– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – The following text was inadvertantly ommitted from last week’s edition of the Mail & Guardian – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Dror Eyal on rap and rock
I’m standing by the sink. The radio blares a mixture of white noise and random beats. I draw blood. Red. A blossoming of colour in an ordinary Johannesburg day. For a while I’m just a pair of mesmerised eyes, lost in the moment. But the spell is broken, and the cut wrapped in a spiderman plaster. The show’s over. The radio DJ announces Lifetime Partner by South African rawkers Plum.
Plum are Kevin Leicher, warren Leicher and Troy Dougan — or The Band Formerly Known as Instant Karma. Between them they create a concoction that has led many to call them such cliches as the “next big thing” or South Africa’s Beastie Boys. Funky and dense, they might never be as big as the Springbok Nude Girls, but they are injecting a shot of fresh blood into the atrophied rock scene. The scene isn’t quite ready for their slabs of densely layered sounds and percussive vocals, but it’s dancing anyway — rock’n’roll for the new millennium.
I think it was Jim Dickinson who claimed that the source of rock’n’roll was “a bunch of rednecks playing nigger music”. By “nigger music” he meant the blues, the music those “rednecks” identified with and tried to mimic. Rock’n’roll was born out of this torrid marriage of white boys playing black music. So it’s fitting that it’s almost 20 years after punk laughed at rock’n’roll’s corpse, and white boys have yet again resurrected the genre by going back to nigger music.
In a rock club far from its Memphis origins, after a million Elvis impersonators got it wrong and hundreds of Mick Jagger wannabes tried every trick in the book to get a girl reaction, Plum are taking that music a step further.
It’s a step ahead that they’ve taken with their eyes set on their roots — roots that extend to both rock and rap. The result is a funk engine hot-wired from all sorts of scrap pieces: Beastie Boys, Primus, Red Hot Chilli Peppers — white boy rockers who long ago learned the art of combining thrashing guitars, live drummers and rap vocals.
But their music isn’t just a rip-off of black music. To see rap as strictly black is to misunderstand the last 15 years of rock history. It’s a decade and a half of white boys experimenting with combining rap vocals and rock guitars. Run DMC and Aerosmith, Anthrax and Public Enemy, KRS-1 and REM transformed the corporate rock sound to encompass rap.
Plum don’t just rap, hip-hop or MC either. While some bands take American rap, dump some lyrics about South Africa on top and expect to be taken seriously, Plum have taken that particular percussive sound, stripped it and rebuilt it into something uniquely Plum. It’s guitars, drums, bass, skatting and wind instruments thrown into a random gene-splicer and spat out live as a three-piece band.
So what do you think of those South African bands whose music rips off American bands? You know, the ones that leave you scratching your head trying to remember if that riff came from Nirvana or Pearl Jam.
“At the end of the day you have to sleep with yourself. We believe in what we do. Its our music. We have this song called Karma.” Mmm, the concept, the woman or the band? Silence all around. What? Did I ask the wrong question? Is Karma Ann, lead vocalist of Henry Ate, the band all three played in, a forbidden topic? “We would never write a song about her.” They laugh, the tension broken. Karma, it turns out is a song about “gaining weight” of the spiritual kind. Riff pirates, you have been warned. They refuse to talk about Karma Ann and their time in Henry Ate.
I’m standing by the bar. Plum are on stage, going through what could possibly be a polka version of Paz man. A sudden explosion of words and sounds. I gesture towards a beer. Suddenly Warren shouts “Stop!” Silence. They start again. Somewhere to my left someone says, “Cool break in the song.”
“Yeah, I was one beat in front,” laughs Warren. “I just couldn’t get it. So we stopped and started again.” “We do a lot of improvising on stage,” adds Troy.
It is this manic live feel that has drawn Plum its fanatical support around the Cape Town and Johannesburg circuits. You never know whether they’re going to pull out a flute or a violin. Their sound mutates, freaks, dyes its hair or just radically changes from moment to moment.
So what’s rocking your van currently?
“POC, Busta Rhymes … Jungle, LTJ Bukem … Yeah. Primus, Beastie Boys …”
And locally?
” … Seed, POC, Nine and The Original Evergreen. We still dream of opening for The Red Hot Chilli Peppers.”
I’m standing by the edge of the stage, trying desperately to focus the camera. The tempo shifts, blood flows, heart beats in my ears. A sudden explosion of words and sounds. For a while I’m just a pair of mesmerised eyes, lost in the moment. But the spell is broken and I haven’t taken any photographs. They pack away their guitars. The show’s over.
White boys playing black music? Yeah, in the same way Groinchurn or Gutted Remains or any of the local death metal bands owe their heritage to bluesmen like Blind Boy Jackson and Muddy Waters. So what?
— Plum play live at 206 in Orange Grove, Johannesburg, on Tuesday June 3 at 9.30pm in Pretoria on May 31
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