“Lale ilalilale! Wavuka ekseni awazi ulalephi!” For the past two hours, our cluster of festival-goers had supplanted the Wodumo chant over almost every beat that descended from the decks of that Oppikoppi stage. Somewhere amid the heaving hilltop congregation, a whistle punctuated each off-beat, driving the chant forward. The gqom banger, Wololo, had become so infused in the crowd’s party consciousness that we could string together a remix from any tempo and cadence, pleading for our sonic release. The dancefloor rung with anticipation for what felt like an inescapable necessity: for our sound to drop.
When the minimalist grit of a gqom beat finally aired that night, it felt like deliverance. Like the genre itself, the audience quickly locked into oscillation between tension and euphoria. A glitchy percussive drive encased the Red Bull stage — unapologetically dance music, unapologetically reverberating elokshini. All of this at a historically-white, historically-rock festival.
The first minute of that set was enveloped in a sense of urgency, as we clutched at one another’s shoulders, asking, “Who is this?!” Eventually, the DJ took up the waiting microphone: “Uright?” The beat motored forward through the dust. “Hello Oppi! My name is Diloxclusiv. I’m all the way from Cape Town”. The crowd raised hands in recognition. “Does anyone know gqom music?” A chorus of resounding affirmation responded. “Ok masambe ke! I don’t talk too much”.
And so Diloxclusiv (Vuyisa Genu) began his set, spinning a turn-up tapestry of local house, kwaito and gqom. I later learned that he was a dancer. No wonder, since his music had movement as its impetus, commanding the feet into action. Somewhere in the middle of his set, an interjection of Afropop, as Letta Mbulu’s ‘Amakhamandela (Not Yet Uhuru)’ set a choir of voices, and a swinging national flag, to the sky. A struggle song come to remind us that dancing, particularly in this country, is at-once celebration, protest, mourning, and communion.
Diloxclusiv, as dancer/DJ/artist, speaks from and for his place, as though there were no alternative. He grew up in New Crossroads township, Nyanga, and later moved to Hazeldean in Phillippi. Around 2003, Diloxclusiv started playing paid gigs, initially at house parties and later at larger events. Remembering his very first set, he told me: “that was one of the longest sets I’ve ever played. I played from 4pm till 2pm the following day. Back in my area, there weren’t DJs, plus I had no friends with cars. Music was the only thing that kept us moving. I remember one group of ladies dancing to my old-school songs. They kept saying ‘Repeat DJ!’ I repeated because the crowd loved the music I was playing. So we could play a song 10 times before changing it.”
As a presenter on UCT radio, Diloxclusiv’s popularity soon resulted in him hosting his own show: Kasi Flava, which later became The Blend. With a growing reputation, he has received bookings at some of the Western Cape’s most popular nightclubs and festivals. Cape Town “is one of the most difficult cities to play for”, he told me. DJ’s struggle to get support from the media, and from the Department of Arts and Culture. Township events, he went on to say, are particularly under-supported. Oppikoppi had been a long-term dream for Diloxclusiv, and along with Vic Falls Carnival and Black Coffe Block Party, had been among his favourite performances.
When I asked him about his musical influences, Diloxclusiv described kwaito as his “first love. I still believe kwaito is not dead, just hybernating, soon to come out like a massive butterfly”. Defiantly local in his sonic pallette, he is critical of South African (particularly hip hop) artists that impersenate soundscapes from elsewhere, more appreciative of palpaby local genres like ispaza and motswako. This has been the primary attraction of gqom. “I was one of the first DJs to play gqom in Cape Town”, he said. “The first DJ to play gqom on Vuzu’s Hit Refresh, and the first DJ to play gqom at the 2013 Boiler Room sessions in Amsterdam”. The moment Dilo dropped gqom on that Oppi stage will undoubtedly also be documented as a historic first.
Gqom’s raw minimalism succeeds because it is both ostentatious and lacking in pretention. An unapologetic genre. As an artist, Diloxclusiv is very similarly characterised. He is an unabashed advocate for the music that does not, and could not, exist elsewhere.
