Spring is here y'all ... so that means the tone of music also changes ... heard this on the radio this morning

Remember - Celebrate Life™ Picnic, 4 September, Emmarentia Dam Botanical Garden.

"People are fragile things, you should know by now, careful what you put them through. People are fragile things, you should know by now, you'll speak when you're spoken to."

I'm at work very very early today because there are just not enough hours in a day - so I'm creating my own. Anyway, I woke up with this song in my head because quite frankly this is gonna be a mad day for me.

So letha madness begin and letha brainz blo if you grin...

I don't know how I found this but I'm glad that I did. Cee-Lo Green is dropping a solo album called The Lady Killer. Now I love me some Cee-Lo, the man has the most inimitable voices I've heard in a while (those are rare as you all know). I love his style and when I heard this track I remember wishing time to fast forward to me having access to this album.

So enjoy it...

This clip is cool for the lyrics.

And this is the official video.

So im looking on gettin' a new bed and I would love to have one of these - I honestly dont see the reason of getting a normal bed.

We gonna check this out probably before hittin' Dwele concert at Bassline. Hoooooold on what happened to Yellow Line? [its another magazine by Kudzanai.

This is a dope for Spring ... i think the shades and the cigaratte gives her the bad girl look. Im a sucker for wife beaters.

PS. When im plaaning on doing a shoot, i go through Negrita Bonita site, it has alot alot of reference in terms posture, grading, colour etc for a shoots.

Studio 83 has already shed light on this new artist on the scene, Spoek Mathambo. His The Fader cover has set a buzz on Twitter and have people interesting in the persona. From living in Malmö to to his aspirations to Mshini Wam's release on 31 August, Spoek Mathambo gives us a summary of where he's been and where he's going.

Where does the name Spoek Mathambo come from?

I used to watch the TV show Emzini Wezinsizwa. It's pretty much my favourite sitcom ever. I just love the premis and characters. My favourites probably being the security guard and Mofokeng. Anyways, in one episode about AIDS, Chedwane said [Spoek Mathambo]. I found the way he said it so funny I started rapping under that name. It means Ghost of Bones...directly.

I've been rapping since I was around 10 years old. I've gone through a ton of pretty generic and weird rap names. Spoek Mathambo was me just picking a ridiculous one and getting it over with. I sometimes think to work under my real name Nthato Mokgata, as I'm not sure how people understand the name and it irritates me when people think i mean Spoke...like Speech. Urgh.

Does the international audience/listener understand the significance of "Mshini Wam'"?

Obviously not. I'm not sure I care about that beyond the short blurb in my PR stuff. I'm not sure I understand the significance of Mshini Wam'. It is simply a reference which makes sense to me as a South African-born in the state of emergency growing up in this crazy young democracy.

Where in South Africa are you from?

I am from Johannesburg. Born and raised partly in SOWETO, then my family moved to Sandton...I now live in Malmö with my lovely wife...who I make music with. She raps under the name Gnucci Banana.

Describe your music and its target listener?

Best way to describe it is to say that it's a new sound coming from South Africa; that's what we're try to do. Music that takes heavily from South African music and culture, but sounds like nothing ever before. I'm really just learning how to make music and I'm glad you can all watch the growth.

There is no target listener. I want everyone to listen and get into it. That's the dream. I love mass music, pop music. I love that really dark house and Kwaito [have been] the pop music of South Africa since the early 90s. I want to continue this lineage.

So now that the album is released, what do you have planned for the next year?

Whoa! A lot of plans I will tour with my band to promote the album. The plan is to get the music to as many people as possible. 

I really love shooting music videos. The next one will be shot by great South African artist Pieter Hugo.

I'm [also] currently writing material for two different albums, one is a rap album based on old Kwaito songs like Ibizemoyeni and BOP's Egoli. I'm gonna go reeeeeeeeeally hard on that one. I'm a rapper, and I'm gonna challenge myself to make the greatest rap album ever out of South Africa.

The other album will be a "mshini wam" album where I develop the ideas that I hinted at on this first Mshini Wam album; the biggest development being [the addition of] a Maskandi guitar to give it a chugging rocking edge. I just discovered Phuzekhisi like REALLLY listening to a lot of his songs with Khetani, and the super group with Nothembi. KILLLLER SHIT! That's my big influence of the next mshini wam album.

What did you do before recording or even coming up with the idea of your debut album?

I'd been writing stuff for the album for seven months to a year maybe. [During] all the time I was still working and touring with my old groups Sweat.X and Playdoe.

I listened to tons of heavy metal, living in Sweden, and initially, I wanted to make a SA house album with a metal darkness. This was [influences by] winter in Sweden. I [arrived in] Sunny South Africa and the album got a whole different feel...especially after meeting up and working with Soul geniuses LV and Zaki Ibrahim. The vibe lightened up a lot. Could have been a very different album.  

Why is it that so few South Africans know of Spoek Mathambo or never heard his music before?

There are a number of reasons. The most simple and direct is that I do not have representation here...in terms of label, management and booking. An infrastructure. The other reason is that I have spent much of the last two or three years overseas.

The third is a decision I made a long time ago, which was that I am going to do whatever I want on as international a scale as possible, without feeling I have to specifically focus on just SA. Not that I plan to neglect SA. Far from it. But I just want to build my stuff. Currently, my album is dropping in SA in February and distributed by Soulcandi. The videos will start to get on TV and the songs on radio.

Have any gigs lined up in South Africa?

I'm DJing in Johannesburg this Saturday [4^th of September]. And then my band is playing live in Cape Town on the weekend of the 23^rd of September.

How does it feel to be recognised by great publications such as "the fader"?

It feels phenomenal. They are really one of the few magazines I still LOVE and buy. That and POPAfricana.

Do you aspire to be as big as Jay-Z or are you liking the little mystery?

I aspire to be as big as Fela Kuti or Stevie Wonder or Prince or Iggy Pop...those are really my big role models. I just wanna make the best music for as many people as possible.

Mystery is overrated. I want my face stamped on the sun.

*Listen to Spoek Mathambo's music here

*Watch Spoek Mathambo's videos here

This year (2010) South Africa declared Outcome Based Education a complete failure. We even went as far as declaring that OBE failed us, here’s how:

Outcome Based Education in based on Contructivist Learning Theories (which loosely imply that learners construct their own learning pathway through experiences). The idea with OBE is to concentrate on OUTput and not INput; in other words, you simply don’t lecture to students and expect them to acquire knowledge, but create experiences that help them generate knowledge. A simple example: you don’t give a lecture on “how to make tea” you create scenarios of “making tea” with learners afforded the opportunities to “make tea” in various ways in order to generate a sense of what it is to make tea.  As you can see OBE lends itself well to skills-based subjects.  This is not to suggest that OBE does not work with knowledge-based subjects, it certainly does; it only means learners have to experiment with testing, and creating theories.

OBE demands that our Teachers are creative in how they present lessons. They have to get in touch with their 007 selves in planning how they a) present lessons, and b) ensure learning. This means Teachers have to think about all possibilities of questions and see how to guide all learners towards constructing own knowledge, without actually forcing them to do so. OBE is not overt.  It is implicit knowledge:  We know because we do – we don’t know because we hear.  Knowledge is generated, not acquired. This means that teachers cannot give up on learners who have yet to come to an understanding of new knowledge, they have only to think of new ways to facilitate the learning process.  The beauty of OBE is that learners are measured against themselves and not the “average” class performance.  So a learner can take as long as s/he needs to to come to an understanding of knowledge.

 So, if we go back to our very simple example of “tea making” a Teachers has to provide: kettles, crockery, teacups, teabags, tea leaves, milk, and sugars in order to get a simple lesson going.  If the Teachers is to provide a more holistic learning environment, s/he would have to include the experience of tea-making traditions from the largest tea-producing cultures around the world from Japan to Uganda. Given that a large proportion of our schools do not have basic access to water and electricity (and textbooks are delivered half-way through the year), how is our dear Teachers expected to ensure the OUTcome of basic “tea-making techniques”

Can we declare with confidence that we have done all we could to ensure that our teachers have a basic access to a variety of learning tools?

Writer / Tebogo Serobatse      Photograohy: Negrita Bonita

Comedian Dane Cook once said in the middle of his stand up routine, ‘Let’s turn the lights off and play a game called: Who’s-in-my-mouth?’

And why not? Hell, I’d love to play that game but chances are I’d take it too far. A grope here, maybe a pinch there. I mean seriously. How many of us have wanted to do something, say something or go somewhere but decided against it for fear that someone will quote you on it, see you doing it or spot you at that place? We really limit our experiences based on the fear that someone will know who we are. If there was a way for us to do something with the guarantee that nobody would know it was really us doing it, we’d most probably live more fulfilling lives. Anonymity is the buzzword these days. Being anonymous means that we get to switch the lights off so the world can’t see us while we curse, complain and completely lose our friggin’ minds. By staying anonymous we steer clear of the one thing we’re scared of the most. (Zulu drum roll)...

Accountability.
What better place to be anonymous than the inter-web? You do it everyday. You log on with a “username”. When you sign up you skip all the sections that aren’t labelled mandatory. You use a picture of your favourite hip-hop star or cartoon character as a profile picture.

Even your character changes. All-of-a-Sunday you’ve gone from Nervous Ned to the one liner “Nice shoes wanna have sex?” Ned. Or from Palesa the prude to Palesa the porn star. We’ve all “unfortunately” been tricked into clicking on some ad and “by mistake,” ended up on those dating sites where people’s profile pictures look more like a page from that dirty magazine that got passed around in high school. But for some reason unbeknown to man, you never really meet these exposed erections and V-shaven va-jayjays (respect Oprah) anywhere. I’ve yet to bump into a “horny 24 year- old looking for someone open to new things,” but I know she’s out there. I refuse to believe otherwise.

It’s not just the World Wide Web. Just pick up any publication that has a letters section and count how many people have signed their letters “Anonymous.” We wouldn’t want the world to know we have an opinion because we know that our opinions will be met with criticism, hate mail or Jay-Zet appointing us head of his shower campaign. God-forbid someone recognises our obsessive use of a full stop at the end of every sentence.

Just look back at how many times you’ve heard the universal phrase of denial, ‘Just do it... nobody will know it was you.’ And with those magical words you were invincible. You could feel the power surging to your hand while you engraved the words “Javas is gay” on the side of your History class table. How sinfully satisfying. I mean what would religious people get up to if they were taught that God was only watching on Sundays to count the turn-out at church? They’d have no-one to answer to for six days of the week. Sweet mother of Moses, I dread to think of what kind of world we’d be living in then!

But what if we lived in a world where there was no anonymity? What if burglars had to leave a business card behind after breaking into your house? What if your full name and ID number were required when you logged onto adult-finder.com? Would you still call to check who called from that unsaved number if you didn’t have a private number option?

So everyday we find new ways of staying anonymous – sort of like creating our own little controlled load shedding. Turn the lights off here while I give you a piece of my mind. Trip the switch so I can spray paint all over your wall and no-one but the five people who follow my graffiti will know it was me. Anonymity. You can’t point your finger at someone you can’t see. By the time you’ve turned 360 degrees looking for the tongue that just violated you, I’m already swapping saliva with your best friend while groping Pakistani behind me.

Writer: Loyiso Madinga      Image

A magnificent piano piece originated in 1975 by Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes (with Teddy Pendergrass singing lead vocals) from their platinum selling album, Wake Up, comes a John Legend cover featuring the Roots, Common, and Melanie Fiona from his & The Roots’ forthcoming collaborative album of the same original name.

I first heard the spectacular interpretation at the World Cup 2010 Kick-off Concert with John Legend on his own (it had been released months before, mind you). I then proceeded to search frantically for the single only realising later that it had yet to be released for sale and was part of the new The Roots & John Legend album to be released on 21 September 2010. So I decided to follow John Legend on Twitter to find out more on this brilliance. Seeing that his avatar is the cover of the upcoming album:

@johnlegend: “Listen to my new album WAKE UP! w/The Roots before release day. http://bit.ly/9DkVxj”

Wow! There are so many variations of this song with Mr. Legend being at the forefront of it all, I was confused as to which was the original recording for the WAKE UP album.

In its entirety, this new version does more than justice to the original 1975 version, and the Blue Notes would be and should be proud of what their incredibly music abilities has brought about.

Besides the music, what do you think of the album art? Trash it or bag it?

Check out the Sony online store for preorders and merchandise.

Before I knew that I could be in advertising, I had a soft spot for graffiti. I used to graf as well (don't ask me what happened).

This is a cool collabo, futura and X Ghetto 666

Check out more pics on hypebeast

I wonder if Nike will be having any graffiti exhibitions around South Africa any time soon... if they do, which graffiti artists do you think they might choose for a collabo?

Levi's has dropped a new campaign called "Believe" --- and they got Fikile "Fix" Moeti and Naima Mclean. I love how this is shot, wonder who shot it. 

What I really love about design is that it solves every day life problems -- now this would sort out the toilet seat problem ... I want this in my house.

Eco urinal concept, designed by Yeongwoo Kim, recycles the water that is used for washing hands to flush the urine.

I had the pleasure of being introduced to Sarah Jessica Parker. As friendly as one can get. She had the smoothest skin. The most beautifully structured nose. She dashed across the field with a majestic flair. Yes, SJP was, indeed, at the BMW International Polo Series at Inanda Club on Sunday 22 August. Gazed on my awestruck civilians as they dined on the greening grass, basking beneath the August sun (or not, if they were in a tent). SJP made South Africa so proud insomuch that the team won – possibly the only sport South Africa has any hope in – and she won Pony of the Game.

A fierce crowd of attention-loverscovered every speck of Inanda Club. I say attention-lovers because it seems each and every individual resembles the characteristics I’ve seen on television’s Gossip Girl. Sipping away on their Cristal champagne, and puffing away on their illegally imported Cuban cigars. Alas, this scene can only be experienced in the marquees, while the ordinary middle-class wannabees, but will never be, are left to fend for themselves on the ant infested and dusty lawn. I sat amongst the commoners.

I came to polo with the mentality that I would be the only black at this party. Boy was I wrong. Black people have moved beyond the tshisa nyama, and realm of golfing and country club membership, popularised by sports icons such as Tiger Woods, who come to think of it, is the only black professional golfer I know of, and a true black man with his...errr!!!...transgressions (Are you offended yet?). Alas, darkies have discovered the culture of polo. Although I doubt they even understand it. I didn’t, until I Googled the rules, after the game was over.

Since I witnessed the tragedy of Scarlett O’Hara’s daughter’s death as she was show jumping with her horse, I had felt no need to involve myself in the act of riding or so much as going near a horse. (Yes, television can be evil) Kind of the same fear I have, and most blacks have, of dogs. The hooves of a stallion look to be insensitive to a human body. Thus, polo is the one sport you shan’t find a “hooligan” parading his naked body across the pitch, for fear of being horse-minced. Rightfully so. But the sound of the gallops at the horses moved swiftly across the pitch – damaging it as much as inexperienced golfer does – was music to the ears.

So, South Africa made us proud after the dismal failure of Springbok against the All Black the previous day L And we celebrated with cheap champagne and Woolies food. Yay!!

*Photographs courtesy of SA Polo Association

Ive been bumping this mixtape since I got it the other day. This is the official music video to the "I Want You" track ...

Normally this would be a 75th Note — but, amma throw you off a lil' remix.  This is  work by Suren Manvelyan (a photographer) and as the cliché goes, seein' is believing.

/word via Scene360

Remember that iPad DJ — I wonder how far that went — anyway, Greg Kaufman came up with this idea and school (university) project.

What you think? Eventually will DJ's be on this, or is the vinyl still sexier?

Multi Touch Light Table: GERGWERK from GERG WERK

/word

I have been asked by about 4 or 5 women to do some nude shots of them — I'll say it, I don't think I have the 'balls' (no pun intended) for it, but I have been researching what and how to do it.

In doing so, I found a lot of porn — but, sometimes you get to find photographers like Tomas Rucker, who actually do something special with the naked female form.

/word via Scene360

Uhm, uhm, uhm, ja.

Okay — This is one of those ideas, I would never in a million shots of tequila would I have imagined possible.

Anatassia Elias creates art works inside the toilet paper roll, simple as that.

/word.

I love typography — although I never studied it, which is shame really. I do however think good typography is inherent in human nature, everybody from your grandma to your lil' cousin, knows when something is good and done very well.

With that, I introduce studiotwentysix2 (aka Tom Davie)'s typographic posters — there is a large trend towards this type of style and work, that's assuming ffffound is anything to go by.

/word

I've never owned a fur coat or anything of that nature — don't really know what it feels like to wear anything-fur-ish. Alas, Jeroen Hofman has taken a couple of photographs of animals that the fur originates from.

Au contré to what I would have thought — shouldn't the animals be like huge, these are, if I dare say so, cute lil' creatures.

Ah, well I guess now I/you/we know.

/word

Ive never heard of his music but Spoek Mathambo seems to be on everyones lips. This is what I love about Fader though they can put Lil Wayne on one cover then The Roots on the next without anyone  judging them.

No self-respecting-creative does not rock a Moleskine. Chances are 7/10 designers will choose Helvetica as a font of choice (or weapon). If none of these make sense — don't sweat it, just get this Moleskine though.

/word

It's been a minute since we've been blessed with a chick dig thursday, dayam, yo! Anyway, enough talk.

I've been soft-stalking (read: right-click-save) this girl, Belén Rodríguez (Argentinian), for sometime now — I hope you see what I see.

*ps: it ain't easy finding 'decent' photographs of somebody who is constantly photographed naked, alas, she is known as a showgirl.

/drool

I would love to see more of this kind of stuff - something fresh, something new [even if its old] - just something ...

“Black Ambition: Life in two Lenses” is an anthology of photographs by renowned young filmmaker Tebogo Malope and reputable young Photographer Pako Magabane. Armed with two cameras they walked into the same environments and shot the same scenarios at the same time. The result is an emotive look on life through the eyes of these young creative minds.

As a designer fonts are very important - they set the tone of whatever layout you design [fonts & photography] dectate how you layout comes out.

hattip /via Lebogang Nkoane

My holiday is nigh... Love me some Morcheeba and this is probably one of my top 5 favourite Morcheeba tracks.

Ghetti, who grew up in Brazil, has been carving since he was a schoolboy who sharpened his pencil with a razor or a pocketknife. He started big, with wood and stone, and then moved to carving soap, candles and even broom handles before he found his niche about 25 years ago.

hattip /via Lebogang Nkoane

So, Res has finally dropped a new album after her 2001 release, How I Do. I used to love that album, in fact I still bump it. I finally got around to downloading her latest album, BLACK. GIRLS. ROCK! If you know Res' music, you'll notice that this album is exactly like her first one. It's a different sound - a little on the rock side but you still can't really place it.

Anyway, have a listen and see if you like it. I do...

This is only cos I fear the YouTube clip isn't clear enough...