![Pessimism: The New Counter Culture? [Part 2]: Optimism in The Age of Nyaope -Hassan Hussain](http://www.strange-fruit.co.za/cdn/shop/articles/bannerrr.-carcoal.png?v=1752150975&width=1100)
An Ethnographic Study of Fatalism in a era of Pseudo Intellectualism and Populism. In Melville.
I told my features writer to start writing about stuff that isn’t about himself and how much he hates everything, and I was very impressed when he pitched the idea to go cover a South African pop sensation from Cape Town performing in Johannesburg. I was so impressed I wanted to join him, I told him I would be his photographer and emotional support animal, but I actually just wanted to go see what a 20 something year old popstar from cpt looks like and whether her fans would think I’m an influential heterosexual fashion designer from a previously disadvantaged background.
“They should have never given you Sandton niggas money”.
Leo: You pulling through tomorrow? Are you going to stand me up the way you stranded (sic)me on Wednesday? I need that hoodie to blend in with the melvillens 🐒
Me: we still on babes, what time is the teenage jenkem?
Leo: starts at 3 sir 💅
Me: Is this a pride event?
Leo: We can make it a pride event 👀
Does he use these emojis to upset me? A monkey and a yellow bitch with nails? Still can't believe he tried to use emojis in an article and had the nerve to explain it by saying “I was being quirky”. What kind of Italian man says words like “quirky”? As much as I don’t understand how the mind of an Italian self-hating Jew works, Leo (annoyingly pronounced LEHH-YO) reminds me a lot of my younger self but without all that Hyde Park existential crisis baggage that he lugs around everywhere like its Lizzo’s colostomy bag.
Leo is a very serious young man, I’d probably be way more successful in life if I was disciplined like him but then I also wouldn’t have stories to tell about how I used to get black out drunk and pee the bed with my ex-girlfriend next to me, then vehemently deny its piss by making her smell the sheets and shouting at her.
“Babe, piss is yellow and stinks, it’s sweat! I was having a dream about racial prejudice babe.”
And which is why I live my life vicariously in the mind and body of an Italian Jew. This is not for my sake in hopes of raising him to be a strong black man.
Me: I'm still busy checking the line up, are you sure Mars Baby isn’t a gay? Not that it matters or anything.
Leo: his stuff is actually pretty good. Chill RnB Vibes.🌈
Leo: have you got any inside dirt/ opinions on locknville?
Me: Dunno if them being related to Charlie Chaplin counts…they once beat up a nigga at Engen garage in Cape Town
Sunday
Before heading to the event in Melville, at Smoking Kills Bar, I decide to invite my friend Mohale to join us. Mohale has two primary operational modes when it comes to social settings. He’s the quiet intellectual guy dressed in a black flight jacket, black" horn-rimmed glasses that enlarge his piercing gaze that screams “I don’t respect you”. His other mode is something I can only describe as “They should have never given you Sandton niggas money”.
For this occasion, either mode will work just fine. Mohale is 30 something, a lot younger than me but not that much younger…I’m old enough to be Leo’s father. Why do I hang out with youngsters? We talk about music in the car.
I try to explain to him what the event is about, but I barely know anything except that I'm expecting the MTV VMA awards afterparty in 2003.
“She has a song with Nasty C” I said.
“Ok”.
The subject changes to our record label business and but for the sake of my PTSD autism hernia, I change the subject by playing Ja- Rules first album “veni veti vicci”. How come the Jewish media moguls haven’t offered to buy me out yet?
15:45 – Opening Pessimism. Nyaope
We get to Smoking Kills, and we can hear acoustic guitar and singing from the outside. I know I'm old but I'm not old enough to listen to live acoustic guitar on a Sunday. The guy working at the door collecting fees is using a Capitec point of sale machine. A white man with a Capitec P.O.S. Chris Hani is milly rocking in his grave right now.
Melville is empty. But car guards still roam.
Nyaope is everywhere but there’s no car windows left to break.
When I was Leo’s age,
Melville was like Studio 54
for middle-class Bantus. Not that different from 70s–80s New York discotheques,
filled with lower-to-middle-class Black
and Puerto Rican homosexuals. Our version of Puerto Ricans,
coloured people
who arrived a decade later,
and were credited with inspiring the phrase:
“Coloured people ruined Melville.”
Which evolved into:
“Coloured people ruined Cape Town trance music festivals.”
Being Coloured is a thankless job.
I call it doing God’s work.
15:48
As I immediately walk inside, I see Leo standing at the back of the room with his back towards the bar, arms folded across his chest. He’s very tall, very bald and very much built like a PVC pipe on D-bol. Next to him is his friend Vincent, a very odd man with a very odd fascination of lying to people by saying“My father is dead, and he left us no money”.
I look to the front of the room and all I see is about 7 young kids listening to a coloured guy with a voice of a coloured angel playing a fucking acoustic guitar on a Sunday.
16:03 – R&B Honda Civic
Speaking of coloured people,Mars Baby can sing.
Coloured people LOVE R&B.
Ever seen a red Honda Civic VTEC
driving at 10km/h in Sea Point
blasting K-Ci & JoJo at full volume?
You already know it’s a coloured guy.
The event was empty.
So empty That’s when the singer’s eyes glanced in my direction,
I started tapping my feet
so, he’d think the Black Anthony Fantano was “vibing”.
Leo and Vincent stood at the back, arms folded —
the universal body language for “impress me.”
I scanned the room, slipping into ethnographer mode.
It felt surreal, haunted, barren.
A Capetonian in JHB is like an atheist in purgatory:
You discover God exists — and you’re relieved it’s not hell
but you’re not far from it either.
16:12
Mars Baby performed “I’m a Creep.”
I don't know if that's the actual song title.
He asked the audience to sing along.
I scanned the crowd to see who’d self-identify as a creep
so, I could judge them.
Blackmail would’ve been easier,
but open-source intelligence fell apart
when coloured people stopped going to Melville.
It was the fetishisation of curated sadness
and safe weirdness.
Maybe being a creep is resistance to capitalism.
Chair-sniffing in your crush’s absence.
Creeps still have something to live for.
K-Ci & JoJo would never relate to this high-waisted denim dystopia.
16:17 – VIP/P.O.C Janitor Closet
“Did I mention that Mars Baby is Coloured?"
After Mars Baby’s performance,
some coloured guy with a giant afro,
part of the Cape Town entourage,
rudely asked us to move,
despite having five meters of detour space
to get to the “VIP” area (a mop closet in daylight).
Under better conditions,
I would’ve said:
“Hey bobotie-face,
you’d look better in black face
and a sky-blue diamante sequence tuxedo”
But a dismal turnout
and the pain,
of my mere existence
and being in their presence.
Was already enough punishment.
16:22 – Hertz Death
“These songs sound familiar?”- I asked Mohale“She’s using downloaded backing tracks”
he said simply with a shruggish smirk.
Me and Mohale then started discussing audio compression hertz.
And I immediately considered suicide and changed the subject to something not even worth remembering.
16:25 – Ja-Rule Flashback
Back in the 90s,I couldn’t go to underground clubs.
It Didn’t mean I had to be a sad wet towel when Ja Rule came on. I swallowed my pride like it was a cealis pill as I put on my dad’s Florsheim, a small sacrifice considering the decades of wank bank material I would be reaping.
“TO EVERYBODY IN THE CLUB WHO BE LIVING IT UP”
Then Anica’s squeaky-but-warm voice broke through
arousing a memory of my younger self
being served orange slices
by someone’s hot Rhodesian mom
in a gaudy summer dress and visible thong,
during halftime at an under-13 soccer game.Astaghfirullah.
16:30 – Ethnographic Luminaries
Disappointment deferred.
In the absence of a cultural orgy
to confirm my subcultural superiority,
I pivoted to mythology.
The astute ethnographer never declares extinction.
He says the aboriginals are extinct aliens
then launches research into corpse insemination.
Yakub is astute.
Werner Herzog is not astute.
Werner is just scared of skin grafts.
Never had raw sex with a Khoisan.
Did I mention that Mars baby is coloured?
16:34 – Houston, We Have an Existential Problem
Whitney Houston once said:
“I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be.”
But the kids today have nothing
except terrible perceptions of what’s coming.
Real and imagined
. Whitney’s optimism wasn’t unfounded — just deranged.
She had faith in faith. That’s not a bad thing.
The kids don’t know who she is.
Why should they care?
A Google search of her name would only fortify their castle built on a foundation of blue high waisted denim jeans and towering walls fashioned from dirty white air force ones. The Pun is always intended. “Whitney Houston sounds familiar (pulls out phone) Not a fan of the music, but I respect her contribution to music. She seems kinda toxic hey”. - Leo Vanzini He hasn’t said it yet,
but we both know it’s coming.
But at least he’s not saying she’s a “stupid dead junkie bitch”.
He tends to be right most of the times
but being right all the time is why
all the greatest humans die from critical thinking.
16:38 – Authentically Fake
Anica Kiana isn’t a pessimist.Her downloaded backing tracks may sound like Mr Price change rooms
but just putting yourself out there is optimism.
Mars Baby is a fake pessimist.
Not the “right” way to live —
but it’s better than dying.
To his credit, he was kind enough
to greet the elder statesmen
standing stoically at the back —
paying silent tribute to coloured breakdancers
who used to steal phones in Melville.
16:42 – Autograph Jihad
The show finally ended, and Anica started giving out promotional stickers, I immediately faced Leo and sternly told him:
“You need to go over there and get an autograph from her”
“Why?”
“Just trust me, I know Pieter Hugo”.
I just wanted him to get her number so he can call her non-professionally after in search of vicarious love for his Sotho employer. As Leo waits for his autograph, I see him engaged in what appears to be a somewhat confrontational argument with a guy that looks like a Greek version of Squidward. I move closer and I heard a cacophony of muffled statements such as:
“Why are you taking pics of ME.?” said the crustacean
“What business it of yours?” Leo responded.
The Greek said something i couldn't make out, I stepped closer and heard Leo say:
“I wasn't taking pictures of you, i was taking pictures of the graffiti with the IDF terrorist. I come from a semitic background, and my grandmother was in the camps, so I don’t support Jews enacting a genocide they once survived”.
Leo has the back posture and machismo
of a Zulu man in 1838 facing an army salt dick Brits.
Anica eventually turned around to see the Italian PVC pipe towering over her petit frame, and to her surprise, the PVC could speak English!
“Hey Anica, can I please get your autograph on my sticker?”
“Thank you so much, come, give me a hug.” Anica said
“Ok” he said as he proceeded to give the world’s most awkward hug with his ass stuck out like a dodo with constipation, his arm around her like she just bathed in a tub of anthrax. That signature made the whole trip worth it for Anica. I’m going to assume this was her first signing an autograph, I imagine it must have felt like a 100-year record deal written in the yam juice and blood of Diddy and Michael Jackson.
16:46 – Cease & Desist
Would Anica believe that Diplo once owed me moneyand I reclaimed it with MS Paint memes?
Would she believe Pieter Hugo
sent me a cease-and-desist
for falsely listing him as a director of this publication?
16:50 – Plastic Tree
A boring life is like a plastic tree:
the seed of pessimism,
the fastest growing tree in the world.
It rots as soon as it blooms.
But you can still eat it.
Gut health. Weekend Enzyme retreats.
You’ll probably vomit.
You’ll shit your baggy jeans.
And if you’re lucky —
you’ll get a buzz from the fermented pulp of failure.
If you’re really lucky,
you’ll realise plastic fruit
isn’t meant to be eaten or propagated.
Leave that to the geriatric titans
of ontological interpretivism.
16:55 – Cold Truth
Followers ≠ turnout. Especially not in Joburg.
The city where cell phone theft shapes nightlife.
Where ageing culture veterans
skip tax paperwork to attend
your acoustic or backing track set.
No matter how good your art is
or which celebrity is suing you,
you may never get recognition.
Don’t plant the tree
unless you’re prepared
to turn public lynchings
into the golden standard of mass entertainment.
Coming Soon From Strange Fruit Publishing
Discontent Periodical,The debut Print Edition Is Coming Out Soon! This spring 2025."Rome wasn't built in a day,but Caligula sodomized a lot of people in a day"- Aristotle
