Abstract
MK was a channel on the premium package of the paid Digital Satellite Television Service (DStv) of MultiChoice and kykNET during the period from 2005 to 2013. The channel broadcast music 24/7, using mostly Afrikaans as medium. Through its content and programming, it helped to build a new identity for the post-apartheid Afrikaans-speaking youth.
While highlighting issues central to the lives of the Afrikaans youth at the time, MK simultaneously set the scene for unique, dissident forms of expression in Afrikaans. A large following was amassed within its first two years of existence, which turned the channel into a cultural phenomenon. As a social influencer, MK stimulated the formation of new subgenres in the field of Afrikaans rock and alternative music, subcultures representative of the language use and cultural or countercultural practices of the Afrikaans-speaking youth, and of a new-found freedom of self.
Despite the channel’s widespread influence on various musical, technical and social platforms, culminating in a lifestyle channel with music videos at its core, no published research on MK exists. To address this hiatus, the objective of our research is to investigate MK’s philosophy and its legacy regarding the expansion of marginal Afrikaans identities, as constructed in alternative Afrikaans music and its subgenres, including hip hop and rap. Based on this contextual framing, the research question underpinning the article is: How was the formation of Afrikaans alternative identity related to MK as a cultural phenomenon, and how were branding and social themes concerning identity influenced by the channel’s meta-textual production of discourse?
The qualitative methodology of an ethnographic case study was found to be a productive approach for our research, documenting MK as a distinctive, single-case cultural phenomenon. As most of the channel’s social media and internet traces have been removed indefinitely, semi-structured interviews with MK stakeholders serve as the primary source for our data collection, supplemented by a study of MK archival material. Interviewees were chosen based on their involvement and field of expertise which constituted and helped to shape the media image of the channel. These include production managers, critics, journalists, band members, and managers actively involved with MK during its existence. Archival materials consulted with a view to our research include all MK Awards nominees’ music videos (2007–2013) and the channel’s broadcast programmes.
As our study involved a relatively wide range of data sources, thematic analysis proved to be relevant to the work. While traditionally researchers have applied the method mainly to textual data, more recently interview transcripts, field notes, historical or site documents, digital audio files and video files have come to be included, among other viable sources of information. Concerning the study of MK, the method offered a systematic approach to the analysis of our data, which involves identifying themes or patterns of cultural meaning, coding relevant data according to themes, and interpreting the resulting thematic structures by seeking out overarching configurations, as structured by a conceptual framework based on recent scholarship on Afrikaans identity.
Our research brought to the fore the fact that the channel had been started for a specific target market for whom branding – on TV and at live events – was a major attraction. Visual marketing established MK as a brand and helped to create new platforms for young musicians, artists and technicians, while simultaneously extending the brand to lifestyle choices and social causes, some of which are still operative today. The variety of programmes, aided by young and “funky” presenters, mediated the many facets of being a post-apartheid Afrikaans-speaking youth and provided a cultural safe space within which to rebel and process their troubled history.
On a pragmatic level, MK impacted all Afrikaans rock or alternative bands during its existence, creating a platform which allowed bands to aspire to international standards of music and music video production. While the success and financial viability of MK were underlined by most of our respondents, one participant intimated that the decision to establish the channel had not been inspired ideologically, but rather amounted to a pragmatic business decision. Ironically, MK’s focus on an alternative Afrikaans niche market seemed to have failed as an economic strategy and eventually led to the channel’s demise.
Post-structuralist thought assisted in underscoring evident contradictions within the channel’s projection of multifarious and fluid alternative Afrikaner senses of self. This was most strongly expressed in the opposing identity formations of nostalgia and cynicism, represented in the “De la Rey” phenomenon and Zef culture respectively. While the Afrikaans nostalgia brand foregrounded exclusivist ethnocentric tendencies associated with the “De la Rey” subculture, Zef culture was seen as being supportive of a subversive, heterodox Afrikaner counterculture.
Thus, as MK was found to have contributed to “new” South African discourses grappling with the formation of marginal identities, and to a definition and redefinition of terms such as other, us, self and them, this cultural phenomenon is deserving of deeper study and analysis.
Keywords: Afrikaans alternative music; branding; cultural phenomenon; identity discourse; MK Music Channel; post-apartheid youth
- The featured image of this article is a combination of a still from the music video “Ek skyn(heilig)” and the MK logo.