South African musicians are enjoying more hard-earned international exposure than ever. After getting an email from Drake’s camp, DJ Black Coffee was featured on the superstar’s More Life project. A Twitter DM, brought Petite Noir’s magisterial voice to Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition. But the actual grind of getting passports, tickets and winning fans through touring is made harder by fluctuating exchanges rates and sheer physical distance.
For the last seven years, the OneBeat fellowship has been offering some redress by bringing talented young musicians, from around the world, to the U.S for residency and performance. Organised by the U.S State Department in collaboration with the Found Sound Nation Collective, it offers emerging professional musicians a period to produce original music and to plan projects in their home countries. This is followed by a national tour, with public performances from small jazz clubs to huge street festivals.
Jeremy Thal, one of the founders, explained the vision behind it as one of communication: ” one of our earliest slogans was ‘ musical collaboration across the world and across the block’. Often the most difficult cultural barriers are not dividing people in Chicago from folks in the Congo, but dividing folks in Chicago and the Congo from their neighbors. Collaborative music-making, when approached with the right spirit, can serve to bridge these divides”. For him, “music is a very visceral and quick way to communicate. And the key elements to bridging these cultural gaps is participation and co-creation”. And so, the fellowship encourages participants to continue engagement in their home countries, with one of the alumni bands performing at next month’s Cape Town Jazz Festival.
The fellowship is open to musicians, aged 19-35, in any genre. Previous years have promoted a rich variety of homegrown talent. An early recipient was Mpumelelo Mcata, the fiercely innovative guitarist of BLK JKS, followed by violinist Kyla-Rose Smith, bassist Benjamin Jephta and folk singer Bongeziwe Mabandla. Most recently, it hosted unique voices Nonku Phiri and Mandla Mlageni.
The applications for this year are open until the 9th of February, 5 PM (Eastern Standard Time, USA). Successful candidates will start with a three week residency at the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, followed by a tour of New York, Baltimore, Charleston SC and Washington DC. More information and applications can be found at 1beat.org.
The dominant theme in the innumerable ‘best of 2016’ lists is disappointment, failure and despair. A year categorised by the rise of the Far Right, war, random acts of violence, hate speech, death and the ominous cracking of the polar ice caps. In the parts of the world that weren’t already in social crisis, this was the year in which the chickens of the 07/08 financial meltdown finally came home to roost. In South Africa, the year was characterised by sleaze as the rich and powerful continue to plunder the state, militarized campuses and a general sense of social stagnation.
In such bleak times, music is even more important in expressing anxiety, resistance and hope. Of course, culture is no substitute for political struggle. (Just look at how the Clinton campaign held the delusory idea that a few celebrity endorsements would win against Trump.) But art can help us find our bearings, even if just to say how fucked up things are. So here is my highly subjective list of the releases which best captured the tone of the dystopian present.
DJ Lag– DJ Lag EP. A few months ago, a video was leaked from the US Defence Department which predicts a future of high-tech militaries fighting low tech insurgents in the favelas, shacks and townships of the global South. This futuristic EP from KZN is the sound of the South fighting back, an off-the-shelf laser pointer taking down an imperial drone. Lag is an architect with his beats, using snatches of missing sound to ramp up the intensity. Furthermore, this release highlights how Gqom, and its numerous offshoots, is the most significant music currently coming out of this country.
David Bowie- Blackstar. Bowie did about as much as person can in one lifetime. And rather than facing his trip to death’s undiscovered country with fear or mewling resignation, he brilliantly stage-managed his exit. The black star of the title stood in for the cosmic terror of space, the personal terror of cancer, even the brutality of ISIS. But most importantly, it was a final artistic triumph.
Danny Brown– Atrocity Exhibition. Many critics this year seemed overly enamoured of the saccharine positivity of Chance the Rapper’s gospel sound. Instead of singing with Jesus, Danny Brown was laughing with the Devil. Completing the trilogy which he began with XXX and Old, Brown released his masterpiece. And for a schizophrenic, post punk inspired trip through personal dysfunction it’s also surprisingly fun, with Brown offering all kinds of wayward life advice. My single favourite musical moment of 2016 is when the beat drops on ‘When It Rain’, a tribute to his hometown of Detroit which oscillates between despair and nihilistic pride ‘’ whole damn city probably got a couple warrants.’’
Radiohead- A Moon Shaped Pool. After the pleasant, but underwhelming King of Limbs, Radiohead decided to go back to doing what they do best- grand statements about the terrors of late capitalism. This beautifully orchestrated album is rooted in personal heartbreak but also glances at global warming and populist hatemongering.
FAKA – Bottoms Revenge. This year was full of terrible things done in the name of religion. In stark contrast, FAKA offer an alternative spirituality of metamorphosis and transcendence. The entire EP is orchestrated like a ritual. Occasionally disturbing, sometimes confusing, always revelatory.
As he moved deeper into his own psychosis, whose onset he had recognized during his year at the hospital, he welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell– The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G Ballard, 1970.
Staring at the devils face but you can’t stop laughing- Atrocity Exhibition, Danny Brown, 2016.
Danny Brown’s latest album is the work of debauched 2016 Dante, clinically detailing the levels of his personal hell. It’s production is not so much futuristic as beamed in from some parallel universe where the bombs dropped long ago. In Atrocity Exhibition, we hear the diary of a decadent recluse holed up in the suburbs around the decaying city of Detroit- phone off the hook but still ringing, residue on mirrors. His voice and lyrics range from resigned to hysterical. On the incredible ‘Tell Me What I Don’t Know’, he is a steely witness to the human cost of the drug game. On other tracks, he is a high-pitched maniac lost in a horror house of hallucinations and waking nightmares. He delivers the most coldly hilarious line about celebrity life I’ve ever heard- ‘nosebleeds on red carpet, but the colour just blends in’, and sicko life advice like ‘ the one thing I’ve learnt is don’t nod off with your motherfucking cigarette burning.’ The album would be morbid if it didn’t sound so invigorating. The moment when the beat drops on ‘When it Rain’, the psychedelic guitars which blaze through ‘Dance In The Water.’ The manic creativity on this album is reminiscent of peak Outkast, who Brown explicitly quotes on ‘Today’. But whereas Andre 3000 and Big Boi moved in a universe lit by warmth and spirituality, he speaks from a perspective leached of hope. This is a winter album, which sounds like walking down the wrong alleyway, in the wrong city. Pain and pleasures are indistinguishable in this frigid depressive landscape.
The phrase ‘cold world’ appears throughout the album. In the past other hip hop artists have used this as a shorthand for the chilling effect of poverty, despair and deprivation. The haunting ‘Cold World’ on GZA’s Liquid Swordz, the entirety of Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein (‘it’s a cold world out there… tell me about it sometimes I feel a little frosty myself’).
But Brown looks further across the Atlantic to find inspiration for his personal ice age. The title itself links Brown into an unexpected circuit of British eccentrics. It was first used in a book of the same age by the great writer J.G Ballard. For Ballard, the exhibition was the media landscape created during the Cold War, in which the horrors of nuclear annihilation and the Vietnam War comfortably existed alongside Hollywood stars and advertising billboards. In 1980, it was repurposed as the opening song of Joy Division’s second and final album Closer. Over drums that sound like a Satanic choir, singer Ian Curtis invites you to a world with ‘mass murder on a scale you’ve never seen.’ Two months before the album was released, Curtis had committed suicide. In the years since this tragic end, the band’s stature has only grown, its music retaining an elemental power transcending the time it was made. As cultural theorist Mark Fisher suggests, the band drew a sense of foreboding from the era it was made (1977-80). A time when politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan pioneered the shift towards an increasingly unequal and brutal neoliberal capitalism. We live in the ruins of this counterrevolution, a world where high levels of economic stress incubate chronic rates of depression, substance abuse, alienation and despair. The exact same personal effects which Brown confronts with such raw honesty. And the rabbit hole runs even deeper. The original American edition of Ballard’s book was pulped by its’ publishers because of a section called ‘Why I want to Fuck Ronald Regan.’ Some year’s later pranksters handed this out at the Republican Party convention, presenting it as the work of some deranged think tank. The Reagan administration’s right wing economic doctrines and shady foreign policy both helped to dramatically increase poverty in America while helping to flood cities with hard drugs. Born in 1981, Danny Brown has had a first-hand seat at the intensification of urban poverty. Today’s atrocities exhibitions are captured on live stream and retweeted rather than caught on tape, but the historical thread is there.
One final overlap- on his last fatal night in Manchester, Curtis was listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, itself a cold electronic album about the twilight life of a trouble Detroit star. As Ballard put it later notes about The Atrocity Exhibition ‘deep assignments run through all our lives. There are no coincidences.’
This background only adds to the appreciation of Brown’s masterpiece. It’s determination and focus is almost heroic, and makes the one percenter whining of Kayne or Drake sound like grocery lists by comparison. This is sound of one man laughing into the abyss, a ‘living nightmare which most of us share.’
