Mahala

Swept Away

Andy — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:05:02 +0000

Everyday for the past 6 months, the Durban Metro Police have been rounding up street children, often beating them, and throwing them in the back of vans. According to Tom Hewitt, founder and CEO of the street children’s organization Umthombo, children are being harassed, beaten and pepper sprayed in these ruthless round-up operations. The kids are then driven out of the city as far as the department’s petrol tab allows and ditched outside Pietermaritzburg or down the South Coast. Alternatively

Contra

Xandi — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:46:27 +0000

Contra by name, contra by nature: young pop-smiths hurdle The Difficult Second Album(tm). It’s easy for certain South Africans to hate Vampire Weekend. They’re trendy, bookish and pretentious. Oh, and they name-check Peter Gabriel instead of Oliver Mtukudzi. This last bit is what gets South Africans backs up most: the temerity of young, privileged New Yorkers to appropriate African music in their indie-pop vibe without painstaking citation. But, jirre fok mense, criticising pop music for being cannibalistic is like straining

Garlic Rubes

Xandi — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:07:12 +0000

Kak. I’m all for folk remedies but what exactly do they mean by “rubes” the soles of the feet?

Skop, Skiet en Donner

Andy — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:30:42 +0000

Look, I’m not going to fuck around, you’re going to need better speakers than the ones you have in order to fully appreciate the new Van Coke Kartel album, Skop Skiet en Donner. At times it gets so ridiculously heavy and overblown that it becomes nothing short of glorious. VCK might have brought on board a producer (Peach Van Pletzen, also on Drums and other stuff) with a distinctive style but it hasn’t made them any less, unapologetically, them. It’s

Musica is a Museum

Andy — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:04:57 +0000

The Waterfront is a re-purposed commercial zone. It used to be exclusively about ships and shipping, and now you can shop, date and see movies there. (All made possible by a dubious Dubai consortium, of course). Anyway, commercial re-purposing of surpassed industrial sites is universal. San Francisco, New York, Singapore, London. Cape Town. Not Detroit. Poor Detroit. These are places where work happened that’s no longer viable thanks to the international division of labour – global investment (remember that?) logically

Spaza Shop Hip Hop

Andy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:30:38 +0000

Where Cape Flats culture meets the Nyanga vibe. Coloured and Xhosa culture mash-up as only the iKapa 'kasi can produce. Another coup for the Pioneer Unit. We be rocking this shit loud!

Blood Runs Dry

Andy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:29:55 +0000

I’ve never been a big fan of vampire movies - the melodrama, the drooling adolescent sexuality, the powdered rakes in effeminate period attire. Give me flesh-eating zombies any day. With the living dead, it’s always party time. Thankfully, Daybreakers combines the best of both worlds – a vampire movie that relies heavily on conventional zombie and epidemic/outbreak scenarios to tell its story. It’s set in the near future (2019), where most of mankind have been “turned” to vampires and as

Zink Waves, Tidal Plaat

Andy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:03:52 +0000

I’ve been following and writing about Tidal Waves for a long time now, I own all their albums and know their set backwards, so I’m always looking for a different angle. This Friday produced exactly that, a unique, once-off collaboration with Zinkplaat, set on a wine farm just outside Stellenbosch. The sum-total of my knowledge of Zinkplaat was gleaned from watching their music videos on MK. I was attracted to their earthy roots rock on tracks like “Piekniek” and “Hondeklipbaai”.

Dinner and Finley Quaye

Andy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:32:25 +0000

OK this is a biggie. We’re giving away two sets of double tickets to the Finley Quaye gig on Friday, as well as dinner at Neighbourhood in Long Street before the gig. Just click here and tune us why you, above all others, are most worthy…

The Street World Cup

Andy — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:17:27 +0000

One World Cup you may not have heard of is kicking off in Durban next week. It doesn’t feature any professional athletes, no big names, brand endorsements, bling bling and multi-million dollar salaries. In fact hardly any one even knows about this World Cup, primarily because the participants are all street kids. Yes that’s right, all the participants of the Street Child World Cup tend to spend each night, in their home countries, sleeping on street corners, dodging criminal gangs