Music is not a fame thing. Music is a gift from the Gods, and if you don’t care, you will sooner than never know how they exactly feel about that: The disrespect." – Philip Tabane
Today South African music is radically split between being a manifesto for the programming of an increasingly capitalised, globalised, unequal reality-machine and the utopian dreams of disenfranchised communities. We ar
e caught between the extremes of consumerist impulse and economic and political control, and in this we must learn to thrive. Global business, government and development bureaucracies have long claimed a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the terrain. Setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible based on models of profit and control, these methodologies have largely served to canalize music, promote inequality, stifle artistic expression and entrepreneurship and generally prevent the development of free, innovative creative expression within our broader democratic society. SNC aspires to nurture the marginalised creative music communities within South Africa. Taking its cues from the Zimology Institute (now sadly defunct) to New York’s success story The Stone and Fela Kuti’s iconic shrine in Nigeria, SNC recognises what matters here is not how to confront or try to bring about an end to the hegemony of consumer entertainment culture. We believe that if we can dare to risk interrupting this seemingly stagnant drift of things by organising ourselves against the current, magic and music can manifest. SNC thus focuses on how “space is the place”: how collaboration can be used as a tool for the radicalisation of space; a means to create new pockets of communality, communication, empowerment, resistance, flow, dialogue.
“We have to realize that culture is not yet another form of ‘service delivery’. It is the way human beings imagine and engage their own futures. Without this dimension of futurity and imagination, we can hardly write a name we can call ours or articulate a voice we can recognize as our own…” Achille Mbembe
SNC has been running for over four years now. The Drawing Room in Observatory, Cape Town hosts us. For updates on shows and live events, please see our home page or visit us on Facebook @ Straight No Chaser Club.
