South Africa is a nation of significant symbolic capital. Through popular culture, South Africans participate in an exchange of sounds, fashion and dance – as an embodiment of identity, self-fashioning and freedom. At the nexus of social media and popular culture, we witness the unabated invigoration of the ‘Lüh Twizzy movement’ – a movement largely carried by youth between the ages of 10 – 16, starting in the latter part of 2022.
Publicly characterised by causing chaos at Gauteng malls, members of Lüh Twizzy are inspired by the Lüh Twizzy TikTok challenge and American Rapper, Yeat. The rapper’s music and lifestyle inform the strong influence on the movement’s name, ideology and identity.
Clad in black and covering their faces – teenagers and fans alike describe the music and aesthetic embodiment of Lüh Twizzy as a soundtrack to freedom, both personal and political – developing inclusive subaltern cultural labour and resistance. Lüh Twizzy transpires amongst sentiments of a spiralled facile and apolitical youth, that rarely pose a challenge to entrenched socio-economic status and relations.
An Assertion of Space, an Announcement of Arrival
The conjunction of social media and popular culture has created an environment for fandom to fundamentally shift towards a pragmatic strategy to address an ideological agenda that may evolve into a strong movement. Popular culture and social media are critical spaces for these alternative political practices.
By looking at current urban black youth politics, through the lens of the Lüh Twizzy movement, one can begin to excavate its cultural formation as an important site of identity and resistance. To do so gives weight to the agency of the Lüh Twizzy youth: giving them the power to contest and negotiate, beyond their public perception as only a site of juvenile public disobedience.
Through the performance of their identity and practice, Lüh Twizzy facilitates alternative performances of black bodies as it transcends the constraints of geography, race and youth. Much of the Lüh Twizzy is about an assertive reclaiming of space, an announcement of arrival, a demand to be listened to, to not be discounted because of youth or circumstance.
The Lüh Twizzy give us an opportunity to examine the figure of the youthful Black body in post – in its representation and the sites of its consumption – as its point of focus. The movement hinges on these youth’s sense of having the right to consume/participate: to move through the city, to self-fashion differently, among other interventions.
The Lüh Twizzy demonstrate new consumption practices over the discontinuation of struggle politics – significant here is the reorientation of consumption with South Africa’s urban youth culture, as itself political.
In the curious case of the Lüh Twizzy, (their) popular culture and music need to be necessitated as a study of self-fashioning and the meditation of the body and pleasure that arises from the practices of popular performance – highlighting the nuanced and contradictory relationship between popular culture performance as an embodied practice and vectors of power (like race, class and gender) investigating the multiple yet contradictory ways that Black youth put popular culture into work.
In developing this line of thinking, we are implored to question: are these performances a tool for the youth to assert their freedom? And if so, what do those performances of freedom look like when they are performed by this group, and what do they mean? What might it mean if this was a new performance of freedom? Does this signify something new within the context of the consumption of popular culture by Black youth?
At stake is an acknowledgement that the performance of freedom is always contested and that different sociopolitical interests emerge to contest its meaning and implementation in contemporary South Africa. As such, what might it then mean for freedom to have a new youthful face for the visions of freedom of South Africa to be orchestrated by different bodies? These performances enact a new political vocabulary – a vernacular that invites new possibilities and different ways of coming together.
Much of what is being subverted with Lüh Twizzy’s bodies are ideals of subjectivity and space with perhaps a hope for shifts in materiality. The Lüh Twizzy beckon a call for imaginations of freedom, identity and youth in practice for contemporary SA.
