Ballroom collectives, underground parties and a new generation of artists kept South Africa's hardest-hitting sound alive when the mainstream moved on to amapiano.
Tšeliso MonahengTšelisoMonahengJohannesburg-Based Southern Africa Correspondent
Artist and deejay LIKKYLIKS agrees that queer communities became the lifeline for gqom, and has the receipts.courtesy of LIKKYLIKS
It's 4 am on a Sunday, and instead of being in bed, everyone at Club AM in Johannesburg is caught in a daze, marveling at the majestic essence that is Barbie Szn, who is standing on the same table as the deejay decks, ripping it on the mic. Behind her are fellow dolls, who cheer her on, back up the verses, mouth every lyric with intention and clarity. "Can I see u" with Uncle Waffles gets three replays, and each comes adorned with layers of internal slang, vibes that bring excitement to the party, a feeling that it shouldn't end. "Slim waist, thick ass/ mangiyifuna, trust ngizoyithola/ .../ I need an application for this pressure I'm applying," she raps.
At this moment in time, the sound of Johannesburg has been temporarily rerouted; it's underground, it's dark and driving, it shifts tectonic plates with its ambit of corrugated-iron sounds collectively known as sgubhu. No sooner has she ascended the podium than she leaves it, disappearing between bodies and reappearing to collect her props after freshening up. The event, Umgqibelo, is one of many that have sprung up post-COVID, in line with a gqom resurgence that has lent a lifeline to the abrasive, bare-bones, in-your-face sound that exploded in the mainstream with songs like Babes Wodumo's "Wololo" a decade ago.
Gqom was born in Durban's townships, from Umlazi to Inanda to KwaMashu, Clermont and beyond, in the early 2010s, made by teenagers on cracked FL Studio software in bedrooms and back rooms, then distributed through the most efficient taxi network. The sound was stripped to its skeleton — no melody to speak of, no chords, just drums, bass, and a vocal fragment looped until it became muscle memory.
The wider world caught on in stages: through compilations pressed abroad, which introduced the sound to European dancefloors; through DJ Lag, who took it on tour and straight to Beyoncé's door; and through film soundtracks, where the music turned up in a chase scene in the first Black Panther. "Wololo" made it a national event in 2016, and Distruction Boyz pushed it to the top of the charts the following year. For a very brief and precious moment there, the rawest sound in South Africa was also its biggest, one whose very sonic structure reflected the lived realities of many downtrodden people.
With VNJ Ball, an inclusive ballroom movement and recurring event series he founded, Lelowhatsgood wanted to carve out a space that was safe for queers, femmes, and they/them to essentially live inside the beat.by Assante Chiweshe
What happened in the interim was that amapiano became the next big thing, leading a fickle audience to move over and ask that gqom wrap it up. However, the music kept thriving in coastal places like Durban, where it's basically a staple diet to the ear, alongside maskandi. Deejay and producer Lelowhatsgood grew up in the city, and experienced the synthesis of one of the rawest sounds to emerge from South Africa in real time: in taxis, at raves, via Bluetooth exchanges. He witnessed the peak, and was present to catch the music as it waned, at least in the popular imagination. With VNJ Ball, an inclusive ballroom movement and recurring event series he founded, the artist wanted to carve out a space that was safe for queers, femmes, and they/them to essentially live inside the beat.
"It was always queer people at the forefront, trying to keep this thing happening," he tells OkayAfrica.
"And obviously that doesn't take away from anyone else who's been trying to do their part as well. But for the most part, it's always the voices that are never mentioned, or sidelined, that are carrying the torch and pushing it forward."
"I look at the peers around me, such as LIKKYLIKS, Barbie Szn, Thobeka, Babes Wodumo, SunOrnza, and even people like DJ Abu, who is in Cape Town. Having Black women at the forefront of gqom, pushing and defying the odds in such a male-dominated field, is really great to see. I think it's spaces like VNJ that give people those opportunities as well, to keep pushing those boundaries."
LIKKYLIKS is an artist and deejay also working to stamp her place in the scene. She always knew that gqom would make a resurgence in the mainstream.
"But I wanted to take it upon myself to be one of the people that keep it alive," she says. This is even before she was a renowned deejay. "I made sure that I would go support the headliners; I would support the people playing in Joburg. This is where the part of femmes and queers making sure that gqom doesn't die comes in. When we would go to these spaces, it would be mostly us supporting these artists. It would be a portion of us supporting," she says. This is before Gqom Therapy and other gqom-centered events sprang up. "You would hear this one gqom set [at an event], and we would live for the crumbs. We were getting the bare minimum, but we'd be so happy, because we live for this."
"Then within parties like VNJ Ball/Vogue Nights who started platforming gqom beyond just being a consumer. The queer parties would book people from KwaZulu-Natal to come over. And within the crowd, without failure, you would see a lot of queers, you would see a lot of femmes. We would vogue to gqom and do ballroom to it because of how synonymous it felt to us as queer bodies," she says.
Artist Mx Blouse would have been one of those queer bodies at the party, and recalls those early events, some of which were held in secret, especially under strict lockdown curfew. "[Club AM] means a lot to me. They opened around 2019, I think, and it kind of defined groove for me in Joburg, just to come listen to electronic music of all kinds," they say.
"This was the one place where I could go and just listen to electronic music I haven't heard before, [including] gqom. It was just a fun experience, and I found that a lot of people that came here were about the music, enjoying the music. That's how you form communities. I've met people I've worked with on my music, and it comes from that mutual appreciation for music that brought us to this place. And it also defined my groove during lockdown, partying illegally. It was just nice to be outside of home; we would party until the sun came up."
Desire Marea continues to break boundaries with his take on gqom.by Tseliso Monaheng
From the outset, gqom has embraced a refusal to capitulate to the system: the refusal to mix songs, the refusal to stop talking about substances to make them palatable to mainstream audiences, and, in some cases, the refusal to answer questions from anyone. Sonically, the refusal has become the embodiment of left-of-center thought processes: basslines that wrap around complex-yet-simple percussion, breakdowns and build-ups that feel like release, vocal chops or entire phrases, repeated like layers that blend seamlessly into one another.
Lelowhatsgood's newly released EP, Rebirth Is Necessary, is an amalgamation of the different strains that the music has collected, starting in the early 2010s with songs like DJ Cndo's "Wamnandi Uqo" and Madanon's "Thana Hosh."
"I was quite young, so I have quite a good understanding and knowledge of what the music is. Even being in high school and going to certain parties, seeing the rawness of the sound and what it did to me and other people as well. I think it's something that always stuck with me, even till now. And I was like, man, it's just a full circle moment. It all just makes sense that I'm in this position now, also making good music, after hearing it years ago," he says.
"If you go into producing, the same structure of gqom will always be there, which is the bass, the snares, and the percussion, everything moving in one direction. But how gqom is now versus how it was then, I think we have a lot more tools now to use to our advantage, to manipulate certain sounds. And I guess with our much more globalized worldview, digital media, social media also has a way of influencing the things that we listen to."
Desire Marea's foray into the sound follows a similar trajectory: first as appreciator, in cramped taxis with bass bins the size of craters, booming blizzards into the ears of impressionable youth; then as innovator, with FAKA alongside Fela Gucci, combining elements of gqom, gospel and house to explore Black queer identity and culture; then as solo artist with 2020's groundbreaking Desire, where he continued to explore the erotic in nuanced linguistic cadences that are journal entries into future knowledge systems in and of themselves. What followed the downright dominatrix decadence of "Tavern Kween" was a body of work that embraced live elements. On the Romance of Being was the work he was guided to make following his initiation as a sangoma. No sooner had he finished that album than he started working on the follow-up, The Baddies of Isandlwana.
"I'm very much interested in that tension between electronic sounds, sounds that have a native electronic background, and then playing them using instruments, or people. I'm interested in that tension. So I think those songs and my future works are just exploring that tension a bit further," he says.
Likky Liks has organized an event called Girls In Gqom for August, celebrating the presence of femmes and queer bodies in the music.
"I made it a mission because I was here to make sure that it's platformed. So I have to make sure, not even just for my own erasure, but in terms of the girls contributing to gqom, and the girls also understanding gqom in the regard that the guys do. Because it got to the point where the men are controlling what's happening in gqom," she says.
Understanding that control is a survival skill, she suggests. "As a woman, as a queer body, you kind of have to understand the politics of what men do, to play the game and to flip it. So I made it a priority to understand what that looks like and what it entails. But also at the same time, we're not guys; we have a sense of yearning."
"We have a sense of enjoyment, and what flow state looks like for us is not what it looks like for boys. We do want to occupy these spaces that they curate. We do want to share space with them. But also, at the same time, we do want to have our own space where we get to curate what gqom looks like for us. And what gqom looks like for us is not what gqom looks like for the boys."
