It’s not every day that you get to tell musicians a supermodel loves their music. But I had the honour on Monday night, telling Durban musos RudeBoyz that British model Jourdan Dunn loves their song Yebo.
“Wait. What?” asks Masive Q, one half of the two-man gqom group. “How do you know this? Which one is Jourdan?”
So I explain she’s one of the new generation of supermodels and heard the song while in the country for Afropunk Joburg in December. “Oh man, she must have been there for our set,” he says, almost in disbelief. “Wait. Wazi kanjani? (How do you know this?)” he asks. I saw it on her Instagram story, I respond.
“Wow. That’s so dope.”
Wow is also what I say, after they reveal that their set was so well loved by the organisers of Afropunk Joburg that they have been added to the line-up for Afropunk New York this August.
“We had such a short time during our performance in Joburg, but we managed to get the crowd going,” says Andile T, the other half of the group.
We are at the Durban Hilton Hotel’s The Big Easy by Ernie Els, and the guys have just arrived after a whirlwind weekend of performances in Cape Town. Masive Q orders a cream soda, while Andile chooses not to have anything. They don’t drink alcohol.
They are clearly exhausted, but talking about the group's beginnings rouses them.
I first came across RudeBoyz on Spoek Mathambo’s 2014 music documentary, Future Sounds of Mzansi, which chronicled the rise of electronic music in South Africa.
I watched as these guys spoke about this new sound coming from the Durban townships - like kwaito meets house, but dirtier. Almost like forbidden fruit. It made you want to stand up and dance. That sound was gqom, something RudeBoyz have been doing since 2011.
Regarded as gqom originators, RudeBoyz are not afraid to say they should be afforded the respect that comes with being pioneers of a music genre.
“I feel like people know about RudeBoyz, but they don’t know us,” Masive says. “We have been there from the beginning and it’s now time to come out of the shadows so people know who we really are.”
And just who are these guys? Musically, they have been the producing geniuses behind hits like OKMalumKoolKat’s Gqi, Midnight Starring by DJ Maphorisa with DJ Tira, Busiswa and Moonchild Sanelly; and Sesi On by Dbn Nyts featuring Busiswa. They have their own hit songs like Mercedes Song (featuring TD Snax), the hypnotic Get Down, Yebo and Gqom Originators.
At their concert at the University of the Western Cape this past weekend, they initially found a crowd of about 50 people.
“We asked where the people were, I mean, these were students. It turns out they were waiting for us to start playing. That’s the effect gqom has on young people who have always been our core audience because they get the music.”
They ended up playing to a crowd of over 2000 students. They will hit Venda, Bloemfontein and the Eastern Cape next.
The distinction between RudeBoyz and the other gqom musicians?
“Our sound is more electronic, because we are not too focused on the South African music scene. You could say our music appeals to a white audience too. It’s more of an international sound. And no, it’s not EDM. It’s more dark (use of synthesisers). It’s still gqom,” Andile says.
“We fuse different genres with gqom,” Masive adds. “From hip hop to pop. We understand that gqom is a beat. It’s just beats. Drums and beats. But when you start adding different sounds to the beats and drums, you get our sounds.”
Gqom is riding the wave right now and, while that means more competition, the guys are choosing to go at their own pace and focus on what makes them different.
Masive, 25, started in 2009, working on broken beats for the underground scene in Durban.
“What happened was, there was a sound called broken beats and what we did was make it darker. We took broken beats and added dark elements (strings, synths, drums) We would experiment, playing around with the sound. Almost metal, hard rock. And then that attracted other producers to our sound. This was back in 2011/12.”
Andile, 22, was 15 and in Grade 9 when he started. “We wanted to be in the first wave and we had to carve our niche and do our own thing. We worked hard to improve at all times - a bunch of experimenting and it was always a different sound. But we had a fear of sharing our music with people,” he says.
A bar on Albany Grove in the Durban CBD, 58, became their chosen temple, where students and pupils hungry for the gospel of gqom would come to worship.
“The place was always packed with students and other DJs and everyone used to come listen to the latest track. Every time we played, people would go crazy. We would have to repeat songs and people just kept on wanting to know who did these songs? Other DJs started resenting us because the crowd just kept wanting more from us.”
That was before the era of using social media to market music. “We used to share our music with people on USBs, share it on phones. The songs would be played on taxis and buses. Schoolkids would dance to our music before and after school. Our music was widely shared by everyone.”
Their songs were so popular that they crashed Kasi MP3, a website where people could download the latest underground music.
“We made music every day and there was always something new we were releasing. We had more than 100000 downloads in three or four days.”
Personally? They are boys from Mount Moriah in the INK precinct in Durban. “We are neighbours and we grew up together and know everything about each other,” Masive says.
And like most young musicians, they had to convince their parents that they were serious about "this music thing" and prove that they could live off it.
Most important for them right now, though, is to be credited with their contribution to the music. “Many people from outside don’t really know who we are and we plan to change that this year,” Andile says.
On the rivalries in the Durban music scene, the guys are loath to comment, but Andile says that the artists in the city should become a community instead of seeing each other as competition. “In Joburg, you have people working together because they understand that united they will go further. We don’t have that here.”
And no, they don’t have beef with the other gqom group, Distruction Boyz. “We featured in their album with Midnight,” Masive says.
Midnight and Midnight Starring share the same beat.
While Afropunk New York is an exciting destination for them, they have toured the US, performing in New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC with the Red Bull Music Academy. The next city on their horizon is Lagos, Nigeria, which is where they plan to go after releasing their album, Gqom Evolution, later this year.
They are releasing their single in a few weeks, and even after begging them to reveal who is featured on the already recorded track, it’s the one thing they refuse to tell me.
“It’s important to us to make further inroads into the continent,” Andile says. “The continent’s support is key and while we do have a fan base in Europe and the US, we need to conquer Africa.”
What’s next after gqom? I ask. They laugh. “People think gqom has gone mainstream. It hasn’t. It’s still underground,” Masive schools me. “Until Rihanna has a gqom-influenced song, or any other pop star, only then will gqom be mainstream.
"This is just the beginning. The gqom evolution hasn’t even begun.”