First and foremost, just to get somethings out of the way, this is
not a bitter article about how we missed Maftown Heights because we
didn’t. Even though for some strange reason Sheila Afari wouldn’t have
us, we pulled some strings like a puppet master, got poured up,
chilling stundee in the VIP shandees. We had a great time, bananas as
funk because we are in with the in-crowd. We might not be the AKAs and
K.Os of our city but we run Jozi, the streets know it and so does everyone who
keeps abreast of current affairs, industry trends and forecasts. They
don’t call us the new school Three Musketeers for nothing, go ask PRO,
go ask Muzart, go ask The Soil…man, go ask the ever so gorgeous
Melanie Ramjee. Sheila Afari is sleeping on us though, she is still
doing PR the stone age way, prioritizing traditional media over new
media, meaning she’ll over look you unless you are from the good old
City Press or Sunday World. Meaning she didn’t get the memo, then the cool
kids are of that obsolete nonsense, they are online, on Twitter and on
Insta. And by cool kids I don’t mean the wanna be Skhothanes from Tembisa
and Orange Farm who still listen to YFM, I am talking about well
travelled over-achievers like us, kids who work in advertising and who
read Book Of Swag. That’s the audience you want to attract Sheila,
that’s who. I don’t know how dumb and out of tune with pop culture do
you have to be to not get that. Anyway, with that said, here goes the
story:
So a couple of weeks back, we contacted the good people at Dreamteam
SA regarding media accreditation to Maftown Heights and they put us in
touch with the Sheila Afari Group (a mediocre PR company if you don’t
already know) because “they are handling all the media
requests….blah blah blah”, we hit them up via email and said…Yo,
listen, we’d like to cover the upcoming Maftown Heights so we need 3
all access media passes for a full coverage and a Live Twitter
reportage and they said, no biggie, we are still finalising our media
list and we will revert back to you. Latasha Pucoe and Julie Tshuma
said this to us to be specific. And we said “ok, well…uhm , can we
send you a few questions to ask some of the performers in exchange of
pre-concert publicity? ” and they said “Ya, sure thing, who would you
like to speak to?” and we told them Khuli Chana, AKA, Cassper Nyovest,
Magesh and Tumi from the V. A week went past and we didn’t hear
anything from them, so we took it upon ourselves to find out what the
hold up could be. The day before the show, they went “oh…sorry please
find Magesh’s answers”, which is not a problem because we like Magesh
and we figured we could always catch up with the other artists back
stage for some post concert publicity. And as fate would have it,
November 28th came and we jumped up and down with much excitement and
avidity because we love Hip Hop the same way Fred Mercury from Hype
Magazine does. Only, Latasha Pucoe and Julie Tshuma didn’t have passes
for us, they had apparently given all the passes to the media, meaning
their friends and cousins who don’t know shit about Hip Hop.
Eventually, our good friend Jani Roodt got a hold of Sheila Afari and
Sheila said we were not on the list. We felt like Kanye when Hov had a
show in Madison Square and Kanye was like “yeah, yeah, we gonna be
there” but not only did he not get a chance to spit it, Carlin told
him he could buy 2 tickets.
Like I said, this not a bitter article about how we missed Maftown
Heights because we didn’t, we have good friends in the game. The moral
of the story is “gate keepers” like Sheila Afari suck, they spoil the
fun for all of us, all of us in this case means online magazine,
events organizers and performers, people whose online numbers we could
help proliferate. If you ask us why Sheila snubbed us, we couldn’t tell
you. If you ask her, she could lie and say our numbers are not
impressive, but we are sitting pretty with over 48 000 unique views
per month and more than 180 000 revisits, Google Analytics don’t lie.
Or maybe she could lie and say we are shit journos and we don’t know
how to delineate pictures with words or that the aesthetics of our
literary pieces are not awe-inspiring, but that would be a lie, we
could jot down this articles in our sleep, go ask Diane Coetzee from
Rolling Stone Magazine. Even William Shakespeare would give it to us,
so would Tolstoy and Kafka and Hunter S Thompson and Charles Bukowski.
I know some people will frown upon this article and might feel let
down the same way HHP did when Cassper Nyovest dropped Beef, but what this
old farts don’t understand is that in true contemporary urban youth
culture, young people will call you out if you are a phony and expose
you for your lack of insight. If you do us wrong, we won’t roll over
and play dead. We are ambitious, aggressive and confrontational, Tony
told us the world is ours and he was right. Now in closing, Sheila,
it’s fine if you don’t feel Book Of Swag, pay us no mind not because you are
nothing, but because you need to up your ante. End of story.