When, in the late Fifties, jazz pianist and critic Todd Matshikiza wrote for the popular monthly Drum magazine, he recognised in music one of the most important means of resistance to apartheid and one of the few fields where he and his people could imagine and express their democratic aspirations. Comparing music to “a musty hole where man makes friends with no restraints,” the musician provides an original definition of freedom, which, thirty years later, is elaborated by Mark Romanek in his video for Janet Jackson’s hit Got ‘Til It’s Gone (1998).
The result is a multifaceted cultural operation, through which the director tries to envision the utopian space invoked by Matshikiza, recreating the atmosphere of the cultural and political South African Renaissance of the Fifties as depicted in Drum and, at the same time, displacing it in a non-defined temporal and spatial dimension. The video provides, therefore, an interesting platform for the analysis of how a historically contextualised concept of freedom can cross boundaries and paradigms and how the counter-hegemonic discourse it entails can be translated into original terms and into new technological forms of representation.
As the creative attempt to visualise Matshikiza’s “musty hole” of unrestrained universal brotherhood, Got ‘Til It’s Gone also offers a privileged ground for the interrogation of the African and Black Diaspora cultural and political practices and affiliations, exploring the possible transnational and transracial elective affinities black communities resort to in their struggle for freedom.