2 posts tagged “photography”
I don't like raves. Shit, I can barely stand going to a party in a club. Sure, I'll gladly go to any event, be it in a club, open field, airplane hangar, the moon, the ocean floor, whatever, to see a set by an artist I dig, but my overall opinion on events on a mass scale involving music is that they usually cease to be about music and more about just going where the pussy is and getting wasted on Heineken jacked up fifteen times the market price.
So imagine my consternation when I was assigned, for the second time, to cover Recharge Revelation5: Global Gathering at the A Famosa Resort in Melaka. Simply put, the Revelation festival is the largest display of Malaysian hedonistic excess of the year, timed strategically right after Eid celebrations, so, you know, people can get back in touch with their inner heathen. Bearing in mind that last year's jaunt was exhausting to think about even a year on, I braced myself for iteration #5, which was being hyped up as the longest, most massive one yet.
I was there at two in the afternoon. Unlike last year's party, which kicked off at around tea time (that shit sound dainty don't it) and was abruptly cut off at 1am (read: raided. pay your bribes next time), this year's started earlier and was slated to end at 4am. Last year they had it over a blacktopped parking lot, which was big enough as it is, but with six stages, skullfucking carnival rides, concession stands and a gajillion beer and cigarette kiosks, they couldn't fit all that there this year. So what they did was they levelled a whole field about 5 minutes away and set up their trance/proghouse/techno/breakbeat/hiphop Carnivale there. I'm sorry, but it was like going to visit the Swamp Thing. As soon as I got through the media gate, I was up to my calves in muck. The whole place smelled like the hippopotamus enclosure at the zoo. I was looking for the cows, because I sure as hell smelled cowpat.
So what's an anti-party party magazine reporter to do? I must've walked 10 miles that day, all in. In slow motion, because the mud was sucking my feet in every step of the way. Argued with security because my media-passed ass couldn't get backstage. Are you crazy? I am Cecil B DeMille with a 400D, I need my close-ups goddamnit. Results varied. I got onto four of the stages, but damn if I didn't make the most of it. I'm not going to lie, what with the mud running up my legs, the tripod (useless without firm ground) strapped to my back, no water just coffee from the media lounge (water. we need water) and my eardrums damn near pounded to bloody mush from the technotranceelectrobreakbeats, i like the pictures i took. Nice concert photos in the face of overwhelming adversity reflects a depth of character. Okay I'll stop bigging myself up.
I know for a fact that I'll never be able to wade ankle-deep in bullshit-scented mud through a festival playing music that I like. Not in this country anyway. The price you have to pay for being a music snob. It hit me - hard - while I was making my rounds that as good as it gets for hip hop in Malaysia is for it to just keep on existing. As much as I would like to fantasise Rakim, Tribe, Digable Planets or Hiero performing here in front of 50,000 screaming Malaysian bassheads, I know it's not going to happen. I'd be better off saving up funds for a trip to New York to catch Rock the Bells or the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival. I love what I have here; it keeps me grounded and hungry, but I want to be a part of a whole throng of people who love the same music I do, not just work quietly in the cuts with the few dozen or so hip hop heads who are still justifying their time and effort to make noise for empty dancefloors. Not meaning to be blasphemous, but yo. I've already been to Mecca and Medina. I've already made that feeble attempt to foster a connection to the larger parameters of my faith, my spiritual aspect. My art, my manifestation of self on an abstract plane, runs a distant second to that part of my life, but it's still second on my list. Just to touch base with where it all started, you know? Not doing the hip hop tourist thing, nah. Just to walk around a place where hip hop music and culture, and before it blues and jazz and rock n roll and punk, all contributed to its constitution as much as any amount of concrete and cement. I'm done with trying to make things stick in a place where music and art and culture are just clothes people peel off and exchange on a regular basis. I'm in the mood to rub the skin and flesh of the culture I so readily adopted 19 years ago. I need to map out my pilgrimage.
I need to get the fuck out of here.
