Youth Popular Music, Waithood and Protest: Zimdancehall Music in Zimbabwe

Abstract Dancehall music in Zimbabwe has become a very popular genre among urban youth. Since its emergence, this localised music genre has reconfigured urban public culture in complex ways. Drawing on popular musical forms (Zimdancehall), this article examines how urban youth use this musical genre to articulate and express their frustrations, grievances, and everyday existential struggles. This article critiques popular songs and lyrics of selected young Zimdancehall artists to show how their musical discourse can be viewed as alternative discursive spaces of counterhegemonic narratives and a critique of the excesses of the post-colonial state. I argue that Zimdancehall music has become a space where young people simultaneously articulate and navigate their existential frustrations and waithood. While marginalised from mainstream socio-economic and political processes, and detached from the corridors of power, young people use music to speak truth to power. They sing about their anxieties with the socio-economic and political injustices metaphorically and creatively. I assert that through music, young people have found a way of (in)directly addressing the political elites who are complicit in their everyday existential struggles. I argue that Zimdancehall lyrics should be read as ideological texts which articulate a specific type of being and becoming, epitomised by the politics of suffering and smiling.