy, Kiddominant, Anatii, Gemini Major, DJ Maphorisa, Makwa and Julian. The lack of women on his production team – features aside – is probably the reason why he released Beyonce. The track is a tantrum and Bonang is on the receiving end of it. The song is a farce, it’s emotional abuse forever imprinted in music and I wonder what this means for the child he is raising? Forbes is setting a precedent in Beyonce, that it’s okay to ill-treat women and emotionally abuse them – artistically. When he brags about kicking her out of a hotel room, this sends chills of domestic violence down my spine. I tend to become emotional around hip-hop because, in my life, it has served as a form of enlightenment so I tend to feel like rappers should actually analyse their role in patriarchy and domination of women.

“What does all of that have to do with hip-hop?” Monaheng questions as we iron out how I can go about this essay. “Hip-hop is party music,” he says referring to the early days when people jammed to broken beats, that amazing boom bop era. Forbes is an artist, he’s holding a mirror up to society – I get that. However, no possible explanation can make me hate Beyonce any less. Women actually love Forbes, know his lyrics and go to his shows; that’s why I feel that South African hip-hop is yet to truly understand the importance of femininity in hip-hop. Of course, hip-hop is rooted in battle culture, I mean his tiff with Refilwe Phoolo is almost at the level of Jay-Z and Nas, and I really don’t want to talk about who’s who in the sitch. Battle songs, beef with other rappers and dissing forms part of the foundation of making a rap song cool. Ask Masta Ace all about it. However…

“Hip-hop is imperfect,” Rushay says, “the younger generation is doing things a lot more different than the old school. When we were coming up things were a lot different and that’s why there is a lot of conflicts.”

For the longest time, my younger brother urged me to listen to Forbes’ music – I have been exposed to his work by force and his growth with each album intensifies. It will be interesting to see him really conduct the business of hip-hop beyond the limelight. An early retirement at the age of 30 is significant and it indicates a level of success most coloured and black men only dream about.