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Back then, most DJs could spin for only a few hours; they were limited by the number of
vinyls they could buy. Since parties went all night, you might need five or six DJs to keep the
dancing going. But I had a massive hard drive stuffed with MP3s, which is why Bongani was
excited when he saw me mixing—he saw a way to corner the market.
“How much music do you have?” he asked.
“Winamp says I can play for a week.”
“We’ll make a fortune.”
Our first gig was a New Year’s Eve party the summer we graduated from Sandringham.
Bongani and I took my tower, my giant monitor, and all the cables and the keyboard and the
mouse. We loaded everything up in a minibus and brought it over to Alex. We took over the
street in front of his house, ran the electricity out of his place, set up the computer, set up
speakers, and borrowed a tent, and people came. It was explosive. By midnight the whole
street was packed from one end to the other. Ours was the biggest New Year’s Eve party in
Alexandra that year, and to have the biggest party in Alexandra is no joke. All night, from far
and wide, people kept coming. The word spread: “There’s a light-skinned guy who plays music
on a computer. You’ve never seen anything like it.” I DJ’d by myself until dawn. By then me
and my friends were so drunk and exhausted that we passed out on the lawn outside
Bongani’s house. The party was so big it made our reputation in the hood, instantly. Pretty
soon we were getting booked all over.
Which was a good thing.
When Bongani and I graduated from high school, we couldn’t get jobs. There were no
jobs for us to get. The only ways I had to make money were pirating CDs and DJ’ing parties,
and now that I’d left Sandringham, the minibus drivers and corner kids in Alexandra were the
single biggest market for my CDs. It was also where I was playing the most gigs, so to keep
earning I naturally gravitated that way. Most of the white kids I knew were taking a gap year.
“I’m going to take a gap year and go to Europe.” That’s what the white kids were saying. So I
said, “I, too, am going to take a gap year. I am going to take a year and go to the township and
hang out on the corner.” And that’s what I did.
There was a low brick wall running down the middle of the road in front of Bongani’s
house in Alex, and every day Bongani and I and our crew would go sit on the wall. I’d bring
my CDs. We’d play music and practice dance moves. We hustled CDs all day and DJ’d parties
at night. We started getting booked for gigs in other townships, other hoods.
Thanks to my computer and modem I was getting exclusive tracks few people had access
to, but that created a problem for me. Sometimes I’d play the new music at parties and people
would stand around going, “What is this? How do you dance to it?” For example, if a DJ plays
a song like “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)”—yes, it’s a catchy song, but what is a whip? What is
a nae nae? For that song to be popular you have to know how to do the whip and the nae nae;
new music works at parties only if people know how to dance to it. Bongani decided we
needed a dance crew to show people the steps to the songs we were playing. Because we spent
our days doing nothing but listening to CDs and coming up with dance moves, our crew from
the corner already knew all the songs, so they became our dancers. And hands down the best,
most beautiful, most graceful dancer in the crew was Bongani’s neighbor, Hitler.
Hitler was a great friend of mine, and good Lord could that guy dance. He was