Singing truth to power: youth existential struggles and popular music in Zimbabwe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".