Hello Hobo and goodbye NME
SUCCESS is mostly about timing. Isn’t it so? Don’t all the famous quotes and sayings that have dripped through your Facebook and Instagram pages through the years warn and advise you about the importance of time in your life. From time management ditties like “the early bird catches the worm” to truly inspirational deep stuff like “time is precious” written by that revered obsequious entity, famously known as “anonymous”.
One of my favourite time yarns comes from the late Idries Shah, Sufi teacher, writer and author of more than 30 books where he reasons, “right time, right place, right people equals success”. “Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.”
This particular quote came to mind this week, when reading and watching the explosion of Sacramento based, spoken-word-slash-hip-hop artist and previous nobody, Hobo Johnson, going viral with his video entry, filmed at some innocuous backyard location, into the NPR Tiny Desk Contest. This shaggy haired bumpkin, Hobo Johnson, is actually 22-year-old rapper Frank Lopes. After a family fight, he moved into his Corolla and began writing his poems and music that dealt with his everyday struggles from family dysfunction to dreams of fame.
After the car’s gasket blew and the car towed and sold for scrap, he began posting videos of his performance art online and soon gained a devoted local following that enjoyed his off-kilter, lo-fi approach in merging his particular brand of conversational rap with folk music.
Earlier this week, his video entry into the above competition quickly gained more than three million views and has quickly catapulted this indie artist into the mainstream spotlight. The song Peach Scone sees Johnson and band the Lovemakers buzz about with geeky pomposity, trifling on about his devotion to a girl who already has a boyfriend and his confused interior struggle. His delivery and style is one you might expect from a hairdresser filling in the awkward silences while she snips and clips with daft questions and light ribbing banter.
Why this song has made such a global impact is beyond comprehension, the only answer could just be timing.
A local Amamzimtoti outfit a few years back, which I managed for a minute, named Lush Puppy, were doing the exact same shtick. The band and vocalist even physically resemble Hobo Johnson and his merry music makers that it’s just too uncanny to fathom. How does one identical twin break the internet and glass ceiling for indie artists and the other, hailing from our shores, dissolve and fade away into obscurity? It can only be timing and Lush Puppy were most definitely ahead of their time.
This week also saw the announcement that the New Musical Express, known as NME, music magazine would no longer be available in print edition.
The main theme to these think pieces centre on the fact that the NME no longer has a strong enough identity, compared with its glory days where they championed the punk and indie scenes pre-internet.
NME was one of the few magazines that slipped through the harsh censorship laws during apartheid South Africa and thousands of young white South Africans were exposed to counter cultural happenings, politics and entertainment movements from across local shores, providing them with an alternative way of thought.
So goodbye print NME and hello a brand brave new world of open access to all… just not for Lush Puppy.