This year saw us pally up with Phillips in order to bring you You Need To Hear This. Our new sister platform allowed us to adorn our serious face breaking down albums to their molecules, charting the evolution of artists and visiting untouched music scenes from around the continents. YNTHT was also home to our weekly Touching Bass series, inviting some new and experienced DJs to make us a mix. Here’s the best of our World Unknown series.
WORLD UNKNOWN: SOUTH AFRICAN IZIKHOTHANE
Videos by VICE
A couple of months back, I was on my way to the beach in Cape Town when two teenage boys strutted past me. Both were dressed in garish silky floral shirts, tangerine jeans, and dazzling patent leather loafers: think Jazzy Jeff in a Versace advertorial circa 1993’. But their gaudy choice of garments wasn’t what caught my attention. My eyes were drawn to their fists, each one clenching tightly onto a thick wad of cash, arranged like a flourish of playing cards. The two boys fanned and flaunted the banknotes as they headed on down the street, feigning an attempt to cool themselves with a money-breeze in the beating heat of the South African summer.
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WORLD UNKNOWN: ISRAELI HARDCORE
Punk and hardcore scenes always emerge from a bubbling cauldron of discontent, and Israel is one of those cauldrons. The country’s modern metropolis, Tel Aviv, is safe and Americanised, but its edges are still frayed by the perpetual conflicts of the country and neighbouring Palestine. Being a punk is frowned upon in the holy land, scenes have grown and dispersed due to bad reputations, lack of longevity in bands and the compulsory military conscription for all 18 year old men. Many young adults feign mental illnesses and injuries to escape getting dragged into the militia. Unfortunately, when the government eventually linked this truancy to the punk and emo scenes a few years back, they slowly dissolved through fears of the government stereotyping and the profiling of ‘alternative’ kids.
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WORLD UNKNOWN: SOUTH AFRICAN ACID HOUSE
…And then you had to ring a number and drive to a petrol station and wait there panic-buying Rizlas… and then you always had to drive round the entire M25 seventeen times… always exactly seventeen times…. and then you got there, right, and there were all these scallies, thousands of them, like buffalo, an army of shellsuits… well, shellsuits hadn’t been invented then, true, but… of course, back then pills all cost seventy five quid, which is about £8000 in today’s money, but they were all amazing, took you to literal outer space, I remember getting so buzzed I zoned out and just couldn’t stop orbiting the Crab Star Nebula… It was much more intimate too: actual Oakenfold spun Lil Louis for the first time with his fingernail in the groove rotating it round on my friend’s back…
