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Kenya: Rock And 'Roctoberfest'
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The East African Standard (Nairobi)
26 October 2007
Posted to the web 25 October 2007
Tony Mochama And Robert Gicheru
"Summer has come and gone, the innocent can never last, wake me up, when September ends!" -The rockers, Green Day.
DJ Edu, who left for the UK in the year 2000 after winning Vybestar Hotel's deejaying competition, was open-mouthed, jaw agape, on his DJ's loft at the Carnivore last Saturday at the Heineken-sponsored 'Rocktoberfest.'
"I have never seen anything like this in my life, outside of a rock concert," he confessed, literally rubbing his eyes in disbelief.
"Not even in the UK?" I prodded, amused.
"Not even in the UK," DJ Edu said emphatically.
DJ Edu on the wheels of steel, Fret Wire band spices the night as rockers club the night away
"Man, I didn't know Kenyans can rock like this," he said, looking at the mass of heaving, sweating, shouting, ecstatic twenty-somethings who were grooving, gyrating, head-banging on the dance floor, stamping their feet and playing imaginary guitars ('air-guitar,' as the art of 'playing' invisible guitars is called, now even has an international talent competition show in the USA, complete with cash and trophies).
When DJ Edu left Kenya for the UK in the year 2000, the few rockers on the scene still thought of rock as a 1995-1999 thing, the same way house music was a 1988-1991 phenomenon before it mysteriously and sadly - like a kidnapped toi - disappeared.
"The Kenyan rockers of 2007 are as up-to-date as their counterparts in the UK," DJ Edu, who has taken akina Wyre, Nonini and Nameless to play the British scene in the past, beams proudly.
But according to him, Kenyan rockers are one step ahead of their UK counterparts. "In Kenya," DJ Edu says, "These kid rockers can actually dance to pure rock the whole night through.
In the UK, clubs usually play a mix of music. But here !"
Edu seems glad that DJ Ben is now the main rock man at Carnivore. "Akina DJ Babs had a 1990s mentality ati you must play a mix of music, even when you have advertised a night as, say, a 'soul night' or a 'rock night.' That's not fair."
On radio, he says the best rock deejay is Capital FM's Deejay Zoom. A good thing too, that he is on The Fuse because Kerry, right now, without the electrifying Esther, gets a little too eclectic in her rock mix and sometimes gets lost into other genres.
In the cool night air of the Carnivore, on a stage where 'the bushes' used to be when rock was young, the Kenyan rock band Fret Wire are taking revellers to the wire with their songs like Down the Road, Crawling For Love, Angels and Is it Safe Outside?
Their Crawling will never come to within an inch of infinity of Linkin' Park's eerily bawling Crawling. Fret Wire's lead-singer Su may look like an angel, one frets, but Fret Wire is a little too safe for a rock group. Calabash may be a cover band (although Hot Rod is hotter) but they certainly know how to liven up an outdoors rock bash.
Capital FM 1997; Linda Holt, Phil Mathews . The likes of Fareed Khimani coming over from New York to fire up this crazy genre so that by the time DJ CK bought the station in 2004, and threatened to stop "this Karen house-wives' music," Pulsers, and the Pulse team rose up in arms to 'save the rock.'
When Elvis Presley stormed the scene
Folks imagine that rock began when Elvis Presley stormed into the scene in 1956, but the first two true rockers were blacks - Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
But in the segregated 1950s, many radio stations would not play their songs (just watch 'Dream-Gals' this weekend to catch the drift)
So that when white boy Elvis with his duck-a** hairdo and blue suede shoes rolled into the scene, the white World of Radio christened him the "first rock star" and handed over the airwaves to his guitar.
That is sort of like Marshall Mathers (Eminem) being declared the "first rap star," with men like 2-Pac and the Notorious BIG's roles totally ignored. Travesty, if not outright tragedy.
So the next time you hear a heavy rocker like Marilyn Manson screeching with passion like a man whose mansion is on fire, and raging against "gods who don't exist," don't just say white folks are nuts.
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Back to the sixties, the British Beatles ran with a new branch of rock called "pop rock" and mesmerized the planet.
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