Kritiek Aster — Homegrown
But the thrill we've never known was the one that you get when you see your picture on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Olivetti 45 — Oh, the joys of an open mic night, I sighed as we left that venue on Tuesday night.
I haven’t attended an open mic night since one of my good friends left the country. He is in New Zealand now but he used to raise the roof at such local venues with his smooth blues sounds. When he didn’t play solo, he performed with his band, Louis and the Mountain Yaks, that included this other smooth cartoonist I once knew while attending Monash South Africa. Have you ever seen them live?
This Astertjie is almost sad when she looks back at what a good open mic night once meant – a chance to showcase undiscovered talent. So when I saw that the first open mic night of 2014 is happening I decided to check it out and dragged a friend along.
Apparently, since moving away from the blues-y bliss it once provided, kattekore and inexperienced guitarists started making their way to the stage. I noticed someone playing a guitar that they haven’t tuned and it all went pear-shaped from there.
Eventually we gave up on the noise and took to a corner booth where specials from the bar and chats about 90s music saved the night. A television screen blaring images in the background reminded me of some of the odd artists I enjoyed as a child, later a teenager. Isn’t it always fascinating that every bar or pub has some television screen showing music videos that don’t match the songs played in the venue? We spoke about how rock was dead and rap rose to claim its fame, and how neither genre seems honoured truly by all the artists claiming it as their own these days. There are a few obvious exceptions, I said, but we aren’t wearing leather pants, meeting Almost Famous band-aids (overly passionate fans that are in denial about their dalliances) or writing for Rolling Stone.
But then, is there a lot of local music we can rant and rave over in the media right now? I aim to find those artists, I know they’re hiding here somewhere.
Ever since, I’ve been begging that guy overseas to come back to me, and he seems to be longing for solid homegrown music as I do.
