Music
Gqom - The New Underground
Listen to a selection of tracks from some of the pioneers of one of SA's most minimal, raw and exhilarating underground dance music movements.
Kwanele Sosibo and Chris Saunders travelled to KwaZulu Natal earlier this year to meet up with some of the pioneers of one of South Africa's most minimal, raw and exhilarating underground dance music movements, Gqom, for an article for the Red Bulletin. Read an excerpt from the article below:
In front of a shebeen crowd, not far from his mother’s house, Bhejane, in jeans and a black bubble jacket, jerks his hips in the opposite direction to his flailing arms. His energy is manic, but his movements match the staccato beat that, with his vocals mixed in, echoes through the hilly township.
The teenagers in the front row take cellphone videos while mouthing along to a fairytale-like song about an ecstasy trip gone bad. The adults at the back watch incredulously, unsure what to make of this post-kwaito scene. Out of the limelight, Bhejane is a lanky and soft-spoken figure, his boyish looks contrasting with the image his booming baritone evokes. On record he comes across as larger than life, menacing society with some memorable, rhetorical questions. “Ubani… islima… pahkathi… kwestraighti… nomakhwapheni? (Who is the fool between your real woman and your mistress?)” he chants in Zulu on Makhwapheni, a tongue-in-cheek song about infidelity.
Just 21 years old, Bhejane is one of the leading lights of a rap style that has evolved specifically over gqom beats rather than kwaito tunes. He first came across gqom seven years ago, on unmarked mixtapes that were being put out by a DJ from Pretoria named Bin Laden. “It was popular, but it was never on radio,” he remembers.
Taking its name from the hollow sound a drum makes, gqom is a mostly Durban-based music movement that has evolved out of the stagnant kwaito scene and Pretoria’s Bacardi house rhythms. Imagine a sound that strips kwaito of its sheen and flat vocals and rewires it as unruly, offbeat dance techno.
To read the rest of this article click here.
We present a small selection of tracks from the Gqom scene to give you an idea of how it sounds. All tracks have been uploaded by the artist onto KasiMP3, if you're keen on downloading the tracks yourself the links are included in the individual Soundcloud track descriptions:
