Black Noise drops latest track “The Cape Flats, Mitchell’s Plain”

Brooklyn, NY via Capetown, South Africa – December 19, 2011
After over 20 years of beats, raps and rhymes, Black Noise is South Africa’s oldest active hip-hop crew. Their latest “The Cape Flats, Mitchell’s Plain” is a fun party track celebrating an oft misunderstood and misrepresented area. To many, the only reported stories from the media tell of organized crime, drug dealings and gang violence. They miss out on the music and culture coming from this region including house music tracks like this one.
 The crew, including founding member Emile YX? hail from this very area. As he puts it, “’The Cape Flats, Mitchells Plain’ is an attempt from our side to dispel the general belief carried by local media that only bad comes from these communities. Media mostly tells the stories of gangsters and drug dealers when speaking of this community and in so doing keep people from traveling there. Thus keeping people divided post Apartheid.”

The song and video chronicle Emile YX?, DJ Thee Angelo and crew from their first break dance crew created in Rocklands (in Mitchell’s Plain) and how years later the Black Noise blueprint that was laid down has come to fruition. The video features young neighborhood b-boys as the next generation of South African b-boys, as well as House, an American dancer, who is the founder and director of Urban Artistry.

Shot on location by Nomadic Wax’s Magee McIlvaine, the video chronicles the Cape Flats colored townships in Cape Town. The Afrikaans community has a particularly poor reputation in South Africa for gangsterism and violence. Some of the worst drug problems come out of these neighborhoods. Yet it is out of that context that Black Noise grew, in direct contrast to all of this. Indeed, they have never left the neighborhood. They continue to live in The Cape Flats and have done so their entire lives.

WATCH THE VIDEO

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 Heal the Hood
Along with his roots with Black Noise, Emile YX? also participates in the annual Heal the Hood gathering. Now celebrating its 23rd anniversary in South Africa, the event is an opportunity to celebrate the survival of Hip Hop culture within South African communities and elsewhere in the world. Several b-boy crews gather to share, laugh and break dance. For Emile YX?, it’s an opportunity to recollect with his old Hip Hop crew members and reflect on a career of establishing strong communities through music, dance and art.

Urban Artistry
Heal the Hood
Nomadic Wax
Black Noise