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Record W4408090098 · doi:10.1080/00083968.2024.2439477

Singing truth to power: youth existential struggles and popular music in Zimbabwe

2025· article· en· W4408090098 on OpenAlex
Simbarashe Gukurume

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAfrican studies and sociopolitical issues
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSingingExistentialismPower (physics)Popular musicArtAestheticsPolitical scienceLiteratureAcousticsLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Drawing on Zimdancehall youth music genre, this article examines how youth mobilise and deploy music to speak truth to power in creative and subversive ways. I focus on the music of popular youthful artists such as Winky D, Seh Calaz, and Platinum Prince to argue that Zimdancehall music has transformed into a genre and discursive space through which young people entertain and critique power and the excesses of political elites simultaneously. I assert that in authoritarian and repressive regimes, music, in this case Zimdancehall, acts as a form of resistance. Indeed, Zimdancehall has become a counter-hegemonic public sphere through which young people express their everyday struggles. In a space where violence is instrumentalised to silence critics, young people deploy creative tactics of political expression. I argue that regardless of repression, Zimdancehall has developed into a protest genre that entertains and critiques hegemonic forms of political power beyond the state reach.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.747
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.045
GPT teacher head0.287
Teacher spread0.243 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it