I’ve cried over Milo milkshake at a Northam strip mall; coughed up ten rounds of mud-dust; dug the dirt from my nails; slept for fifteen hours straight; shaken the twiggy debris from my tent; plunged into nostalgia every time Wololo airs on radio; and added five new artists to my playlist. All in the aftermath of the 22nd Oppikoppi and four days in a Limpopo dust bowl.
Oppi is the largest music festival in the country, hosting over 150 acts on seven stages. It began as a small rock festival for a congregation of predominantly white, Afrikaans devotees. While these origins remain palpable in its demography, the festival’s line-up and audience has undergone kaleidoscopic diversification. Oppi’s 2016 party pastiche reflected an assortment of musical tastes, including rock, drum-and-bass, hip-hop, house, Indie, metal, and alt-RnB, with the aim of awakening audiences to new people, new ideas, and new genres.
Ours was a creative commune of clustered braai stands and deck chairs. Huddled under umbrella shade were MC’s, DJs, photographers, models, social media professionals, and entertainment entrepreneurs, all flipping meat and dispensing wet-wipes. It was a camp as committed to a shared lamb potjie and a rotating AUX cable, as it was to supporting one another’s hustle and artistry.
There were those cutting-cold nights when we were kept awake by our feet. All three pairs of socks and still our toes were never quite warm enough to go unnoticed. Those nights when an encompassing blue-pink sunset drew in a bespeckled black sky and the stars forced their way into conversation. “How did these extinguished fires, so far away, seem close enough to be plucked from their black canvas?” Those nights we crawled into our tents at 5am, encased in meat-scented smoke, clutching to any available warmth, only to be cooked out of our beds at sunrise.
Dawn was ushered in by human wolf-cries, echoing across the steaming valley. Heat poured over the skin, with an after-sting of grit and acacia thorns. We learned to cherish simple pleasures: a sip of cold water, a friend’s finger coated in lip-balm, a dust mask, a slice of flat ground. Each day we navigated from basecamp to ‘the belly’: over the danger tape; past the gazebo emanating kwaito; turn at the row of green toilets; pit stop at the Red Frog tent, where water, coffee and pancakes were offered to wayward travellers; and finally dive into the current of festival-goers, decked in ripped denim, Basotho hats, dusty moon bags and bandanas. Each group yelling ‘Oppiiii!!’ as they passed: part-greeting, part-salute, part-chant. In the heat and grime and crowd-sway, everyone looked paradoxically more beautiful. “It’s that dusty love”, I was told. The lovely young, effervescent in bush-wear couture. Oppi was a simmering incubator — of sound, and creativity, and disparate bodies colliding.
Where the day was about scarcity and longing for a flush toilet, the night erupted in excess. The most sophisticated technologies of sound and light extended laser beams and synthesisers from the peak of the ‘koppie’ over the 20, 000 campers below. At the festival’s pinnacle, pegged atop the hill, was the Red Bull stage, where green light darted up the trees like florescent lizards. The three neon triangles above the DJ decks reverberated bass over the natural amphitheatre and into the bellies of the audience. Here, the dance floor was a slope of sand and rock. We clutched onto strangers’ bodies for support and offered hands to pull others out the pit.
Over the course of the weekend, some of the country’s best DJs shook Red Bull ground, kicking up dust from the decks. Newcomer Buli spun melody and groove into a perfectly ambient set, lifting his audience from their rocky footholds into a cool sway. Duhn Kidda’s genre contortionism had us dipping from Ja Rule, into new house, and back to the Noughties. Then there was the moment Diloxclusiv dropped Gqom on an Oppi stage. Unapologetic and dripping ostentatiousness, he spliced Durban dance music with struggle songs, while the crowd spewed whistles and ‘woza!’ An impromptu performance by DJ PH had us fast forgetting about Nasty C’slast-minute cancellation. You know that stomach-shaking ecstasy you feel when your song is about to drop? Now imagine it every twenty seconds, your arms stretched out for more. He’s the DJ who plays “37 songs in one”. We pulled him back for an encore set.
Magic mixology was interspersed with fire-spitting live acts. Saturday night belonged to 21-year-old North-London lyricists, Little Simz, who entranced her audience with grime-stained confessionals, carried by bass-heavy production. While hip-hop, RnB and dance music have often been synonymous the Red Bull stage, there have been increasing attempts to diversify stage acts and prompt eclectic discovery. MC’s Riky Rick and Khuli Chana performed on Main and Skelm stages respectively. Petit Noir’s enrapturing Main Stage performance rippled into evening conversation. We celebrated his sound while stoking hot coals and climbing into our night jackets. On Sunday, DJReady D took to Main Stage to receive the festival’s Heavyweight Champion Award. His banging tribute performance set the crowd and Twitter alight, featuring guest artists ‘direk van die Kaap af’:Prophets of the City (POC) inserting (P)eople (O)f (C)olour into the festival’s Afrikaans cultural production. “Sit jou hande op, terwyl die beat klop”. Also on Sunday, 2Lee Stark, backed by Boombapbase, shut down a sweltering Skelm Stage. His perfectly tailored set and electric stage presence had me feeling like this was an artist, pre-detonation, about to explode on the local hip-hop scene.
It’s days since I returned from the Oppi dustbowl. I’ve submerged myself in sanitising bathtubs and sunk into the nostalgia of the Unsea. Some of my clothes still smell of a dusty Northam farm, where we surrendered to “the cusp of this here whatever time” and “prayed in a language that would outlive us” — music.
Dusk falls in Katlehong. A line of cars extends down the Nota street pavement, connecting the provisional barricades to the Hurricanes entrance. It’s an East Rand block party, wedged between residents’ yard fences. The sun-warmed air is infused with house music and smoke: simmering Rizla, hookah-pipe tobacco, and meat on the grill. A young man leans over, laughing, and says: “Welcome to Hell”. Hurricane Sundays, he tells me, will keep you from church. Behind us, young people cluster around beer-stacked cooler boxes, intermittently setting their sneakers to dance.
Today, Hurricanes plays host to the ‘March To Victory’ party, a pre-election day celebration in support of the ANC’s mayoral candidate for Ekurhuleni: Mzwandile Masina, dubbed ‘The People’s Mayor’. Ekurhuleni’s current mayor, Mondi Gungubele offered public support for Masina’s candidacy, following violent protests in neighbouring Tshwane over the nomination of new candidate, Thoko Didiza.
As night edges closer, a constant stream of partygoers pours through Hurricane’s palisade fencing. The venue is interspersed with ‘party’ regalia: yellow, green and black dotted amidst army jackets, headscarves, sneakers and Timberlands. Styled ‘campaign cool’, partygoers are clad in cutting-edge street-wear and military-chic, with clusters of ANC insignia. A group gathers for a photograph alongside a makeshift tuck-shop: their heads tucked into their elbows, a line of arms outstretched in the signature ‘dab’. An ANC flag flies above those queuing for the bar. It’s the blowout before the ballot box.
By seven, the venue is throbbing with some of the country’s biggest tunes. On the line-up for this evening’s ‘Victory March’ are DJs Sbu and Shimza, as well as hip-hop sensation Riky Rick, who took to the stage in a Madiba-emblazoned ANC shirt. The night also includes a surprise performance from 19-year old emcee, Nasty C, the young voice of hip-hop anthems Hell Naw and Juice Back.
It’s the soundtrack of our dancefloors, but this time, descending from the decks is the regular chant, Viva ANC, Viva! It’s entertainment electioneering, steered by the local ANC youth league and aimed at Ekurhuleni youth. When the campaign struggle song, Asinavalo [We are not scared] drops with ‘Nqonqo’, the audience erupts, receiving the song like any club banger. Fists raised, the crowd chants the lyrics: Sisebenza Kanzima [We work hard]. The apparent implication in this case is: “we work hard, so why not enjoy it? This is our victory dance”. Elections rendered as celebration above contest. It’s the politics of partying, and of the Party, in audacious collision.
‘Nairobi, by weekday dusk, is a mad asylum of matatu (mini-bus) mayhem and stone-faced pedestrians, hurrying to get home. I’m definitely going against the tide of evening traffic’
Tony Mochama, Nairobi A Night Guide
When the sun is out, Nairobi streets are an interlocking riddle of cars, buses, motorbikes and pedestrians. New lanes emerge and disappear as travellers take on the traffic. It’s a delicate dance, splitting potholes and narrow avenues, tires kicking up dust and gravel. In some places, motorists and hawkers jostle for roadside territory as pavements overflow with sneakers, potted plants, furniture and corrugated iron. Gated apartments, office buildings, embassies and roadside nyama choma flash by in the windowpane film reel. The requisite ad-breaks: ‘M-Pesa; Tuskers beer; “newly-erected flats for let”. Matatus, the city’s famed mini-bus taxis, run the streets: their car bodies emblazoned by local spray artists, interiors encased in lush fabrics, and windows reverberating club bangers.
When the sun is switched off, the streets clear and quieten. But around the city’s nightclubs is a cacophony of headlights and hooting, as Nairobi’s youth descend on the dancefloor. Nightclub gossip, over the past month, has circulated around B-Clubb, where the sons of Uhuru Kenyatta, Raila Odinga and William Ruto had reportedly spent 1.16 million Kenyan shillings on alcohol, much of which was used to wash the hands of their party. Nairobi’s skhothane, switching custard for champagne, and setting Kenyan twitter alight. Meanwhile, Nairobi Noir has flooded online catalogues with grey-scale images of the city-by-night: a dimly-lit street corner; the lone light of a motorcyclist; security guards at an alleyway precipice.
My first night in Nairobi took me to The Elephant in Lavington. It’s an outdoor venue, erected in the back garden of Eric Wainaina’s studio, behind an inconspicuous metal gate, in a dimly-lit suburban street. Slide through the gate and arrive at what feels like your neighbour’s driveway. Yet, around the back of the house is a dazzling stage, bathed in purple light, and set up for an eight-piece band. It’s Nairobi’s Narnia. The audience gathers on wooden crates in the garden, enjoying tightly-packed samosas, which are among the city’s signature street food.
The owner, Wainaina, is one of Kenya’s most acclaimed singer-songwriters, His debut album is titled Sawa Sawa. Perhaps the most commonly heard phrase in Nairobi, it’s a street-talk equivalent of ‘sharp sharp’ or ‘sho’. And indeed Wainaina’s music has often transformed street politics to soundtrack. His single, Kenya Only, became the unofficial song of mourning after the city’s 1998 terrorist bombing. In 2001, he released ‘Nchi ya Kitu Kidogo’ (‘Country of Bribes’). The anti-corruption anthem has, in the past, prompted state intimidation and censorship by the national broadcaster.
City politics had similarly infiltratd this night at The Elephant. The show was delayed due to some-or-other encounter between the band and the police. But when hey finally stepped into the purple light, Atemi Oyungu, Chris Adwar, Kanji Mbugua and The Villagers Band had the audience entranced with a Benga —Afro-Soul—RnB fusion. Midway, we were coaxed into rehearsing a series of dance moves, each an adaptation of Nairobi’s street-characters: the bus driver, the motorcyclist, and the soldier. With the moon ascended to form a spotlight over our heads, Atemi and Chris Adwar perform ‘Someday’, sketching a roadside romance: ‘Ningekuwa taxi driver. Ningekupa lifti kila mara…Ningekuwa dereva Citi Hoppa. Hata kileleshwa tungetembea.’
Next pit stop on my journey through Nairobi’s lunarscape is TheAlchemist, perched on the narrow Parklands Road, behind another innocuous metal gate. In many guises, TheAlchemist brings the outside, in. The outdoor, semi-tented venue is clearly a favourite among expats and locals alike. To the rear of the gravel dancefloor, groups cluster around hookah pipes or join the line at the bar. Around the side, street food is sold from a small caravan. The stage itself opens out from a truck: transporting music, literally, off the city streets. On stage is a Swahili rhumba band: Red Acapella. Their lead singer — draped in beads, overalls and red light — calls to the audience. The music unapologetically old school, unapologetically Kenyan, is branded ‘urban folk’.
Our final stop and the motoring metaphors are relentless: The Space is a car wash by day. At night, its neon-lit entrance is framed by a multi-story tightly packed parking lot. A long line of cars stretches from the entrance down the Ngong road pavement. Only a select few vehicles are allowed to park inside the venue, and the selection criteria are clear. Who needs red carpet when you’ve got BMs? It’s another part-indoor, part-outdoor venue, dotted with bar tables and hookah pipes. Young promoters, with spirits in their belts, offer shots by the minute. Expensive bottles are carried to their buyers, ablaze with sparklers: traffic signals to indicate who is spending and where.
Like a matatu interior, the walls of The Space are dotted with television screens, and the club’s playlist is a music video montage: tracks from Kenya, The Gambia, Nigeria, South Africa. Then add a dash of 90s American hip-hop. If Nairobi matatus are nightclubs on wheels, then perhaps its nightclubs are like stationery matatus: infused with rising smoke, flashing lights, motorist metaphors, and the pounding feet of night-crawler traffic, kicking up dust. At night, the life of the bustle-city is transported here, backlit in florescent light and set to music.
It’s dark and warm in the sweet sweat-scented nightclub. Exclusively female and femme-identified DJs stroke the decks — a sonic pleasure patrol, an Empress insurrection. There’s a Hello Kitty pussy-cat vagazzling the DJ booth, backlit by velvet and a lick of pink lighting. Think Pussy Pride. Pussy Play. Pussy Power. Pussy Party. It’s a story about how femme bodies might take back the dancefloor.
Pussy Party pops off every second Wednesday of the month at Kitcheners, offering a platform in which femme DJs and artists can “practice, incubate, exchange and expose”. The organisers describe it as“an experiment in amplifying feminine energy on the dance floor”, an act of “yielding beyond the gender binary”, a femmeditation. In a thickly and narrowly-defined masculine industry, Pussy Party has sought to nurture and celebrate young female and femme-identified talent: each party is preceded by a three-hour workshop for aspirant femme selektas.
Three months in, Pussy Parties have boasted a fierce line-up of femme foxes: SistaMatik, FAKA, Lady Skollie, DJ Doowop, DJ Mystikal Ebony, LoveslavePhola, and Lil Bow. But the curators, creators, and dancefloor equators behind Pussy Party are DJs Phatstoki and Rosie Parade. Rosie Parade (AKA Coco) is part of Broaden a New Sound, music curators for Kitcheners.
‘When we arrived at Kitcheners, in 2009, courtesy of Andrew the DJ, there was nothing. There wasn’t 70 Juta. There wasn’t Smokehouse. Nothing was happening at Alexander Theatre. Kitcheners was a dive bar. I had my 21st birthday here at a time when what is now the bathroom was the office, when Great Dane was just an empty hall. Initially Kitcheners was the type of venue anyone could book. Butin late 2014 we were conscious to say ‘Okay, what’s happening to the space around us? What’s happening to the club? What’s happening to the dancefloor?‘
Phatstoki (AKA Gontse) is a music mixologist and penetrating photographer, whose artistic raw material has been gathered through a lifetime of traversing city, suburb, village and Soweto, where she now lives. Phatstoki’s fluid audio-eclecticism resonated with Broaden a New Sound, whose mandate has been to curate genre-bending, and in this case, gender-bending night-spaces. ‘Phatsoki’s had this series of mixes called Boobs and Honey ’Rosie Parade remembers. ‘Boobs and Honey! Those are literally like my top two things (laughs) ’The two groove goddesses, Rosie Parade and Phatstoki became reciprocal fan-girls, teaming up to create what is now Pussy Party.
‘I remember walking through the club and being approached constantly’, Rosie Parade says, ‘being pressurised constantly by men.’ Whether a baggy hoody, or a tight skirt, or a long dress — each garment is re-imagined as the self-same solicitation. And so, femme bodies are propelled through a current of pull—stroke—squeeze—clutch. The crowd become an excuse to make the brash laying of hands appear accidental. And the dancefloor — ‘Hey baby’ — becomes — ‘You look like a million dollars’ — an exercise — ‘I like your…’ — in carving out space and protecting one’s borders. Just the presence of a woman in a nightclub, particularly if alone, can be read as implicit consent for all manner of invasions.
Then there are those femme bodies that outwardly supersede gender circumscription. Courageous, embattled bodies living dangerous, defiant and godly in a beyond-binary space — whose bodies are cowardly read as provocations to violence. As Desire Marea of FAKA once told me, a proximate dance might result in a punch to the face.
‘Looking at the dancefloor’, Rosie Parade explained, ‘there came a point [where we as Kitchener’s management thought] ‘Okay there’s a lot of guys. Women [and femme-identified men] are telling us that they feel unsafe. That’s not a positive club environment. I’m privileged that the management and staff at Kitcheners trust and respect me. So it’s about ‘What do I have that I can use?’ And for me, this space, and these people, this is what I have that I can use’
‘Maybe’, says Phatstoki,‘there’s a space for women/femme energies to actually own the dancefloor — not just necessarily own the dancefloor so that guys can hang around, but own the dancefloor ‘cos we actually wanna party, for us. We are the party, so can we actually be given the space to do just that.’
Go to an instalment of Pussy Party and you’ll still find many men. ‘To be quite honest I don’t think femmes want to exclude men’ Phatstoki says. ‘We just want some goddamn respect! Maybe this is a way we can teach them. Ya’ll are more than welcome, but ya’ll need to know what this party is about. If you don’t like it, by all means [leave]… if you wanna appreciate our efforts and party with us, please do…’ But understand that ‘it’s not your night tonight, you know’.
True to its name, Pussy Party, in monthly cycles, sets out to be a place of warmth, and pleasure — to cradle and excite us. It changes its shape to let us in, remoulding the club-space into a femme-positive experimental sanctuary. It can ache for us. It can be potentiallylife-giving. But, as with any pussy, right of admission is reserved. There are pre-requisites of respect, appreciation and recognition that Pussy Party is grappling with enforcing.
‘Actually’, Rosie Parade says,‘what’s been simple is: put women behind the decks, or femme-identified individuals behind the decks [and] the femmes in the space respond. Tell people that it’s a space for femmes and honeys will come through’.
Both Rosie Parade and Phatstoki know that this is the awkward, messy, beautiful beginning — of a movement to disrupt club cultures. ‘It’s still marginalised. You couldn’t do this on a weekend. We’re mid-week and we’re mid-month. It’s not payday weekend’.
They also know that Pussy Party, as it stands, attracts a particular, pre-defined Model C, middle class. ‘But [for this space], this is how it starts’, says Phatstoki. ‘I want to bring these issues up, and depending on how we address them, that’s when I’ll know if we’re serious about the movement or not. [We need to make sure we] don’t forget those who go through the most [regarding this subject].’
The Pussy Party agenda aspires to openness. ‘Come through and tap us on the shoulder and say what’s up. This is the night to come through. If you have a problem coming through, tell us about the problem. I think you need to admit where you’ve gone wrong and made mistakes ’Rosie Parade says. ‘Openness. That’s a big part of a femme party’, Phatstoki adds, smiling. ‘That flexibility. It can stretch’, laughs Rosie Parade, ‘and it can shrink. It can self-lubricate’.
Photographs have become indispensable to our nightlife: there’s no party unless it’s pictured. Amid the lazer beams, and tri-coloured stage lights, is the cacophony of tiny camera-phone flashes, setting off about the crowd. Snapping images is part of what it means to share, enjoy and curate our after-dark experiences. A night on the town clusters around various photo opportunities: getting dressed, meeting up with friends, the taxi ride, the big arrival, the bathroom graffiti, the pavement banter, the ride home, maybe even a selfie before bed. It’s a life documented, a record of existence.
Although we are now all Insta-photographers, we are not simply interested in being seen and recorded: we also hope to be captured well. If anything, an Insta-culture has attuned our eyes to quality lighting, design and composition. We are an aesthetically discerning generation, concerned with packaging our lives with the right colour schemes and filters: the quotidian as art.
Curating our visual record becomes far more difficult after dark. Phone cameras flail in a low-light environment. Increasingly, nightlife promoters are recognising that part of what makes an event ‘lit’ is expert photography. That has been the business of On-Air Entertainment.
On-Air is comprised of young photographers. Nights spent taking pictures in clubs soon flourished into a business. Entirely self-taught, the crew accumulated more and more gear as they continued to work. In their early twenties, they established a company. ‘Over the years you get your style’ Leander explains. ‘That’s how you know that’s the shot you need to take. Your creativity comes out in that space’.
On-Air have now been in the business for eight years, splintering into corporate work, fashion shoots, photo-booths, social uploading, videography and an array of events photography. Their newly renovated studio is tucked away in a suburban area in Montgomery Park. Simply driving past, one would have no idea that behind the neat lawns and flower beds, were three of the biggest events photographers in the game, who spend their nights capturing sound, light and bodies at high velocity.
Amid the lightning-fast traffic of uploaded night-photography, On-Air recurs again and again in the image peripheries. Jo’burg’s nocturnal city is being captured by their lenses. From Black City and Pop Bottles, to J-Cole at the dome, massive Zone 6 gigs, and the most recent SAMA Awards.
Scan through an On-Aircatalogue and it’s difficult to miss their sharp-lens perspective: a top-lit crowd receding into a horizon of smoke and spotlight; a DJ ascending from the decks, basking in purple light; a sea of heads arched in submission towards the stage lights. Despite the dark room and crowd current, bodies are captured and suspended in perfect technicolour. On-Air are shaping how we remember our nights on the city. Their photographs, astutely composed and lit, offer a shortcut to nostalgia.
There’s a now well-known idiom: ‘Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like’. And that is what On Air have done: pictures of awe, power, ecstasy, release, and solidarity. Through these selective images, audiences are able to extract blissful moments from the long hours spent waiting in line, the drinks spilled, the desperate scrambles towards the stage, the broken glass. The carefully chosen images tease out these transcendent moments from the negatives, re-enchanting us, keeping us coming back.
Three months ago, I shared 90-minutes with Buyani Duma (otherwise known as Desire Marea, of the artist collective FAKA). Encased in a wall of glass at the Newtown Workshop, we moved unusually quickly from strangers’ niceties to buried intimacies. A few weeks later, on a Juta Street corner, Didi Simelane (A.K.A style icon Didi Monsta) and I were exchanging histories for herbal tea. In each of these conversations there had been a moment in which the artist seated across from me seemed to leave our city meeting spot. As if speaking from a suspended television screen, their voice emanated like static through flickering colour bars, projected either from a nostalgic past or a utopian future, or maybe both. I sunk into those seconds of being lost, basking in the aesthetics and poetics of someone who moved in another plain. But I haven’t been able to write about either conversation since. Over the past few days, Didi and Desire have started to speak with one another inside my head. I don’t know if they’ve ever met, but, in my own mind, Marea and Monsta were performing a collaborative pantomime.
Didi grew up in Pretoria, also spending many years of his childhood in Mozambique. A designer, style icon and influencer, he says he’s always been fiercely experimental in his style. Didi remembers how his mom used to put him on the ‘next next vibes’. ‘Sneakers wise, clothes…’ he told me, ‘she would buy clothes for me as if she was buying for herself. She would go so Rambo on my gear. Me and my brother. Yeah, she would go Rambo. I would just kill everybody’s style from a young age.’
Desire describes himself as a ‘village boy’ from KZN. Reflecting on his after-dark upbringing he said, ‘I liked going to the tavern and just dancing. That’s my nightlife there and it’s intense. I love it’. Didi has found inspiration in the night too, hence his brand ‘3am LifeWasNeverTheSame’. Meanwhile, Desire has been engaged in a different project: the cultural movement, FAKA, have sought to create a visual and performance archive, testifying to alternative expressions of black queer identity.
Having each recently moved to Johannesburg, both Didi and Desire have a story to tell about the city’s party culture. In their own way, each artist describes the night as a cloak, masking our shared brokenness, and delimiting the modes of expression acceptable for the dancefloor. ‘We end up covering ourselves, you know’, Didi said. ‘We go partying. I’m not saying there’s something wrong with partying, but just partying, there is something wrong. Me forgetting my purpose.’
Desire also paints a picture of a prescriptive party-scene that alienates us from who we are. ‘There’s a lot of pressure in spaces like Kitcheners or Great Dane, where you have to be a certain kind of cool. I don’t know — there’s that thing. And Cool Kid is also very narrow by definition, in that context. It’s only a certain kind of cool and it shuts down every other cool.’ The assumption is that when you’re there you’re that. The space is that loaded’. The club space imprints itself upon you, requiring you to wear a particular kind of mask.
‘We do get very lost’, Didi says. ‘It becomes fun. It’s fun. But it’s not fun. So it’s like you’re there, but you’re not there’
Social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman, says that masks permit ‘pure sociability’, detached from circumstances of power or the private feelings of those who wear them. We take on ‘masks’ in the hopes of protecting others from the burden of ourselves, and making interaction possible..
Desire uses the term ‘Nivea-ness’ to describe these forms of social masking. ‘Nivea-ness’ means embodying a ‘polished’, superficial persona as an act of self-protection. Much of Desire’s work has been to comment on and explode stereotypes on the gay scene. Here, Niveaness ‘is yourcis gender metrosexual, who wears head-to-toe Markhams. He stays in Sandton or in a Marshalltown bachelor pad. Very invisible but carrying a lot also. Carrying a lot, but giving off this ‘best foot forward’ kind of vibe. The fact that you are ‘Nivea’ over like Vaseline’.
Bauman would call this mode of interaction ‘civility’. Putting on a mask means disguising our personal demons, and we expect others to do the same. We don’t expect to be cajoled into expressing our inner-most feelings in public spaces. Instead, we take on a ‘persona’ that enables us to share crowd space. This is the ‘civility’ that the city requires. And while Didi and Desire may occupy different worlds, they have a shared ability to identify the city’s masks.
In his poem, Johannesburg, Abdul Milazi writes:
Welcome to Johannesburg
where we wear our nightly masks
our private pain stored away
to be dusted and worn again at sunrise
For Didi, there is frustration in being approached always as a ‘public persona’, rather than a person. ‘Aren’t you the guy from that magazine?’ they’ll say. ‘I think you should greet people first, you know. But cats jump on: ‘Yo, yo!’ But you don’t know me man. If you come inside a room you should knock before you go in. You greet. We all humans you know. Before I’m an artist I’m a human being. I go through things as well. Maybe I’m not in the mood. Maybe I’m not having a good day’.
Beneath our surface appearances, Didi explains, is a deliberately concealed wound. This has been the impetus behind Very Lost — a playful autumn collection of outwear. ‘We’re all broken’, Didi says. ‘It’s just about every human being, being broken at the end of the day. And not talking or not finding somebody to help them. There’s something that happened to you as a child. Maybe they used to bully you, then you grew up and started bullying other people. Maybe you’ve been raped, maybe you’ve been molested you know. We end up covering ourselves’.
It resonated so strongly with something Desire had written a few weeks before: that ‘everyone on the Buffalo Bills dancefloor, still or mobile, is essentially an adult who was once a child, who was probably teased, who probably hated themselves…’ In a story for Bubblegumclub, Desire wrote about the unravelling of intimacies and traumas between two strangers on a night out. He explained to me that the club-goers he met, no matter how ‘hard’ they might try to sell themselves, were ‘just so soft. We’re all so broken and vulnerable.’How do we give that a voice? Desire practices art as a route to humanising oneself and others. It is a humanising process that he profoundly and paradoxically articulates as ‘godliness’. Without masks, ‘we’re not actually strangers’ he says. ‘As much as you don’t know others, you do know them.’
Because there’s so much fragility to hide, people become all the more keen to guard the space and protect their own boundaries.
‘There’s this social hierarchy that’s really bothering me’, Desire says. ‘So like a person who goes to a tavern can’t really access Kitcheners. And not by choice. The people that go there would probably stop going there if the audience changed radically. It’s very territorial. Model C kids are very territorial.’ For Desire, compounding this classist element are prescriptions about the modes of sexuality that one is able to express. ‘Femme bodies are still more shamed. Femme bodies are not allowed to express their sexuality in the same way.’ So while ‘civility’ might provide a volatile safety for some, it is also violently prescriptive for many others. ‘
‘People have an issue with the power to transcend’, Desire says, because everybody’s oppressed in a way. I guess when you’re a person who’s oppressed, the world as it works doesn’t allow you to be beautiful, doesn’t allow you to be amazing, doesn’t allow you to be great. If you are actually a black person who’s great and amazing, or who feels like they’re great, that’s intimidating. We’re not supposed to exist. But we do! And it scares them’.
Both Didi and Desire fearlessly push their audiences by embodying this transcendental space. For Desire, this means unravelling and presenting a provocative kaleidoscope of queer masculinities. For Didi, it’s bold ‘back-to-the-future’ threads that explode the bounds of status-quo style. Whether in biker gear, old-school vans, camo or overalls: Didi’s sought-after swag has imprinted ‘next level’ aesthetics on hip-hop videos and stages, look books and dancefloors. ‘Sometimes I’m too forward man’, Didi says. ‘It’s like, yoh I see it happening the following year. I’m on the next, 24/7’. Both artists, for all their differences, are unapologetically themselves. As Didi says: ‘There’s no I’m gonna be a social worker. There is no, I’m gonna be a doctor. This is what I do’.
Each artist comes ready to wear their non-conformity in the times and spaces that might provoke ridicule for it. ‘I know people that were laughing at me four years ago, trying to jump on what I’ve been doing, now’, Didi says. This is the work of being, what we so casually call, a ‘trend-setter’. You live in a yet-to-be space, as though it already exists. And from this precarious not-yet-existing place, you call others to you. Speaking through the (too-often literal) white noise, drawing us to the honesty and audaciousness of our flickering, glitchy humanity.
If Didi’s clothing concept Very Lost, could speak, it would say: ‘Do something. Stop with the masks, man’. By encouraging us to wear our ‘lost-ness’ on the outside, the collection injects this challenge with urgency and daring. ‘Everybody’s tryna be on the scene’, Didi says, ‘But then what’s your function on the scene? What are you doing on the scene? So many cats miss the mark.’
Whether explicitly or not, the function of both Desire and Didi has been to disrupt. For Didi: insert pastel pink and playtime camo into a hard grey cityscape. For Desire: insert black queer bodies into an oppressively hetero-normative space. In both cases: insert fearless fragility in place of artificial mask. And watch art happen.
We use the word ‘place’ to mean many things. Most obviously, place is location — a space in the world. It may also be a ‘place’ in the social order, as in to ‘know your place’ or ‘be in first place’. In a third sense, place is performance: events ‘take place’. If there is any event series that knows how to ‘take’ and ‘make’ a place, it’s Kool Out. Whether it’s the mellow kick-back of Kool Out Lounge, a concert gig at Kool Out Live, or Koolin in the Cityover a Sunday skyline;the Kool Outcrew know how to produce place with hip hop.
In its most recent edition, Koolin in the City saw crowds gather on a Troyeville rooftop. Shoulders slung over the balcony railings. Heads rested on the distant edges of Ponte Tower. Mouths pulling smoke, stoking orange light. Then exhaling Biggie, Erykah and Bobby Caldwell over the used car lot below. ‘Is this your first Kool Out?’ No-one said yes. These were pilgrims, like birds regularly migrating home, coming to rest atop another Kool Out skyline.
For the past eight years, Kool Out has been cultivating this sense of place. The brand began in Cape Town, founded by DJ ID (Akio Kawahito). ‘I was an old-school hip hop guy’, he explains, ‘and there wasn’t really that scene on Long Street’. The city’s hip hop heads had been ‘placeless’ since the early 2000s, when DJ Raiko had run Cape Town’s biggest hip hop night, The Lounge. They needed new turf and Akio set about finding it.
‘The way that I always found places to DJ, it’s not like I’ve been to a spot and I’m like, “Yo, this is the music I’m into. I wanna play here”. It’s more like I’m into a spot and I’m not even listening to the music. If it’s the vibe, I’ll play here, and I’ll play what I wanna play. But this is where I wanna play what I wanna play.’ Place was paramount from the start.
Akio chose the Waiting Room, recognising potential in the above-street space, teetering on the pavement-edge of Long and Kloof. ‘The décor, the ambiance is cool. The crowd is there. You’ve got views of the city.’ He knew that the ways places affect us was not about individual locations, or even the bodies within them, but about the interaction between spaces and bodies — and how curators like Kool Out could connect people and place. In this first series, artists, lyricists, poets and hip hop lovers were strung together on a Cape Town rooftop.
‘This wasbefore Waiting Room was what it is now’, Akio explains.‘It was very much on an electronic tip. They said they didn’t do hip hop’. In spite of this, Akio began running Wednesday hip hop nights, having fooled the venue managers with an instrumental demo. ‘Really by the fourth month, it was poppin’ off’.
As Kool Out grew, it also ‘took place’, reclaiming territory. ‘For the first time, hip hop people — even black people in general — were going to the Waiting Room. Before that, it was like straight up a white spot.’
There were tussles over turf: the venue soon discovered what Akio was doing.
‘You can’t be doing this hip hop stuff’, they told him, ‘The crowd is too rowdy’.Kool Out was urged to relocate, but they held their ground. They knew their place, and quickly put the Waiting Room in theirs. Within a year, they were the city’s biggest monthly hip hop event.
In 2011, the crew moved to Johannesburg. Turntablist P-Kuttah (from Durban) and Emcee Reason joined the team. So did Banesa Tseki, Kool Out’s Creative Producer, whose role has been to put the vision in place — to make place happen.
‘Johannesburg has a beautiful downtown skyline. Within the last four years or so, people are starting to come downtown again. [We thought], “Let’s take something — a new space — and try build it up”’. The bricks and mortar would be immaterial things: the sound, the senses, the feel of a place. Using space like a ready canvass, this was about how to inject a site with meaning and attachment.
They began at Kitcheners in Braamfontein. ‘We always try to use a nice, small, compact space’, Kuttah explains. ‘So it gives you that house party feel’.Kool Out wanted crowds to feel intimacy and familiarity, as though they owned the place. Meanwhile, the team were also looking for their own place, to reclaim turf from venue managers. ‘We started off as artists [on the decks]. Then we became promoters [at the door]. But you know where the real money is? The motherfuckin’ bar! (usually claimed by the venue). ‘[So] we were like, “let’s take the door and the bar, cos that’s where the power’s at, you know”’.
‘We did site checks everywhere’,Akio explained. ‘Me and Raiko. We needed a place that nobody else was doing, where we could define it’. That place was the Kool Out Rooftop on Commissioner Street.
‘We saw a gap’, says Kuttah, ‘to do rooftop parties.’ No doubt there was something about being above the city that made it feel like it was yours. Like you could pluck the Hillbrow Tower from its place and pin back your hair with it. As night fell, Koolin in the City morphed: its people became a shadow-mass of silhouettes, while the city, all alight, was let in. It reminded me of that J-Z lyric from City is Mine: ‘You belong to the city, you belong to the night’.
Jo’burg is a city to which many belong — a place of many places. ‘The funny thing about Jo’burg’, Kuttah says, ‘I think about 70 percent of the people you meet in Jo’burg aren’t from Jo’burg. [They’re] from all over the nation.’On stage at the most recent Koolin in the City were AKMG (out of the Eastern Cape), Kandy Koated (from the Vaal) and Durban’s Nasty C. Place has always been integral to hip hop, as artists make a point to ‘rep their hood’.
The culture of Kool Out is fed by Jo’burg’s cosmopolitan energy. By Kool Out is also literally fed by Jo’burg, where the crew have been able to live off their work for the first time. ‘We were on the top of hip hop in Cape Town and we were broke. Going out with hip flasks and shit’, Akio remembers. In Jo’burg, ‘you can make money off this shit.’ It’s like that Biggie lyric. Akio recites: ‘You never thought hip hop could take you this far. That’s how I feel! Everything is done from me being in hip hop. I own a house here. I’m buying a car next week, cash money. That shit blows my mind!’While running an incredibly successful event series, Kool Out also consult for corporates and music festivals and have facilitated local tours for big international acts: People Under the Stairs, Ras Kass, DJ Babu, Talib Kweli and more.
Ask Kool Out pilgrims what keeps them coming back and they will say ‘the music’. That’s what transforms a non-descript space into a place where people feel they belong and connect. We hear a track and we remember where we were when we first heard it, how we felt when we first loved it. Then, in our communal recitation of lyrics, the memory is transformed into something shared. It is as though all of us here now, were also there together, at the time when we first loved this song. And so a bond is manufactured between us, like old friends and family coming together for a reunion — despite having never physically met. These days it doesn’t even matter where the venue is, coming to Kool Out means coming to a place that you know.
Kool Out works as this music meeting-place because DJs don’t just play the latest ‘turn up’ tunes. ‘We’re not trying to be about any trend’ Banesa explains. ‘We’re not dictated by who’s on radio. We’re not dictated by who’s big on social media. It’s not about who’s cool and who’s not. It’s just about what’s dope’.Interspersed with old-school hip hop nostalgia, Kool Out audiences will also be introduced to something new, discovering unchartered sonic territories together. ‘You get to kind of educate people on music’, says Kuttah. ‘It’s not subjected to you having to play commercial stuff all the time’. As such, artists are able to carve out their own space at Kool Out.‘The funny thing is, even club DJs, when you put them here, they play different sets here.’
At Koolin in the City, those who come early enter free, after which tickets stay a reasonable R60. There’s no VIP and no price variation based on who’s performing. Whether it’s an international act like Sky Zoo or a massive local artist like Nasty C, it’s a normal Koolin in the City. ‘It’s not supposed to be artist-dependent’ Akio explains. ‘It’s difficult, but what you want it to be is: everybody loves your brand and they don’t care who’s performing. They go anyways. If it’s Nasty C, dope. If it’s someone you don’t know, then it’s probably somebody cool if these cats are putting him on’.
Underground artists and open mic emcee’s share the stage with big acts. Internationals and locals are given equal turf. Each has an option to claim and contest space. I saw young women (both female emcees and audience members) putting weak rappers in their place, attacking the dancefloor, and brazenly halting proceedings to call out misogynist lyrics.
Literary journalist, Joan Didion, once said that ‘ a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that [they] remake it in [their] own image’.
This is how the geography of Kool Out has been made. There has been acute sensitivity to physical location, but also a devotion to the immaterial sound and sense-scapes that make a place what it is. And while Kool Out has cultivated a very particular sense of place, it has been with enough openness that audiences claim it as their own. ‘Everyone just feels like home’, Banesa says. ‘A lot of people say Kool Out is their church or their home’.
If Mkay Frash were a comic book character, he would levitate in celestial space, straddling comets, in constant orbit between worlds. His hands cupped, as though in telepathy with the surrounding sky-scape. From his outstretched fingers, threads extend like webs, connecting disparate planets, weaving transcendental tapestries. This would be his superpower: his ability to draw worlds together, curating spectacular cosmic collages. No wonder his suit is camo. Mkay is a cultural explorer on the hunt for kicks. In discovering aesthetic treasures and glistening brands, he also links them to a vast network of people and places.
Mkay is the don of South African sneaker culture. He’s founder and host of the online magazine Hunting For Kicks. Sneakers are his weapon, his tool and his metaphor. The shoes transport us, literally and figuratively. But they also leave imprints, documenting and celebrating a youth in motion. But more than sneakers, Mkay is an OG in the game: a long-time curator, commentator, and producer of street culture.
‘I’m a gangsta. I dowanna put myself in a box and say, “this is the type of person I am”, because if I wanna switch up, I don’t want you to look at me like, “Yo, you just switched up on me!” I’m a gangsta. I go for what I want. I can decide any time what I want to do.”A veteran shape-shifter, with camo-adaptability.
Mkay’s influence and longevity on the street scene have come from his ability to occupy in-between spaces: between artists and agents, between the corporate and the cutting edge, between peripheral hoods and central hubs, between people and product.
It started young. Mkay grew up in a place of assemblages, where multiple worlds met: a taxi rank in Marabastad, Pretoria. Before forced removals, Marabastad had been a site of racial and cultural synthesis — Pretoria’s District Six or Sophiatown.
‘My dad is a taxi owner. I grew up on a rank basically.’ That explains Mkay’s catch phrase: eTimer lePusha amaTaxi yena uPusha amaTakkie. Taxis connected ‘the hood’ to town. This meant that from an early age, Mkay was traversing two worlds, connecting the hood to city brands, and the city to hood threads. Because the taxi rank was a nexus — the starting point for all journeys — it was also an aesthetic explosion. ‘People, wherever they’re trying to get to, they go to the rank. Whether they’re travelling to the office, the jazz club, the tavern, each one brings their own style. I grew up seeing a lot of style as a young kid’.
Today, Mkay’s camo attire reads like a patchwork of jumbled pieces brought together. Camo was designed to resonate with the wearer’s surroundings. Appropriate since Mkay’s character was forged at the intersection of multiple stylistic cut-offs.
Just like the rank, his home was a meteoric style catalogue. ‘My mom was a teacher, a music conductor and a fashion designer. She used to dress us up in her own clothes. So Christmas day, we used to change four times, four times! I grew up like that. My pop’s wardrobe is crazy! My mom’s wardrobe is crazy! It’s like even a battle. The type of space clothing took in the house was just ridiculous.’
The attention to threads was stitched through Mkay’s early life, from his parents to his uncles, to the streets themselves. He tells the story of visiting one of his uncles in jail. After a long wait, his uncle emerged from the cells keen to show off his customised prison apparel: standard leather shoes transformed to suede. ‘I come from that’, Mkay says, ‘It’s not even flossing. It’s a lifestyle. That’s what we do.’
Amid Dead Prez and basketball courts, the taxi rank and family wardrobes, Mkay’s origin story unfolded. He discovered the transformative power of the right kicks and the right threads. ‘For me clothing was always that. When I rock somethin’, girls react to me in a certain way. People treat me differently. After I tasted that, for me it was like a no brainer. I was like, I gotta look fresh if I wanna get this type of treatment or this type of vibe’.
In his first year of college, Mkay, a 19-year old maverick, co-founded a streetwear store, stocking local brands. It was dubbed 100% Flavour. That was when the Magents crew recognised his magic, teleporting him to Jo’burg. Nineties fashion trailblazers, Magents were putting their streetwear on some of the country’s biggest kwaito, house, jazz and hip-hop stars. While coordinating the brand’s PR, Mkay worked with the likes of Mandoza, Trompies, Lebo Mathosa, and Rudeboy Paul. In 2006, he teamed up with Scoop Makhatini and Nkosana Modise to launch Ama Kip Kip — a brand that blew up on the scene.
Mkay was picked up by Nike in 2008. Like Spiderman’s radio-active spider bite or The Flash’s lightning bolt, connecting with Nike injected Mkay’s already exceptional craft with super-capacities. Nike saw Mkay’s talent for re-aligning the cultural cityscape: connecting crowd to commodity and clothing to culture. ‘They wanted to open a space where influential people could come through and grab product’. This marked the beginning of Gallery on 4th in Melville, which Mkay describes as ‘an interaction billboard, where kids could come in and check out Tier Zero stuff from Nike — the latest, limited and most special product’.
Lit by Mkay’s power to bring worlds together, Gallery on 4th became a key meeting place for cultural producers. He and his crew hosted the regular Jumble Rumble, showcasing local urban brands, including Strussbop, Head Honcho, Butan and Thesis, to a soundtrack of Jo’burg DJs and live performances.
The Gallery also spurred a number of creative collectives. At the end of 2009, Mkay was asked to compile a team to ‘work the space’ — marking the beginning of Boyz’nBucks. ‘We did a lot of crazy shit with big artists at that time.’
With clothes as the catalyst, Boyz’nBucks detonated into audio-aesthetic debris. ‘The fashion thing was always the thread. That’s how we started’.
For Mkay, it’s been sneakers. They are the stuff of the streets, the courts, the hip-hop stages, and the backyard battles. More than that, takkies have been enigmatic double-symbols: of creativity and consumption, solidarity and status, nostalgia and aspiration. Mkay explains that ‘when the Nike shit popped’ was when he got serious about the sneaker game. Sure, he’d owned some premium kicks before, but with less sense of direction, without having plugged sneakers into his personal compass. ‘I was collecting then, but now it’s a thing now, because you go deeper into it. You understand the culture. You see cats who are 40 and doing it. Like damn, there’s longevity in this shit!’
Sneakers are art, ambition and identity, but they are also money. Growing up on hip-hop and b-ball, Mkay knew that his mom would be hurting when she copped him the latest J’s. He’s tried to use his platform to celebrate sneakers, while also pushing back on consumerism.
‘I always say, “don’t believe the hype”. I’m always into the shit that I’m into. Aint no blogger that will tell me what’s ill. No, I know what’s ill. I know what I like. If I don’t like them, I don’t like them. You can hype them as much as you want. And I always try to push that. Buy the shit that you like and buy below your belt, you know. Cos sometimes you’ve got a Gucci aspiration, but you don’t have a Gucci wallet. You don’t have Gucci money. You can still be stylish without rocking Gucci. How you gonna compete with an engineer when you in matric? You’re putting your mom under pressure.’
Mkay’s sneaker show,Hunting for Kicks, started four years ago, while he and a friend were literally hunting for kicks in Cape Town. There was a massive Concords release: ‘We managed to get like 20 pairs [for reselling]. It’s crazy, back then you could get away with a limited shoe, 20 pairs, and they would let you buy the whole stock. I wanted to record the joint. So I’ve got my Macbook on my lap [and] he’s driving. So we do this mini-clip talking about these Concords: when did they come out, why are they so important to the culture, all of that. [Later] I took a look at this clip and was like “this clip is dope”. I put it on Facebook and a lot of people reacted. And I was like “oh shit I can do a lot of this”’.
Since then, Hunting for Kicks has offered intimate insight into local sneaker culture and featured some of the biggest names in the game: Marc Mac, Jake Lipman, Haydan Manual, Scoop. The list also includes some of the flyest women on the scene: Urban Mosadi, Thithi Nteta, Empress Mrs Mome, Sumaya Peterson.
‘I always wanted to capture the whole sneaker culture in SA. I felt like it’s gonna be essential in the future looking back, you know. I felt there was a need for that. The stories sometimes get diluted when written by people who are not part of the culture. So I felt like I was the right person to actually tell that story’. And in telling the story, Mkay, as he so often does, has weaved disparate narratives together. The stories of each cultural practitioner are interlinked through sneakers. ‘It’s funny that learning about the shoe, I also get to learn about my friends.’ Testament to Mkay’s urge for creative collaboration, Hunting For Kicks currently have a mixtape out with Hype magazine. ‘I got like 12 rappers, rapping about sneakers,’ Mkay chimes.
For every superhero, there’s an urban stage and Johannesburg has been Mkay’s Kryptonopolis. Braamfontein pavements have served as the dominant backdrop for Hunting for Kicks. It was as though these streets resonated from Mkay’s chest. He was the man who wove worlds together and the city echoed his vision. ‘You and me, people like us, we come from small towns. My crew are from Durban, Eastern Cape, wherever. We’re coming to Jo’burg to come dig this gold. We’re coming for work. So our style becomes fused to the city that we live in, and its game over! You can’t copy that. It can’t be trendy. Me and my crew we’re so different because we come from different towns. We absorb the whole shit in different ways’.
The man lives borderless — straddling borders, and connecting across them, on our behalf. Because he knows that people are porous, Mkay has always been about the team — about bringing people together. He has stood for the idea that if young black creatives are to rise, they’ll do it together. Camo, then, becomes an outward symbol for rolling squad-deep and having one another’s backs.
‘We all Shakas in the game. Every man wants to have his own kingdom. But when it’s your project, I’m your boy. We’re going 100 percent for you. I look at it more like an Odd Future mission or a Wu Tang [mission]. Everybody’s got their own thing and we still come together’.
Undertaking to back local creativity, Mkay has helped get local urban labels into big stores like Shesha, and plugged creative collaborations between South African designers and US sneaker brands. He intends to start an agency, linking brands to street culture influencers — the act of connecting that has defined much of his prior work.
‘I’ll be sitting in a boardroom fighting for checks for the arts. Then I’ll be sitting with cats on the streets saying, “If you really wanna get this money, this is how it’s done”. It’s the best of both worlds. It keeps me on the edge with my own businesses. I know I can’t commercialise it that much, and I can’t neglect the business side of the whole thing. I gotta stay authentic, but I gotta make money while doing it’.
In between his packed-out bookings, Mkay works with Slim [Jerome Du Plooy] on a charity project: Sunday School Foundation in collaboration with Slim Cares. For the past three years, they have taken 150 kids from Orlando West on regular outings: to the zoo, for ice skating, for Christmas parties. And again, he’s threading worlds together. ‘Expose them to different stuff so that they can see the world in a different way. Three years later, their confidence is crazy. We do bursaries too. But our main mission is to instil confidence’.
Like the best of sneaker customizers, Mkay knows how to un-piece street culture, and then re-stitch its elements, curating undiscovered combinations. As he does this, he pulls people towards each other, links them to the cultural coalface, and generates spectacular collisions of people, product and place.
List the components of a flawless party night and it will probably read something like this: floor-shaking sound, a stellar line-up on the decks, the perfect venue, big sponsors. On to aesthetics and atmospherics and we might add: the crowd; the colours; the threads; the kicks; the lexicon of intoxications we inhale, imbibe and ingest; the moves we make with and towards others. What is very unlikely to make the list is all the talk that circulates around parties.
We often forget that a significant part of our nightclub cultures come from how we speak about them. We utter the hype into existence as talk takes on the role of festive foreplay. It’s our dancefloor dialect; our pre-game parlance; our jive jargon; our night-time nomenclature. All these speech acts are a significant site for young people’s creative production. Through talk/type/emoji we inject the words of our music into real times and places. We engage in local-global exchanges. We manufacture a mood — sculpting the ways that parties are lived, remembered and imagined. To testify to the terminology of the turn up, and document the dialect of our night times and spaces, we’ve put together this small catalogue of party phraseology.
Turn Up/ Turnt
First appears in Urban Dictionary in May 2013.
Tonight we’re gonna turn up; It’s time to turn up!(verb)
Meaning: It’s time to get loose, go wild, have fun, get hyped, party.
May also connote getting drunk/high.
Last night was turnt(adjective) To describe the state of a person/party as having been crazy/wild/next level.
That party was a turn up(noun) The ‘turn up’ in its noun form is yet to be acknowledged by Urban Dictionary, but is fully a thing (as evidenced in its twitter usage).
To turn up/ be ‘turnt’ operates implicitly as a prefix. It’s a call and a solicitation, gesturing towards multiple possibilities for what might need to ‘turn up’: Turn up the volume, turn up the heat, turn on, to be turned on. It implies the activation of a different register — that one enters a higher frequency. To ‘turn up’ suggests that we switch on, implying that we take on a particular mode of performance that is enhanced, flamboyant, confident.
But what is wonderfully complex about the term ‘turn up’ is that it simultaneously evokes performance and genuineness. Consider this: In its flattened, traditional usage, to ‘turn up’ simply means to arrive, to show face, usually in the most casual terms. Embedded, then, in the re-imagining of the word ‘turn up’ is a provocation: ‘Why turn up if you aren’t going to turn all the way up?’ ‘If you came, but didn’t TURN UP, were you ever really here?’ By inviting someone to ‘turn up’, we ask them to be fully present, to give their all, to show themselves as they truly are.
In a beautiful and powerful paragraph, the Crunk Feminist Collective captures the multiple connotations of ‘turn up’ as follows:
“Turn up is both a moment and a call, both a verb and a noun. It is both anticipatory and complete. It is thricely incantation, invitation, and inculcation. To Live. To Move. To Have –as in to possess– one’s being. The turn up is process, posture, and performance — as in when 2Chainz says “I walk in, then I turn up” or Soulja Boy says, “Hop up in the morning, turn my swag on.” Yet it holds within it the potential for authenticity beyond the merely performative. It points to an alternative register of expression, that turns up to be the most authentic register, because it is who we be, when we are being for ourselves and for us, and not for nobody else, especially them”.
With this in mind, Lil John and DJ Snake’s club banger ‘Turn Down For What?’ is charged with existential meaning. Everyday life is so often infused with an imperative to turn down, self-regulate and self-censor — particularly if we are young, or women or black (or a potent combination). As Crunk Feminists suggest, ‘Turn Down For What?’ asks ‘Why?’ ‘For whom?’ ‘To what effect?’ More so, it pummels this question through our chests on the dancefloors of our every-night lives, imploring us to explode our full expressive selves.
The relationship between ‘turning up’ and being 100 percent authentic may explain why the ‘100’ emoticon regularly accompanies our type-hype online.
[Speak]er Box
Lupe Fiasco — Turnt up (2009)
Soulja Boy– All The Way Turnt Up (2010)
Beyonce/ Dream/ 2Chainz — ‘Turnt’ (2013)
Lecrae — ‘I’m Turnt’ (2013)
Ciara — Super Turnt Up (2013)
DJ Snake & Lil John — ‘Turn Down for What?’ (2014)
Cassper Nyovest — Turn Up Gang (2015)
2: Lit
First appears in Urban Dictionary in May 2015.
This party is lit (adjective). Meaning: The party is live, amazing, hyped.
The lituation (noun) Equivalent of ‘the party’/ ‘the turn up’
Regularly accompanied or supplemented by the flame emoji.
‘Lit’ is a derivative of much of the fire terminology that surrounds parties. ‘That party was fire’; ‘The DJ brought flames last night’; ‘We gonna burn up the dancefloor’. To be ‘lit’ connotes being alight or ignited. It’s no wonder that fire imagery is so often projected into nightclub cultures, given its symbolic potency as a place for ritual gathering, trance, music and dance. We associate fire with passion, sexuality, action, and the untamed. Heat and flame ignite much of our party phraseology, with terms like ‘Siyasha’, ‘Siyashisa’, or ‘DJ brought the heat’ frequently captioning our online club catalogues.
[Speak]er Box
ASAP Rocky — Get Lit (2011)
Young Futura — We get Lit (2015)
Ludacris — Get Lit (2015)
BenchMarq ft Tweezy (2015)
K2 ‘Lit’ (2015). Includes the lyrics: ‘My Situation is a Lituation’
3: H.A.M.
First appears in Urban Dictionary in April 2008
Tonight we’re going h.a.m. (adverb, pronounced ham) Accronym for hard as a motherfucker.
Meaning: To go balistic, wild, or be super hyped.
[Speak]er Box
Gucci Mane- Go Ham on Em (2008)
Kanye and JZ – H.A.M (2011)
4: The Jump
Last night was a jump/ That place is The Jump(noun)
This party ‘bout to jump (verb)
Describing a party as ‘jumpin’ or ‘a jump’ dates back to the nineties, perhaps speaking to a burgeoning nineties nostalgia in contemporary youth culture. Contributing to the term’s current popularity among Jozi youth is the Yfm show #TheJump. ‘iJumpile Boy!’
[Speak]er Box
Kriss Kross — Jump (1992)
Destiny’s Child — Jumpin’ Jumpin’ (1999)
Busta Rhymes — Pass the Courvousier Part 2 (2001)
Anatii and Cassper Nyovest — Jump (2016)
5: Going in
First appears in Urban Dictionary in September 2008.
Tonight, we’re going in/ That party went in/ I went in on the dancefloor last night (verb).
Meaning: to enter an activity with maximum enthusiasm, hype or energy.
Related in the lexicon to phrases like #S[i]yabangena, loosely translated as ‘We’re going in’/ ‘It’s going down’/’I’m ready’.
6. Make a Movie
Appears in Urban Dictionary December 2011.
Tonight’s gonna be a movie (noun).
Tonight we ’bout to make a movie (verb)
Meaning: It’s going to be/we’re going to make it a big night. This usually involves drawing attention to oneself (whether positive or negative), particularly in a nightclub context.
Genealogy most likely related to phrases like ‘tonight is gonna be epic’. If tonight can be ‘epic’, then it can surely be on the scale of a cinema epic. ‘Sishaya ama movie!’
[Speak]er Box
Neyo — Makin’ a Movie (2010)
Riky Rick ft. Okmalumkoolkat — Amantombazane (2013), includes the lyric ‘Sishaya ama movie’
7: #Habashwe
Directly translates to ‘let them die’/ ‘let them be defeated’. Chimes with DJ SPEEDSTA’s repeated refrain: ‘You’re killin’ em son!’
Yfm listeners (2014) translate #Habashwe as ‘time to rock’, ‘let the good times roll’, ‘lets do this’, ‘let’s get it’.
Whereas much of our turn-up terminology is a derivative of American hip-hop, ‘habashwe’ is most often associated with the South African house and kwaito scenes. Radio shows undoubtedly deserve a shout-out for the role they have played in shaping our music/dance/party lexicon. S/O to Yfm, Metrofm and TransAfricaRadio in particular.
Night fright permeates many conventional imaginings of the city, as the dark plays host to a web of seedy associations: violence, criminality, backwardness. Illumination, on the other hand, connotes a glistening cityscape. We envision a technologically-enhanced wonderland that is safe, accessible, and bustling with consumer activity. The delivery of light to South Africa’s ‘dark corners’ has at different times highlighted both the successes and failures of democratic modernity. Since the late 2000s, the country has experienced a series of rolling blackouts, dubbed ‘load shedding’, plunging millions of residents into new encounters with the dark.
In 2010, one such urban eclipse gave way to a series of after-dark parties in Johannesburg. Dubbed Black City, these parties have sought to re-imagine and revitalise audiences’ relationships with the dark, and indeed the city.A blackout. An interruption. A disruption of traditional patterns of moving, thinking and relating.
This week,I sat down with two of the parties’ masterminds. Cardo is an events entrepreneur/promoter. Imtiyaaz is primarly a DJ, and one half of the duo Problem Kids (otherwise known as PK Musiq). As DJs-come-promoters, Problem Kids co-host night-time events, including Juice and Black City.
‘With load shedding at its peak’, Cardo explained, ‘I found myself staring at a beautiful city in darkness. Moulded in that darkness a phenomenon was born: Black City’. The first Black City curated a nightclub stripped of its colour, where both audience and venue were embalmed in black fabric. All black dress code. All black décor. ‘Six years ago, I don’t think black was what it is now. There was no All Black Movement at that time. Everybody only knew All White parties. That was the craze.’
The inspiration behind ‘all black’, Cardo explained, drew from street fashion. The rising popularity of black monochrome increasingly matched people and pavement, giving way to a tacit aesthetic consenses and a statement of collective identity. Today, the predominance of all black monochrome cannot be delinked from a wider revival of Black Consciousness politics, of Black Power, of Black is Beautiful. In South Africa, a history of imposed curfews for black residents provides centuries of impetus to take back the dark and the city.
The switching on of nightclub lights at closing time has visceral affect. Under the everyday glare of a 60 watt bulb, we see each other in all our ordinariness, stripped of the fantasy, subsumed by sudden awkwardness. Without the darkness, all the intimacies we made between us coming undone. After all, it is in the dark that we dream. Nightcover beckons the creativity of grafitti artists, the insurgency of activists. In this case, it also offers a stage for the subtle politics of urban partying.
What Black City sought to harness were the productive and imaginative qualities of darkness — so often neglected. They understood that even the brilliance of light relied on a depth of darkness. On one occasion, Black City filled the darkened nightclub with UV lights. Add neon paint and something spectacular explodes onto the scene.
Saturday night (28th of May) was the 10th and final Black City installment, coinciding serendipitously with government’s recent announcement that loadshedding had come to an end. Black City parties have circled from the Centre to the North and back again: Newtown > Rivonia> Fourways > Sandton > back to Newtown.
As an audience member, Black City launched me onto an experimental fence between inside and outside, the seen and the unseen, the raw and the produced. It transposed outside darkness into an inside space: this time, Antidote, in Newtown. Antidote does not announce itself on its outside walls. One has to enter before spotting the signage. This inabiliy to immediately ‘recognise’ Antidote is, paradoxically, the very source of its recognition as a trending hotspot. While the dancefloor is relatively small, the walls encircling it seem to stretch up for kilometers with a VIP audience lining the four-walled balconies above. Borromean rings interlocking the circles of dancers, hookah smokers, and smoke itself. The height of the room simulated being in a pit, animating the affect of the ‘underground’.
Around midnight on Saturday, Problem Kids emerged on stage, announcing themselves with a soundtrack of percussive house. They were soon joined by a live drummer, pounding the snare and symbols to accent the sounds from the decks. His drumsticks drove the house beat forward and charged it through its audience. Dark heightens the non-visual senses: sound, touch, taste. The juxtaposition of snare and soundsystem brought the crowd into close confrontation with the music. At times, the sound was so proximate that it might have emerged from our own bodies, as though our very movement made it.
It was during a gig in Klerksdorp that the drummer first appeared on stage with Problem Kids. ‘We told him to come with’ Imtiyaaz explained. ‘The crowd went mad, so we brought it [the act] back to Jo’burg’.
By cultivating sonic conversations between the metropalis and smaller towns, Problem Kids foster an inside-outside dialectic. They bring the city to town, and the town to the city.
‘We branched out’ Imtiyaaz explained. ‘We got into Bloemfontein. We got into Kimberley. A whole lot of places outside of the city. It actually pumps there. Nothing happens in those places, so when something does happen, everyone is there’.
This inside-outside dialectic is repeated in performance. As PK Musiq manipulate the decks, they keep one ear to a stick-headphone they call ‘the lepel’ (spoon), and another to the room. ‘I can’t play with headphones anymore’, says Imtiyaaz, ‘I wanna hear.’
For most of the world’s working population, daytime is a time of discipline – of regulation and traffic, schedules and tasks. As dark falls, there is an exodus of commuters escaping the city, pulling at their shirt collars. But many forget the counter-exodus: those who travel inwards at night. This ‘second city’ has its own geography, its own citizenry. Here, the young rule. They are the buyers and the sellers; the curators and the artists; the performers and the audiences; the celebrities and the fans; the rulers and the followers; the gatekeepers. At night, Problem Kids become Kings.
The young brains behind Black City told me their parents did not approve at first. ‘My mom was against the whole nightlife thing’, Cardo explained, ‘But after a while she saw the dedication and the hard work I put in and she understood it’. Imtiyaaz’ parents are similarly resigned: ‘Oh well, he’s surviving on what he does, so it must be good’. This was about proving that the night was an industry, in which they were at the top of both their – and the – game!
Cardo and Imtiyaaz explain that their industry functioned because, unlike in Cape Town, Johannesburg’s nocturnal inhabitants are willing to spend. Otherwise, ‘How are you gonna pay your artists? How are you gonna pay your venue?’
For Imtiyaaz and Cardo, the money was a surface reflection of another tacit currency being circulated between audiences and performers. This was an economy of recognition.
Their own night-time success relied on sustaining a loyal following. ‘People are still messaging me about Black City.I basically love events for that. The thank you messages: ‘Black City was such a blast’. As part of this crowd-cultivation, the Black City crew come to know their audience intimately. Aware, for example, that many of their followers observe Ramadan, some online marketers promoted the party as ‘The Blast Before the Fast’. Indeed, Johannesburg’s young coloured population — so often invisible in the urban cartography — are a noticeable contingent among Black City followers.
For audiences, the politics of nightclub recognition has another expression, and that is in the will to ‘be seen’.
‘People don’t go out anymore to have a good time, like they used to. It’s more about the fashion. They want to be seen…. ‘
Black City’s creators spoke of something double-edged about the colour black.
‘You can either hide, like there’s something mysterious about you. Or you can express yourself wearing All Black’.
Notably, instead of causing people to disappear, an All Black theme encouraged partygoers to dress up, offering opportunities to ‘be seen’. ‘Jo’burg knows how to sell cool’, Cardo and Imtiyaaz explained. Popping bottles, the fashion, the lifestyle, all of it is about being seen. It’s recognition, I’m told, that many partygoers vehemently pursue, sometimes with significant stakes.
People come to be photographed. ‘We just released the pics from ‘Black City’, which regenerated the hype again.’ Recognising the significance of nightclubs as backdrops, Black City has incorporated photobooths from its inception, prefiguring an Instagram generation. Posted online, scrolls of pictures from a dark room, emblazoned with the tagline ‘last night was lit’.
Instead of viewing this urge for visibility as narcissistic mania or dystopian materialism, we might also consider how recognition functions as a vital human need. A politics of recognition is about claiming space and power: projecting oneself outward into the world and leaving a trace.
In 1983, Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth, made an observation about the economy of nightclub culture. She said, ‘people pay to see others believe in themselves’. Through this simple sentence, Gordon sketched a diagram of intersubjectivity in the nightclub, mapping the relational pulls and conflations between audience and performer. Among Johannesburg’s millennial clubbers, we might say this: People pay to believe that others see them.
Ironically, this visibility happens in the dark, through the dark, because of the dark.
A pool of blue light, ebb-flow bodies and scented smoke: It’s difficult not to close my eyes as I sink in. Little specks of orange rise to form shining patterns above our heads as we respond to the call ‘lighters up!’ Throats lifted to the stage lights, the crowd echoes Lucky Dube then plunges their hips into a Vybz Kartel grind. Every hour or so, Dancehall Queens ignite the stage with ululating hips and acrobatics, enthralling the audience with flips, splits and headstands.
It’s Thursday night at the Bassline — a long-standing institution on the Johannesburg reggae scene. DJs Admiral and Jah Seed have been holding down the decks in Newtown for fifteen years: first passing through Horror Café and Carfax to finally settle at the Bassline. Each week, streams of partygoers are drawn under the highway on Henry Nxumalo, through a corridor of rasta-themed street sellers and into the expansive dance hall.
‘Is Soweto here?’ a voice echoes from the pulpit, attracting a few muffled responses. He tries again. ‘Is Nigeria here?’ A choir rises in response. Finally: ‘Is Zimbabwe here?’ and a chorus reverberates throughout the room.
Bob Marley’s 1980 performance at the Zimbabwean Independence Celebrations has knotted reggae into the country’s cultural fabric. ‘Natty Dread it in-a Zimbabwe; Set it up in Zimbabwe; Mash it up-a in-a Zimbabwe; Africans a Liberate Zimbabwe’. A reggae soundtrack for an anti-colonial, Pan-Afrikan politics. Recycled, reconfigured and re-imagined, reggae has become enmeshed in the continent’s musical catalogues, along with its offshoot genres, dub, ska and dancehall. In each case, the continent has imprinted itself stylistically — an African reggae palimpsest.
In my meandering from one reggae nightclub to the next, I was also mapping the cartography of Johannesburg’s Afropolitan city. At its centre — Yeoville — often described as the United Nations of Africa. This year, Yeoville has been a nucleus for the city’s Africa Day celebrations, hosting parades, symposiums, and live performances.
My nocturnal meander pulled me down Rockey Street, where flashing lights spill bodies out onto the pavement. Pulsating bass lines reverberate back and forth between the building facades, many of them with club venues at their base. Long before you glimpse its signage, you can hear House of Tandoor: Reggae dancehall cascading from its balcony, overflowing with red, green and yellow. This was where Jah Seed and Admiral originally got their break. In contrast to the hefty R100 entrance fee at Thursday Bassline, Tandoor remains free. Above our heads, an arched tribute to Great African Leaders: Patrice Lumumba, Chris Hani, Julius Nyerere, Elijah Muhammed, Walter Sisulu. A dark, narrow entrance and two flights of metal stairs lead up to Tandoor’s rooftop. Plastic garden chairs splayed across the tiled floor, filled with mostly men (but some women) — a congregation of beer and bobbing heads. Another crowd alongside the bar, gathered around the two pool tables. The DJ booth, illuminated by wall art, attracts a crowd swaying and skankin’. It’s a hypnotic swirl of dreadlocks and headscarves, hoodies and low-slung jeans, denim and Timberlands.
Journey a little deeper into the city’s Reggae Dancehall scene. Pass through the tunnel of rumbling neon that ignites Rockey and Raleigh Streets, where pavement iconographies display the Lion of Judah interspersed with the continent’s technicolour flags. Soon enough you’ll find yourself in Hillbrow, at the unassuming Safari International Hotel.
Posted in a dark corner on the precipice of Banket and Yettah Streets, it’s easy to miss. Entering has a sense of theatre, stained with a Baz Luhrmann surrealism. Your ushers: a security guard in full military attire and a bulletproof vest, who peels back the creaking metal gates, locking them fastidiously behind each visitor. Alongside him, a butler in a red bowtie greets ‘good evening’ with grand gestures towards an extended foyer. The walls are draped in taxidermy and wooden carvings, and the furniture in plastic. It’s the cliff-edge of Afro-kitsch, but a gateway to an unexpected dancehall furnace.
Safari International hosts a weekly ragga/dancehall event, dubbed ‘Weddy Weddy Nights’. The ‘Weddy Weddy’ concept has teleported from the clubs of Kingston Jamaica into what feels like the most obscure recesses of Hillbrow, and many other night-time revelries across the globe.
‘Safari International Hotel’, my cab driver repeated as we passed through the city centre the following night. ‘I know it!’ he chimed, with a broad smile. Equally astounded at our shared knowledge, we took a moment to bask in the mutual recognition. The cab driver was Zimbabwean — a reggae dancehall enthusiast, living in Hillbrow. ‘Do you know African Vibez in Rosettenville?’ I asked. Another little-known reggae/dancehall venue, whose patrons, I was told, also celebrated Weddy Weddy. His smile told me yes.
African Vibez is another illuminated corner pinned at the hem of a dark-street-nowhere. A group of young men at the door present a pavement bouquet of some of the world’s most sought-after sneakers. Air Force 1s, Jordan’s, Nikes. The poster plastered alongside the door bears both the Zimbabwean and the South African flags. Once inside, familiar dancehall rhythms vibrate under our soles, this time crying out in Shona. The music is by far the best dancehall I’ve heard all week. Selektahs, hype men and young ragga performers have honed their craft. They deserve more than the stiff anticipation of a 9pm crowd, still too aloof to dance, still too aware of where to put their glistening feet and who might notice.
I travel almost twenty minutes back to the city centre. Cold, empty streets are dotted with night fires as people gather for warmth. My head spins with the enflamed imagery of a reggae-city after dark. ‘More Faya! More Faya! Burn it Up’ The ABSA building flashes a continental collage of Africa Day imagery. I smile, thinking about a simmering nocturnal culture, where reggae/dancehall/dub provides an under-acknowledged conduit for African cultural exchange. But it hasn’t all been ‘Iry’. Amid the crowd-calls for ‘One Love’, the affectionate embraces, the knowing smiles, and the resolute Afrocentrism, is another bar brawl, another man aggressively dragging his girlfriend from the room, another patron blacked-out on the dancefloor. I’m told that attendance at the Bassline dipped at the height of Xenophobic violence. As is the case with many nightclub cultures, Johannesburg’s Afropolitan reggae scene is a potent cocktail of fear and desire, rage and euphoria, the lone dancer and the collective.
Back to Braam for Rootz Rock Reggae, an outdoor reggae party where the audience gathers around barrel fires. South African, Zimbabwean and Mozambiquan artists take to the Kospotong stage at the end of Smit Street. Escaping through the metal barricades, the reggae rhythms of H20’s ‘African’: ‘I’m an African, no doubt that’s what I’m about’. Head tilted towards the sky, I basked under an imagined urban constellation, of all the reggae/dancehall parties I had discovered that week, each a night-fire of its own — Newtown, Yeoville, Hillbrow, Rosettenville, Braam. I hoped that others would connect the dots, explode our South African insularity, and take on the turbulence of an Afro-metropolis on faya.
We’ve become expert archivists of our lives after dark. At nightclub entrances and dotted across our dancfloors are clusters of partygoers huddling to snap that essential Selfie. A big night out is an exercise in self-curation — the clothes, the music, the crew, the venue – each serving as raw materials in our imagining of the space and our place in it. The imagery is then methodically logged on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat: a clublife catalogue, a recreation record.
Recently I was offered a rare glimpse into a party archive, recorded and documented before the social media take-off, before our night lives were exploded into a kaleidescope of online albums. The catalogue belonged to fashion designer and DJ, David West, who in the years 2006— 2008 facilitated a series of Cape Town-based parties called Nu-Flex.
Nu-Flex emerged in conversation with Nu-Rave: a wistful wave of post-punk and acid house, which hit the UK/European club scene in the mid-2000s, draped in UV glitter, glow-sticks and neon skinny jeans. Nu-Rave sought to re-interpret and revitalise 90s Rave Culture: ‘The likes of BoomBox and other club nights in London, where dressing up was a thing’, David explains. BoomBox offered a spectacular collision of fashion and music — novel for its time. Partygoers revelled in the shambolic dress-up, mingling with many of London’s fashion heavyweights. Relatively short-lived, Nu-Rave served as a passing moment of ephemeral euphoria. It came and left, leaving in its wake a dazzling debris of bold prints and lime-stained nostalgia. The novelty had a life-span, David said. ‘It’s better to burn bright than burn out’.
Back in the mid 2000s, Nu-Flex partygoers would amass on a more-or-less bi-monthly basis at Disko-K in Cape Town’s CBD. Today, Loop Street is a popular night-time destination. But at the time, this was ‘a part of town that nobody ever went to. Sailors came in for drinks while docked in the nearby harbour’.Disko K, which no longer exists, ‘had the most ridiculous sound and light set-up and it had kareoke.’
The Nu-Flex crowd included droves of students, interspersed with an older group who had lived through rave’s first wave. ‘We did also have lots of visitors from Johannesburg and yes – some kids used to travel in from Wellington and Worcester to be there’.
Nu-Flex was draped in audacious colour. But David concedes that the scene was predominantly white. Not much has changed about Cape Town since, he added. Contributing to the narrow demographic were the limitations of David’s own audience. The Nu-Flex crowd, he explained, was often an off-shoot of Evol, an edgy divebar, which David also ran and describes as having been ‘very white’. In a time before social media, news of Nu-Flex travelled by word-of-mouth. This gave it an ‘underground cool’, but also entrenched forms of exclusion. Perhaps there’s something to be said about the relationship between rapid-fire-tweets and the democratisation of dancefloors.
Nu-Flex parties were heavily themed, encouraging partygoers to be daring in their outfits. Drugged-up Spring themes included: Tropi-core, Optikamax, Antihistaflex. Add to the mix the metallic Hyper Go-Go and the garbage-glam-themed Gutta-Flex. The time of Indie boys dressed in black-and-white, eyes cloaked in mascara, had peaked, giving way to an exuberant and colour-crazed fashion revival. All across town, partygoers would gather for the ‘Pre-Flex’, revelling in the act of ‘getting ready’.
Rather than the mucho masculinity commonly associated with nightclub bouncers, Nu-Flex had a ‘Door Queen’, with drag being an essential component of the party aesthetic. ‘I hired a make-up artist to style my friend Andrew (who had done loads of drag in the past)’. The Door Queen screened partygoers’ attire as they entered, commenting on their lack of effort or offering compliments to those who had come out in style. ‘The gay scene had already become very bland and hetero-normative, so I was hell bent on encouraging the queerness of the party’. For David, Nu-Flex would have been incomplete without a Drag Queen on the decks, so he made it a point to learn drag himself.
‘I was a club kid. I was schooled in aesthetics in the 90’s at Rave and House clubs’. Both as a fashion designer and party planner, David’s muse was club culture. ‘It’sbeen a huge part of my life and allowed me to contribute to the city culturally over time’.
Reflecting on Nu-Flex, he said: ‘I was desperate for something bright, fabulous, happy and over the top. I remember one night, I had a net full of silver-foil balloons released from the balcony at the peak of my DJ set. Just for the drama’. This was a celebration of excess: reflected in eccentric décor and dress, in being encompassed by a 303 synthesiser, in losing oneself in Nitris Oxide or psychadelics, and finally leaving the club in a 4am haze. ‘You danced so hard, it was more like a flex’. Alongside David himself, DJs included Pierre Estienne, Dario Leite (the Midnight Men), Gazelle and Bradley Abraham. Spoek Matambo and Marcus Wormstorm would perform as Sweat X. ‘Most were old enough to have had experienced the early 90s to some degree’.
Nineties nostalgia continues to hold weight among South African millenials, with much of our aesthetics harking back to the technicolour of a post-94 transition. It’s evident when we drop a TKZee lyric , or rock a Spice Girl choker, or revel in Brenda Fassie bubblegum.
‘I think many of the kids today appreciate the cheese factor of the nineties sound’, David says, ‘like Venga Boys or Crystal Waters. But they can’t handle actual rave and acid house. There seems to be a need to be able to attach irony to something for it to be enjoyable today. Do I sound old? I guess I’m waiting for something to emerge that sounds as new as House/Rave/Techno did in the 90s. And then of course, when a scene emerges around that, I think that will be thrilling’.
David yearns for the club cultures of old:
‘Nightclubs should be places of self expression and freedom, a fantasy world even. I am saddened by the clubs (or lack of them) today. Where’s the pizzazz? Where has the spirit of rebellion and non-conformity gone? Why is it all about mainstream pop music today? What happened to the underground or alternative?’
There’s no definitive answer. But if I were to go in search of one, I would ask the gqom artists playing new mixtapes out their car boots in Durban. Or the crew gathered in a courtyard to hear the latest electronica from a friend’s home studio. Or the audiences that galvanise sonically and politically around FAKA and Angel Ho. When it comes to contemporary cultural production in South Africa, I am full of that old-school, pink-glazed, neon-clad idealism, with which David would be very familiar. I see young people delight in the experimental, perhaps with less of an inclination to pursue escapist bliss. Stylistically, politically and musically, we are increasingly inclined to disrupt. But we also see the importance of giving disruption mass appeal and mobilizing for inclusivity. Like David, I believe the emerging scene will be thrilling — pumped with a powerful mix of critical nostalgia and uncompromising futurism, an unhinged blend of radio-hit consumability and radical resistance.
The Nu-Flex catalogue teaches us to pay attention to our party archives: as testaments to a generation imagining, wrestling, searching…
