The ‘Turn-up Talk Series’ is a collection of discussions in which young Jo’burgers share their nocturnal lives: stories and reflections from the city’s dancefloors. The candid conversations explore nightclubs as stages for young people’s negotiations of identity, belonging and power.“This week’s episode is a phat 20-minute story about one woman’s coming-of-age in Johannesburg nightclubs. It’s a tale of transition from the Eastern Cape to Gauteng, from childhood to adulthood. It’s about rumour, romance, space and belonging. An exploration of “How to be black, ‘middle-class’ and ‘hipster’ in a complicated city.”
Tag: nightlife
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Turn-Up Talk Series Episode 4 – Mess in Melville
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DJ Capital (Siyabonga Sibeko) and the Dancefloor Dialectic
DJ’s write our nocturnal soundtracks. Spinning the energy in the room, they ease their audience in; build them up; hold them in suspense. They have us clawing for the next big drop, then reeling from the release. This week, I met with Siyabonga Sibeko (DJ Capital) to talk about the art of the DJ. In the nightclub, there is a dialectic: audience and DJ in communion and conversation. The DJ attunes themselves to the energy of the audience, reading their desire or distaste through their bodily responses, their calls, the extent of draw to the dancefloor. “You can’t really plan a set because you never know what kind of crowd you’re gonna get”, Capital says. “You’ll have 5 big songs that you will play. But for everything else, it’s a ‘feeling’ thing. When I play a song you haven’t heard before, you are going to stand and look at me. You have to find a way to ease them into it”. The task of reading the crowd demands high-level intuition and improvisation. “If the time now is 1.27am”, Capital says, “[Often], I don’t know what I’m playing at 1.30am”. And the audience, too, has ways of asking, thanking, sharing and validating their DJ.
For Capital, music festivals are the epitome of the DJ experience. “You’re this one human being, controlling five to ten thousand people. They’re all looking at you. It’s a crazy feeling.” The tacit conversation between DJ and audience harkens back to an ancient ‘call and response’ tradition: a leader calls out, signaling the song to be sung, and the crowd echoes their response. A DJ spins a track and watches the reverberations through the crows. As with our ancestral forebears, Capital describes this sonic communication as eliciting a type of trans, an out-of-body experience, in which he is as intoxicated by the audience as they are by him. Recalling a recent festival in which he threw his chain into the crowd, Capital says, “Afterwards, I remember asking out loud: ‘what did I just do?’”
Some clubs, Capital says, have lost this energy. “Parties in the North are not really about fun anymore. It’s about how can I stunt on you – more bottles, more ‘chicks’. People get so caught up in that competition that they forget we actually out here to have fun.” Capital prefers the small towns: the audiences who come with the sole purpose of hearing the music, entangling themselves in musical ties with the DJ and others on the dancefloor.
The dialectic between DJ and crowd has been the driving force of Capital’s art. He first tried his hand at DJ’ing — not in a basement studio, or on a friend’s PC, or in his bedroom — but in the club. As a student at Wits, Capital began throwing parties at what was then Keys club: already an architect of ‘the good night out’. One night, when a headline DJ failed to pitch, Capital found himself behind the booth. “I literally ran to my car, where I always had the latest music. Got all my CDs and I just started playing. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just putting a CD in and pressing play. No sense of mixing whatsoever. It was terrible. But luckily I was playing all the right songs. After that I was like, ‘Yo I can actually do this if I actually learn what I’m meant to do’”. From there, Capital was self-taught and dedicated, dropping out of his final year at Wits. “I was so scared to tell my parents I actually wrote them a letter”.
Today, Capital is a three time SA Hip Hop Award nominee and has opened for major international acts: Usher, Wiz Khalifa, Lil John, DJ Drama, Deadmau5 and more. In July 2015, he embarked on a European tour, headlining shows in London and Moscow. He is host of the Capital Rap Up on Touch Central, and presenter of ETV’s Club 808. It’s part of his acknowledgement that a DJ is not simply a music vessel, but a personality, such that music somehow tastes different depending on who’s delivering it. Capital has produced several tracks with some of the country’s best Hip-Hop acts, including Hell of a Life (ft. Reason and AB Crazy), What You Like (ft. Kwesta x Kyle Deutsch) and All to You (ft. Dreamteam). “Hip hop has influenced so much of my life – the way people talk, the way people dress, even hip-hop sports like basketball”, he says.
Few people know just how much DJs, and club culture, have had to do not only with the success of South African Hip Hop, but also its sound. “About 5 years ago, all the [Hip-Hop] DJs and all the artists met at the Radisson in Sandton. We were literally having this huge argument. Rappers were like, ‘Why don’t you DJ’s play our stuff?’ And we were like, ‘Why don’t you give us stuff we can play at the clubs?’ Back and forth, DJ’s and artists. At the end of the night we were like, ‘There’s obviously a problem here. Let’s work together. And that’s when DJs started putting out songs with artists. And that’s literally how South African Hip Hop changed”. It’s not simply that many clubs now sound like hip-hop, hip-hop has increasingly been made to sound like the club.
Despite his own production success, it’s the energy of a live audience that is still primary for Capital. He tells me he once done six gigs in a single night, starting in the late afternoon. “In December, I did three provinces in one day”. There’s a reason Capital defies time and space to play for a crowd.
As author Bill Brewster said, it’s “because DJ’ing is not about choosing a few tunes. It’s about generating shared moods; it’s about understanding the feelings of a group of people and directing them to a better place. In the hands of a master, records create rituals of spiritual communion that can be the most powerful events in people’s lives”.
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If Kitchener’s (KCB) is like a home
“There are venues and there are institutions”, I was once told: a friend attempting to draw categories in Johannesburg’s night-time cartography. Undoubtedly, Kitchener’s (or KCB) falls into the latter group. It’s the ‘go-to’ club when you have no prior plans. It’s the comfort of knowing the sound and crowd to expect when you arrive. It’s the ease of no dress code and affordable entrance fees. It’s the knowledge that you’ll likely see at least ten other people you know. “If the question is, where do we go to party [tonight], we are the first call”, says DJ/manager Andrew Clements.
Among the audiences, artists and curators of KCB are those who speak of it as ‘home’. “Home isn’t where you come from”, said author Pierce Brown, “It’s where you find light when all grows dark.”
If KCB is a home, it is one whose family stretches back generations. The pub/hotel was built in 1902 and is regarded as the second oldest building in Johannesburg. It is a testament to the historical centrality of our night venues. Radium Beer Hall, Kitchener’s Carvery Bar (KCB), Guildhall Pub have watched generations of dreamers and workers spill their histories over bar counters — wrestling with the possibilities and futures of the city. Marc Latilla, one of the first DJs to ever play at KCB, has sought to archive the venue’s history: another indication that night-dwellers are often keepers of suppressed urban narratives.
According to Latilla, by the end of the 18th century, Braamfontein had transformed from farmlands into a thriving middle-class suburb. The Milner Park Hotel, now known as Kitchener’s, was built in 1902, surrounded by German businesses. It served as a drinking hole for British troops, as well as postal riders on their way to Pretoria. In 1902, towards the end of the Second South African War, Lord Milner had a meeting with the notorious commander of the British forces, General Lord Kitchener, in the newly-built hotel. Kitchener had been a brutal warlord: primary instigator of South Africa’s concentration camps, in which thousands of Boers and black Africans were killed, mostly women and children. The name ‘Kitchener’s’ is thought to have arisen from this “auspicious” meeting.
If KCB is a home, this is the family’s ugly origins: it’s ancestral elder, a colonial brute, whose legacy continues to cause disquiet among his descendants. Still, his portrait hangs from the mantelpiece, above the figurative fireplace, where his great grandchildren dance and cuss and caress and worship, along with the descendants of his victims. These young ones burst through at night, trampling on grandma’s wooden floors, spilling on the old carpet, brushing past the velvet wallpaper. Each time, confronting history with a cocktail of detachment, denial, and dissent. It is a story of “dancing on graves”, of repossessing haunted spaces. You see it not only here but in the parties at the old train station, Halloween blowouts at the Voortrekker Monument, projected images of Hector Peterson at Soweto’s Zone 6.
The new generation of revelers took root at KCB in 2009, when Andrew Clements began using and hiring out the old hotel for parties. “This used to be just an old man’s club”, Andrew explains,“where a bunch of 60-year-olds would come every day at lunchtime, have a few beers, and then come back again after work. By 6 or 7 the place would close up”. But as DJ’s re-imagined the dusty Bar and Carvery, and the parties grew, and KCB quickly became a living room for young creatives, experimenters, hipsters, and students.
If KCB is a home, then, like any other home, it is not just about love, safety, memory and identity. There is also domestic power and sources of conflict. A strong sense of community often comes with a shared culture: away of dressing, speaking, moving on the dance floor, that has the potential to alienate others. Money, too, can also mess with families. One regular told me that he experienced a class territorialism that would make it difficult for someone who regularly partied at a tavern to party at KCB. To add to this are gender disparities, with femme bodies particularly under threat. Elders and relatives may try to intervene: we’ve seen dance floor dissent at the monthly Pussy Parties, the introduction of a female bouncer, regular and recognizable door staff, and a huge diversity of music genres to boost inclusivity. But families, inevitably, are sources of both contest and comfort.
If KCB is a home, it is one built on music. For years, DJ’s Rosie Parade and Danger Ngozi, of Broaden a New Sound, have curated its sonic identity,rooted in quality, pioneering music. There are family reunions with regular artists and promoters: 2 Sides of the Beat, Kid Fonque, BeatNN and Subterranean Wavelength. And then there are visits from distant relatives. This year: Tendai ‘Baba’ Maraire, Hussein Kalonji, Tama Sumo and Lakuti. And of course there are family events: Disco de la Mode is a group trip to the beach; Below the Bassline a spiritual gathering around the dinner table, and Zonke Bonke like your uncle’s birthday party.The soundtrack is not from your radio or television. It’s the specially-curated playlists that this family has come to love: exchanging sounds, travels and collections across time and space. Like all good household gatherings, the food keeps coming till the early hours of the morning. At 4am, you’re helping your exhausted cousin out the door. And, as author Wendy Wunder once said of a home: “It feels good to leave. Even better to come back”.
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Turn-up Talk Series Episode 3
The ‘Turn-up Talk Series’ is a collection of discussions in which young Jo’burgers share their nocturnal lives: stories and reflections from the city’s dancefloors. The candid conversations explore nightclubs as stages for young people’s negotiations of identity, belonging and power.
‘In this episode, we talk about music, moves and what they say about us’
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Turn-up Talk Series Episode 2
The ‘Turn-up Talk Series’ is a collection of discussions in which young Jo’burgers share their nocturnal lives: stories and reflections from the city’s dancefloors. The candid conversations explore nightclubs as stages for young people’s negotiations of identity, belonging and power.
This weeks episode is about how we ‘carve out space in nightclubs’.
Produced by Beth Vale
Background music by Ash_fx (@ashfx)
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Nurturing the Night: Reflections on the Berlin NIGHTS Conference and the future of club culture
Over the past few months, a sidewalk in London’s Islington borough has been cloaked in a growing collection of flower bouquets. Passersby solemnly place their offerings at the entrance to a four-story building, opposite Smithfield Meat Market. It’s the site of London’s iconic nightclub, Fabric, which has been closed this year after having its operating license withdrawn.
‘R.I.P. Fabric’, read one of the notes. ‘You’ve gone to join The End, Bogleys, SE1, Turnmills and The Fridge in the big club in the sky. Thank you for all the good times and for the amazing music. P.S. Please don’t become a Tesco [Supermarket] Metro’.
While visiting London this month, I learnt that more than half the city’s nightclubs, and around 40 percent of its music venues, had closed within the past 8 years. A skyrocketing property market, and escalating rents, had resulted in many club owners being bought out by property developers. Compounding this, local councils had been enforcing stringent regulations to limit noise, confine opening hours, and increase security. Meanwhile, shutting down nightclubs had been positioned as the answer to a series of drug-related deaths, including at Fabric. The crack-down on nightclub cultures in London has given rise to a series of fierce contestations around the cultural value of nightlife for artists, partygoers and tourists, and what effects this might have on people’s collective right to the city.
The new urgency around protecting nightclub cultures in Europe is acutely felt in nocturnal hubs like Berlin, a city where night-time socialities are given serious nurturing and attention. At the end of November this year, Berlin played host to the first installment of the NIGHTS conference. Urban planners, artists, DJ’s, festival-planners, club owners, bouncers, sex workers, researchers, music journalists, and drug policy experts gathered to discuss a kaleidoscope of questions related to nocturnal city culture.
Also present at the conference were Night Mayors from across Europe. The Night Mayor initiative began in Amsterdam in 2014 as a strategy to address prevalent nyctaphobia (fear of the night) among public officials and city planners. Too often, night-time in the city is viewed with suspicion and resentment, where darkness is believed to bring with it various pollutions — sex, crime, noise, intoxication and criminality. Night Mayors are intended to be alive to the night, while many of the city’s public officers are fast asleep. In doing so, they connect night businesses, night workers, revelers and residents, with City Hall. The concept has since been taken up in Paris, Toulouse, Zurich, Berlin and London.
Staged at two nightclubs overlooking the River Spree, attendees at the NIGHTS conference explored the social possibilities and challenges of nightclub culture, set to a backdrop of LED lighting. We discussed ableism in nightclubs and the inaccessibility of night venues for those with disabilities. Indeed, inclusivity was a key concern across the three-day conference as speakers explored questions related to the integration of refugee musicians, as well as how to address racism, sexual harassment, homophobia and violence on the dancefloor. Contributors further discussed new technologies of the night: sound, lighting, and virtual reality, as well as their various impacts on the environment.
Those of us in the night-time industry often express the value of nocturnal cultures in Utopian terms. Unsurprisingly, the NIGHTS conference was awash with conversations about night-time as a space of freedom, love, integration, transgression and release. Many spoke about the possibilities of the night for fostering social cohesion and belonging in the city.
But of course, the night is also a source of contestation and conflict. Attendees interrogated norms related to ‘Who gets to have fun?’ For whom is ‘fun’ economically accessible? Who’s ‘fun’ is valued and whose is classed as degenerate? Many discussed the competing claims to the city at night. Is the night a place for work? Leisure? Consumption? Sleep? Which forms of ‘night life’ are desirable and undesirable? While consumers at a nightclub might be one thing, those walking the streets or creating roadside parties are treated quite separately. How can residents and nightclub cultures co-exist? What forms of regulation do we want at night and for whose protection? Many thoughtful discussions were had about ‘harm reduction’ policies that seek to reduce the risks of drug-use by researching which drugs are entering the club scene, offering emergency services to drug users, and increasing awareness about safer drug use practices.
Both Berlin and Johannesburg are cities that have undergone immense social change and upheaval in the past 25 years. As the Berlin Wall came down, clubs sprang up in abandoned buildings and warehouses as young people ‘took back the city’. In Johannesburg, young people’s relationship to the city is also continually in flux as nightclub hubs relocate, and new claims are made to nocturnal spaces. Yet conversations about Johannesburg’s night-time — as a site of artistic expression, economic innovation, social contestation and identity — have yet to truly begin. Our city’s population is younger than that of both London and Berlin. For Johannesburg’s youth, night is not only a function of time, but also of place. The night is a unique place, in which young people predominate, and new forms of social access and exclusion become apparent. More so, young artists, event promoters, DJ’s, musicians, designers and creatives are making and sustaining a vibrant and complex night industry in the city. Perhaps it’s time we take this seriously — as a social, cultural and economic resource. Perhaps it’s time for our own NIGHTS conference.
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Multiplicity on the Dancefloor: nightclubs for the non-binary
One of the defining features of nightclubs is that they are loud and dark: there’s little allowance for speaking. It’s a space where our bodies are especially loaded, in part because they are the primary means by which we signal to, and experience, one another. We dance, we push, we touch, we avoid, we shoot glances across the room. The resulting intimacy is charged with volatility — sometimes experienced as warm and exciting, but always on the cusp of something suffocating or even violent.
Being Pride Week, I was prompted to reflect on some of the ways in which Johannesburg’s night spaces are experienced by queer and/or non-binary bodies. How does cis-hetero-normativity contribute to the contouring of the nocturnal city? To what extent are nightspots designated as ‘gay’ experienced as ‘safe’ by their intended audiences? And how do queer bodies negotiate the layered possibilities and vulnerabilities of the night-time?
One of the very first places I went out after moving to Johannesburg was Liquid Blue, a cocktail lounge in Melville. It remains unclear to me whether Liquid Blue was originally marketed as a gay bar, or whether it has simply been claimed by a queer audience. Either way, the lounge is now a widely celebrated gay night-spot, with a playlist that spans house, kwaito, hip-hop, RnB and pop — designed to keep the dancefloor jumping. My early experience at Liquid Blue made me stunningly optimistic about Johannesburg’s night scene and to this day, it remains the most inclusive club I have visited in the city. No entrance fee, with an audience that is acutely representative of the South African demographic: predominantly black, with white, coloured and Indian partygoers as visible minorities. The dancefloor is an exchange of intimacies that disregards race and gender, and although the crowd is mostly men, young women of any sexuality can feel a precious sense of safety.
Indeed, in my conversations with Johannesburg’s non-binary partygoers, one of the primary debates seemed to be about the place of cis-hetero bodies in queer night-spaces. A few months ago, while chatting to Desire Marea (of FAKA) about partying as a queer, black man, he told me that night-spaces specifically designed for queer audiences are increasingly rare. “Those spaces hardly exist now”, he said. “It’s literally a space that was once a straight club, and now it’s a gay club, and there are still some straight people.” In these spaces that were not designed for queer bodies but in which queer bodies are present, he argues that there is “still that energy and sense of being unwelcome”. It’s “not as safe as a space that is designated especially for you. And we need those spaces. We can’t just integrate. We want to explore ourselves”.
When Desire first moved to Johannesburg from KZN, he began renting an apartment in a lesser-known part of inner-city Jo’burg: run-down buildings, occupied predominantly by young men, many of whom had also migrated from KZN. Early on, he and Fela Gucci (of FAKA) began partying at the neighbourhood tavern. Having spent a lot of time in rural taverns, Desire described this to me as one way of connecting to a particular part of his “black experience”. He and Thato had been in awe of how homo-erotic the tavern was. Young men, many of whom would not have identified as queer outside of that space, were the sole clientele. “They were dancing in ways that would not have been acceptable even at Buffalo Bills”, Desire reflected. It was an intoxicating place, but its permissiveness was also fragile. After one of their friends was assaulted there, they did not go back.
Desire now speaks of his successes and struggles in claiming Braamfontein, as a space in which he, and other queer bodies, can feel welcome. There remains, he tells me, a class gulf between nightspots in Braamfontein and the tavern where he once partied, such that those in the tavern do not have access to places like Great Dane or Kitcheners. To some extent, Braamfontein has become a space in which the ‘alternative body’ is welcomed and celebrated. But Desire argues that there is often only a particular kind of ‘cool’, and a particular kind of ‘gay’ that is desired. He told me a story about a time he wore a dress on a night out and was waiting in the queue for the entrance. Although no one else in the line had been asked for an identity document, he was pressed by the bouncer and subsequently turned away. Those queues, he told me, were so often utterly “dehumanising”.
Part of what Desire is pointing to, in his story about the dress, are particularities about how femme bodies are received in night spaces. He describes this as the “hetero-normativity of gayness” in which “femme bodies are not allowed to express their sexuality in the same way as other gay male bodies”. Of course, club culture that is anti-femme also affects how women experience night-spaces. To this end, the monthly Pussy Party at Kitcheners has sought to create a pro-femme platform that celebrates femme artists and audiences, featuring acts like FAKA, Angel Ho and Dope St Jude, while also pushing back on particular forms of cis-het machismo.
These are instances in which traditionally hetero spaces have opened themselves up to more fluidity. But to what extent are designated ‘queer’ spaces experienced as ‘safe’ by queer bodies? Unsurprisingly, this answer is also not always clear. Many have told me that while these spaces might allow them to feel comfortable in their sexuality, gay clubs that are almost exclusively white provoke other discomforts and other forms of violence. Some described feeling “unacknowledged” which was “disappointing” and “painful”. Reflecting on a night out at a gay night-spot in Illovo, a friend said: “obviously I feel safe there as a queer white man. But it made me feel more uncomfortable than when I was in Kitcheners making out with an ostensibly straight boy because it felt like a church of whiteness”. Despite describing Illovo as “super white”, those I spoke to also recognised it as the heart of the post-Pride party.
And of course, the city’s designated ‘gay clubs’ are not only racialised, but also classed. In Maboneng, a new nightclub, Industry, has been opened with the aim of catering to “upwardly mobile gay men and women”. It is a very chic spot, playing cutting edge electronic music, with patrons who look as though they just stepped out the pages of a high fashion magazine. It’s in image that is at-once immensely appealing to some, and deeply alienating to others. And indeed, this is likely to be true of many night-spots in the city.
Much of the discourse on non-binary nightlife in Johannesburg is about the experiences of queer men, with very little attention given to queer women. In reflecting on her experiences in the nocturnal city, a friend of mine said this: “one of my major concerns when visiting night spots is about the level of unwanted attention and uncalled for touching. For me, not all queer safe spaces feel safe, in the same way that not all heterosexual spaces do. One of my most unpleasant memories at a particular gay bar was being accosted by the bouncers not only outside, but also while waiting for drinks. So one person’s safe space is not necessarily another’s no matter how queer safe they claim to be.” Perhaps unexpectedly, she said that one of her favourite spaces to go at night was the strip club, where the music was good, men did not bother you, and all the attention was on the working women.
Over the past few days that I’ve spent talking and reflecting about nightlife outside the bounds of cis-heteronormativity, the term ‘non-binary’ has exploded in its meaning. Not only do we need to think about how our night-spaces might welcome or militate against gender non-binary audiences. But we might also think about the ways in which our identities are always more than one thing at once. We might be both woman and queer and black; straight, white and disabled; rural and gay man; hip-hop head and crowd-phobic; and so the list goes on. All of these identities factor in the ways that we experience space. The question of queer-safe nightclubs seems then to point to this wider question: how might we craft night spaces that take our multiplicity as their basis?
“There’s just a lot more in Jo’burg”, Desire reflects. “There’s a lot more people dealing with energies, dealing with trauma. There’s a lot more conflict. It’s just a thing about the city. The conflict is a thing that’s in the air. But also a unity that’s very hard to reach. You have to delve to the deepest darkest places to try and find shared experience. Nightlife for us is not just going out. Nightlife is also sharing a bed with someone. Essentially nightlife is living the way you want to exist and it’s transcending the experience you have during the day. It’s like you’re emancipating yourself. It’s resistance”.
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Turn-up Talk Series
The ‘Turn-up Talk Series’ is a collection of discussions in which young Jo’burgers share their nocturnal lives: stories and reflections from the city’s dancefloors. The candid conversations explore nightclubs as stages for young people’s negotiations of identity, belonging and power. -
Nairobi Nights: a three part tale
‘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 The Alchemist, perched on the narrow Parklands Road, behind another innocuous metal gate. In many guises, The Alchemist 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.
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On-Air Entertainment: A Look Into Johannesburg’s After-Dark Film Reel
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-Air catalogue 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.
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Didi Monsta, Desire Marea, and the artists’ quest to unmask our glitchy humanity
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 your cis 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.
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Until Until: Curating Complexity in Jo’burg Nightlife
Until Until are a fast-rising crew of young entertainment entrepreneurs, curating events that attract as many as 4000 partygoers. After only 3-years in the game, this squad of 11 twenty-something’s describe their members as ‘pretty socially relevant’: a humble understatement since each boasts 1000-or-so Twitter followers and an astonishing ability to pull crowds.
As a young brand, Until Until have been consistently under-estimated by venue managers. ‘We told them, “Look guys, we’re going to have 3500 –4000 people. And we could just see, they just doubted us’.
Today, they’re claiming territory among industry heavyweights, attracting coverage from major media houses and collaborating with some of the country’s hottest DJs and performers. Their recent 2016 flagship party, Genesis All Black, boasted in its line-up: Euphonik, Khuli Chana, Das Kapital, DJ Speedsta and PH. Advertised dress: ‘Strictly all black’ Time: ‘from 4pm until until’.
I got together with two members — Thandile (Honx) and Thulani (Thulz) to chat about the micro-politics of the ‘turn-up’, starting with the very first party they threw:
‘June 16 was that Friday. On Wednesday we were like “Yo, what are we doing this weekend? What’s happening for June 16?” And there was nothing on the party calendar. So many friends were coming home. Thursday we announced. Friday it happened’.
Dubbed ‘High School Cool’ and pumped with a heavy dose of uniform-clad high-school nostalgia, the party was hosted on the tennis court of a friend’s Bryanston home and functioned as a tribute to ’76.
‘We had 700 people inside the house and about 400 people outside’
Big numbers for a suburban home. I imagined crowd insurrection disrupting the strictly-regulated pristine of Northern Suburbia.
‘Well look, we did tell the neighbours it was a traditional ceremony’ (laughs).
On face value it was hilarious subterfuge, but Honx was on to something. Among their multiplicity of social functions, traditional ceremonies serve to welcome returning relatives, celebrate achievement, mark rites of passage, pay homage to the ancestors, and cement connectedness between family and neighbours. Fuck it, ‘High School Cool’ did it all.
The middle-finger out-of-placed-ness connoted by an imagined traditional ceremony on a Bryanston tennis court was carried until until. Through each subsequent party, initially reluctant ‘North boys’ were hauled into the once-elusive city centre. ‘Popping bottles’ was made Braam-affordable so everyone could ‘have a shout’. And so elitism and inclusivity were brought into spectacularly contradictory collision.
With an off-hand reference to traditional ceremonies, Honx had messed with the neat Durkheimian demarcation between the sacred and profane. He had acknowledged that parties, rather than being simple triviality, were a cacophony of celebration, mourning, worship, rage and attachment. Protests, spiritual assemblies and political caucuses — like parties — so often rely on music, dance and a heaving crowd. We are regularly skirting the lines between play and politics.
Both marketing majors, Thulz and Honx understand that millennials frequently express their political selves through play: comedic memes and vines circulate online, reporting our socio-political milieu with damning satire. And just as we are bitingly playful in our politics, so too are we political in our play. In marketing their 2015 ‘Pyjama Party’, Until Until drew on design-styles from USSR/USA propaganda, catalysing an explosion of online gimmicks about the party/political. Themed The All Black Army, Genesis 2016 was inspired by a wave of student protests. Drawing on military imagery, it sought to connote a rallying of troops, unified by the colour black.
‘And how would you respond to the accusation that you are commercialising, even belittling, ‘The Struggle?’ I asked.
‘Firstly, the state of our country right now, that’s where we are. That’s where our minds are at, especially the youth. We can’t run away from that. You can’t ignore it. It’s there. You can think of something political and think about Until Until in the same light. We’ve given the brand a voice in this countrywide conversation. People will always party, whatever’s happening. So why not give you a party where it’s not like you’re running from something? You’re not partying to escape the realities. You’re partying knowing very well what’s happening’.
A trenchant critique of night-time escapism.
Thulz and Honx narrate Jo’burg nightlife as a raced status quo:
‘White people party there, black people party there, Indian people party there, coloured people… The fact that Taboo has two accounts: one called Taboo Urban Nights and the other just Taboo. Kong on a Friday is called Kong Urban Nights and then Saturday is called Kong. I guess they just don’t have a name for White Nights (laughs)’.
For these young entrepreneurs, night-time segregation results from a mode of music curation that under-estimates its audience, and consequently, produces audiences that miscalculate their own complexity. We’re intimidated by unfamiliar genres. Through raced assumptions about our tastes, nightclub owners unwittingly dictate our explorative capacity. Presumptions that ‘every young black must love hip-hop’ or that ‘EDM is for town-dwellers’ orchestrate dangerous comfort-zones.
Thulz: The reason an event like Genesis works is because I know that you as a white guy, you like Ricky Rick. You just haven’t been put in a situation where you’re listening to him.
Honx: I think Henry Ford said, ‘If I just asked people whether they wanted faster (horse) carriages, they would have said yes’. They wouldn’t have said ‘I want a car’. They wouldn’t have thought of that. I think a lot of club owners ask too many questions. They build this thing based on questions like ‘What do you want to listen to?’ For us, we didn’t ask if people wanted to listen to EDM at Genesis. We just put it on the line-up. We’re not solely focused on one genre. Get as much music as possible, as many people as possible, and put them in one place’.
Genesis audiences testify to its extraordinary genre-bending, in which there is no explicit switch from one genre to the next. DJs transition seamlessly from house, to hip-hop, to UK-garage, EDM and festival trap. ‘What sound that’s hot right now did you not hear at Genesis?’
I guess one could ask, ‘Aren’t Until Until manufacturing an artificial Rainbow Nation — a worrying faux-utopia?’
From a demographic perspective, the answer is plainly no. This is not a racial mixing-pot with equal doses of white, black, brown and everything in-between. But neither is South Africa. On some level, it’s a party that makes satisfying demographic sense. But more than that, Until Until are trying to rise to the nuanced complexities of their audience — to invite them (for this one night) to discover that they are more of a mess than their simplified typecasting. They remind us that nothing in us, or indeed in our politics, is pure or sacred or untouchable. And at the same time, everything is.
Follow them @untiluntil_za