Venus, Goddess, Chocolate and Rasta Queen are the sizzling, street-smart, breed of girl band, set to shoot some pride into the sistahood, writes Adam Levin
Half the Ghetto Luv crew still live with their folks. The other half live in a once- grand Art Deco building in Yeoville, in a flat without a door. Don’t need a door really because there’s nothing inside except a bed and a couple of homeys hanging on the balcony reading Drum and Next. Now this I know, because I lost an hour on that balcony, waiting for Goddess; Venus; Chocolate and Rasta Queen to show. “Try The One Drop,” the guy in the Ghetto Ruff office at Polygram says. “everyone knows them down there”. So I make my way down to the said, incorrigible, Rockey Street bistro.
Goddess and Venus are charging full- throttle up Rockey when I arrive, and they’re yelling my name. There’s some serious shit going down: Goddess is waiting on a pair of whack, black platforms and the damn shop is damn closed. If Goddess knew how difficult it would be for her to look any more multi-culti than she does right now – with her gleaming chiskop, long, plaid skirt, blue flip-flops and loud, powerful mouth – well, she’d fly those shoes. Goddess storms. Chocolate manages a weak smile. Rasta Queen flexes the tattooed thorns on her upper arm and shrugs, a kind of “we’re Ghetto Luv. Pleased to meet you” shrug.
For a while now, Ghetto Ruff’s main man, Lance Stehr, has been thinking about putting together an all-girl band. Thought it might be a nice little something for you from the stable that’s got POC leaping up and down on the world stage, and Skeem; O’da Meesta and D’Low climbing the home play-lists. So Chocolate sings Lance the sweetest lyrics in a taxi; Rasta Queen starts churning out the ragga rhymes and Goddess and Venus show us exactly how their hips work at the Two Nations bash.
A few months later, Rasta Queen is stabbing the gingham-checked One Drop tablecloth with a killer fingernail and telling it to me like it is: “We’re the happening girls right now. So we’re gonna be getting all those guys out there.”
Well, some of those guys. Leo Munne, Yfm’s music manager, says Ghetto Luv’s single Suddenly has been getting fair play on the station. But that was before this week’s launch of You Ain’t Gonna Get None, Ghetto Luv’s first album, complete with all four girlz butt-naked on the cover.
Though the album makes no radical musical departures, its release marks a turning point on the local dance scene: not only because it cuts an ambitious swathe through the subcultural landscape – from kwaito through R&B and ragga all the way to rave; but because these girlz explode with the kind of kick-ass attitude that saw their sistas up the United States hip-hop charts.
Consider a brief history of the bad girls of local pop. Mid-Eighties: Brenda Fassie proves that the demeanour of a poes-dronk (drunk) tsotsi sells as many records as good girls like Yvonne Chaka Chaka can. Mid-Nineties: Boom Shaka’s Lebo and Abashante’s Iyaya take raw, street sexuality to the stage.
But come 1998: there’s a new, badder, breed of girlz on the block – girlz who take their cues from stars like Manifa and Lil’ Kim (a Bronx-bred hussy, whose poster campaign featured a shot of her groin plastered with the words “Coming Soon”). Girlz who release kwaito grooves with titles like “Two Minute Brother” and call themsleves Ghetto Luv.
“We’re saying a couple of things in Two- Minute Brother,” Rasta Queen explains. “First up, we’re dissing those guys who wanna love you for two minutes, then love some other woman. But we’re also saying, hey, when it comes down to it, they can’t give us more than two minutes. They can’t satisfy us.” There are whoops of knowing, girl laughter. White boy reporter twiddles his pen and waits for it to settle.
Though we’ve had our fair share our bitches and divas round here, we haven’t had the public pleasure of such hard-core home- girls, girls who are less sex-objects than women who lust out loud. Girls who take African chauvinism by the balls with such delicious sass they’d have Camille Paglia in a frenzy. Girls who wear the New Feminism as effortlessly as a new nose- ring. “In African culture, men grow up thinking they’re superior,” Goddess grins, losing the sulk. “But if these guys are gonna call us bitches, then we’re gonna call them motherfuckas. It’s not like we don’t need men. But we aren’t gonna protect them from the truth anymore. Our eyes have opened!”
All four girls came to Gauteng with dreams in their pockets. They came from Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Umtata and Maputo – hence the sultry Portuguese whisperings over their rave track, Ultimate Sensation. All four girls are from the ghetto and they’re all living it – finishing their studies and trying to keep the star thing as a hobby. But there’s something more telling about the way the Ghetto Luv crew grew up – fatherless.
“We all had strong women as role models and no men around,” says Chocolate. “So we knew our mothers were never gonna run away from our problems, no matter how hard it got.”
To be sure, this is not an uncommon experience for black, South African women, but rarely has the anger, power and independence been so boldly articulated. But Ghetto Luv aren’t just any women – they’re the women of a new, increasingly in-your-face generation. “These messages of `don’t do this and that’ aren’t getting young people anywhere,” says Chocolate.
Musically, Ghetto Luv are pushing the limits – trying to score some white fans with a rave track, because, hey, Goddess went to a white school and has to “cater for her white friends”.
My bet is the crossover won’t happen – rave bunnies are just too many worlds away from this kind of street-smart realism for it to mean anything. Besides – I’ve been physically slowed down on enough black dance floors to know that beat is politics, and that releasing a CD where hard house chases down a slow jam in 1998 makes for rather premature revolution.
Rasta Queen shakes her head. “Those guys had better stop thinking they’re superior, `cos Rasta Queen, I’m gonna take care of them.”
Well you go, girl. And you slap on every tattoo and bindi and Adidas stripe you can get get your hands on, because 5 000 years of African male chauvinism isn’t going to be a walkover. But hey, who better to start kicking down some socio-political doors than a bunch of way-sexy, way-streety young ladies, who already kicked down their own one a long time ago?