HMGovt said:
The latest Vice magazine has feature on grime in Somalia. The kids love Dizzee, but the owner of the local shop likes So Solid, so they throw stones at his shop. Apparently one of Dizzee's entourage is Somalian, that's how the goods got out there.
The feature:
http://www.viceland.com/issues_uk/v3n4/htdocs/mogadishu.php
The third world's taste in music sucks dick. They still love Michael Jackson. In fact, the most far-out they'll go is Janet Jackson. Maybe they're too focused on not starving or getting hacked up by a rival ethnic sect's machete to pay attention to the Top 40, but helllloooo? Can we not at least check out something from after, say, 1990?
What's that you said? "The indigenous sounds of other cultures more than makes up for their lack of knowledge of what's hot or not in the Western world"? Bullshit. Sure, you might tune into NPR now and then and hear a saucy mix of a two-stringed guitar playing West African rhythms over a polyrhythmic ancient drum machine programmed by some poor bastard in a shack that only has electricity two hours a day and think: "Righteous." But the guys who are actually making music are in the minority. For every Youssou N'Dour, there are 2.7 billion starving, illiterate, backward bros who will tell you, with a straight face, that Robbie Williams is the greatest singer since music was invented.
Typically, the poorer the country, the worse the music. That's why I was excited (you know, in a morbid way) to travel to the world's biggest shithole recently. Somalia.
No one in his or her right mind would be heading to Somalia. It is basically a locked fucking door. I was getting paid to check out never-before surfed waves off the horn, so I had to go. (I'm a professional surfer.)
The most extensive coverage Somalia has gotten since 1993, when some Army Rangers were ripped limb from limb by a rioting horde on the streets of Mogadishu, was the movie Black Hawk Down, which was about soldiers getting ripped limb from limb… you get it. That's Somalia's claim to fame—soldiers getting eviscerated by bare hands. And the movie wasn't even shot there. They made it across the continent, in the safe marijuana haze of Morocco.
Somalis spends their time killing each other, making goat meat spaghetti, and dying. This is not racist hyperbole. Look it up. The average life expectancy there is 47. Cavemen lived longer than that. And since it has no government, there's no one to issue visas or keep the law. Warlords rule whatever chunk of desert they can carve out. Somalia is an AIDS-infested ultraviolent moronic hell. Is it any wonder that I assumed they would all be listening to Michael Jackson?
Just to insure a pleasant trip, my iPod broke in half before our plane landed. So I was totally music-free later that day, out with my entourage of surfers and Somali escorts (a.k.a. one-eyed civil-war veterans), when my hair suddenly blew back off my face as I witnessed the most amazing thing I have ever seen to this day.
A group of kids were playing soccer in a vacant lot with a stereo blasting fucking Dizzee Rascal. Now, you probably don't appreciate this as much as you should. Dizzee Rascal's Boy in da Corner was being played at full volume in a place that is so separate from the world and its customs of civilized behavior that it may as well be Mars.
One of Somalia's So Solid Crew contingent.
We approached the ragtag group of kids. Between Somali, Arabic, and English, we had basic communication covered. I asked them if they liked the music. One of them answered, and I quote, "Disssseee, 'es graft oy." Another kid started giving the thumbs-up and saying, "Dissseee veddy nice, Dissseee veddy good." I asked where they got their tape. The tallest kid pointed at another one (who had his tongue sticking out) and said, "Bari, Bari." I asked, "Bari?" (which I later found out was just a direction), and he told me his cousin or uncle or something was in Dizzee's crew.
My perceptive Western brain was ready to call bullshit on these guys, but there was some compelling evidence in front of me. First, "Fix Up, Look Sharp" was blaring across the dirt field. Second, "Bari" had scrawled "Rol [sic] Deep Krew [sic]" on top of the stereo. Third, why the fuck would they be lying? They live in Somalia.
I did some research that night and found out that another popular activity in Somalia, besides getting diseases and killing people, is getting out of Somalia immediately. Somali refugees are streaming into ghettos from Ottawa to Stockholm as fast as they can. A particular hotbed of Somali immigrants exists in the UK, which has created a superhighway of grime and garage music speeding out from London's underground to Galkayo.
I found the "Rol Deep Krew" again the next day. They told me that "Dissssee" pretty much rules their neighborhood. Some kids listen to Wiley, but they're nerds. What these kids really hate, though, is that pansy-ass garage shit perpetrated by So Solid Crew. They said there was a guy across town that ran a shop and loved So Solid. They weren't into that guy, his shop, or his bottled water, so every once in a while they go chuck rocks at his windows or try to kill one of his dogs. Yes, you are hearing this right. The old-school UK Garage vs. the new-school UK Grime beef is not reserved for the streets of East London. It is also going strong in fucking Somalia!
Somalis don't like American rap much, either. Some of it they were into, like early NWA and Snoop, but they were most decidedly NOT down with 50 or Puffy. They talked about how the American rappers were "niggers," poor and stupid. "We aren't niggers," they told me, so they didn't want to listen to that shit.
"Bari" seemed like he had a sweet hook-up in London. He ran home and brought back a stack of crazy tapes that comprised a huge library of unreleased material from "Disssseee" recording sessions. These were tracks that the biggest Grime aficionado in New York would sweat. Tracks that most likely didn't make it to record because the samples couldn't be cleared. The quality was super bad, but as soon as they cranked it up, the Rol Deep Krew was jumping and dancing like it was being piped down straight from the pearly Bose in the sky. We hung with the Grime kids for a while as they strutted up and down the dirty streets of the worst town in the world, rocking the most progressive and relevant music being made in Western culture today.
Then we decided to split off and check out their rival, the So Solid Crew guy across town. The kids gave us good-enough directions and were right about his shop being shit. His English was also shit but he did love his So Solid. He sat there wearing a pink satin ladies' jacket, and broke it down.
"How long have you liked So Solid Crew?" I asked (in Somali and Arabic, with So Solid Crew in English).
"Long time."
"Where did you get this music?"
"Braddah."
"What about the kids across town who like Dizzee Rascal?"
"Fuck."
There you have it. Here we were in the middle of Hades, and the beef between Dizzee and Megaman is alive and well. We didn't want to start an all-out war, so we grabbed his bottled water, which was indeed shit, and respectfully walked out the room thinking, "What the fack is going on?"
HERP J.T. SMITH
) in Mogadishu ... how about SA for example?
