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Everyday for the past 6 months, the Durban Metro Police have been rounding up street children, often beating them, and throwing them in the back of vans. According to Tom Hewitt, founder and CEO of the street children’s organization Umthombo, children are being harassed, beaten and pepper sprayed in these ruthless round-up operations. The kids are then driven out of the city as far as the department’s petrol tab allows and ditched outside Pietermaritzburg or down the South Coast. Alternatively

Contra by name, contra by nature: young pop-smiths hurdle The Difficult Second Album(tm). It’s easy for certain South Africans to hate Vampire Weekend. They’re trendy, bookish and pretentious. Oh, and they name-check Peter Gabriel instead of Oliver Mtukudzi. This last bit is what gets South Africans backs up most: the temerity of young, privileged New Yorkers to appropriate African music in their indie-pop vibe without painstaking citation. But, jirre fok mense, criticising pop music for being cannibalistic is like straining

Kak. I’m all for folk remedies but what exactly do they mean by “rubes” the soles of the feet?

Look, I’m not going to fuck around, you’re going to need better speakers than the ones you have in order to fully appreciate the new Van Coke Kartel album, Skop Skiet en Donner. At times it gets so ridiculously heavy and overblown that it becomes nothing short of glorious. VCK might have brought on board a producer (Peach Van Pletzen, also on Drums and other stuff) with a distinctive style but it hasn’t made them any less, unapologetically, them. It’s

The Waterfront is a re-purposed commercial zone. It used to be exclusively about ships and shipping, and now you can shop, date and see movies there. (All made possible by a dubious Dubai consortium, of course). Anyway, commercial re-purposing of surpassed industrial sites is universal. San Francisco, New York, Singapore, London. Cape Town. Not Detroit. Poor Detroit. These are places where work happened that’s no longer viable thanks to the international division of labour – global investment (remember that?) logically

Where Cape Flats culture meets the Nyanga vibe. Coloured and Xhosa culture mash-up as only the iKapa 'kasi can produce. Another coup for the Pioneer Unit. We be rocking this shit loud!

I’ve never been a big fan of vampire movies - the melodrama, the drooling adolescent sexuality, the powdered rakes in effeminate period attire. Give me flesh-eating zombies any day. With the living dead, it’s always party time. Thankfully, Daybreakers combines the best of both worlds – a vampire movie that relies heavily on conventional zombie and epidemic/outbreak scenarios to tell its story. It’s set in the near future (2019), where most of mankind have been “turned” to vampires and as

I’ve been following and writing about Tidal Waves for a long time now, I own all their albums and know their set backwards, so I’m always looking for a different angle. This Friday produced exactly that, a unique, once-off collaboration with Zinkplaat, set on a wine farm just outside Stellenbosch. The sum-total of my knowledge of Zinkplaat was gleaned from watching their music videos on MK. I was attracted to their earthy roots rock on tracks like “Piekniek” and “Hondeklipbaai”.

OK this is a biggie. We’re giving away two sets of double tickets to the Finley Quaye gig on Friday, as well as dinner at Neighbourhood in Long Street before the gig. Just click here and tune us why you, above all others, are most worthy…

One World Cup you may not have heard of is kicking off in Durban next week. It doesn’t feature any professional athletes, no big names, brand endorsements, bling bling and multi-million dollar salaries. In fact hardly any one even knows about this World Cup, primarily because the participants are all street kids. Yes that’s right, all the participants of the Street Child World Cup tend to spend each night, in their home countries, sleeping on street corners, dodging criminal gangs

Another day, another hand out. We’ve got free tickets to the 340ml and 7 foot Sound System gig at the Assembly in Cape Town on Saturday night. All you got to do is ask nice… here.

There comes a time when we must look at the glorious past and let it go, when we must look to the future and prepare for its rewards. But in letting go we must ask, what is it, exactly, that we are letting go of? Because surely the memories will remain. In our case, no. The memories have been erased by the brain damage caused by a combination of the sun, alcohol and that stuff we found in the trance

KAK. Joburg is phallic town. A city built on the dark act of rooting the earth and each other, for money. In Jozi, many a fortune has been built on the back of gold mining and industrial buggery, by proud heterosexual patriarchs with moustaches.

Hey yo, we’re handing out free tickets to a unique Zinkplaat and Tidal Waves co-lab at Beyerskloof wine farm on Friday night. Two of South Africa’s most original bands, in concert together. Click here to get your freebie tickets.

The Times has this week been reporting on the fall-out after Arts and Culture Minister Lulu Xingwana’s left a Johannesburg art exhibition in a huff because it included a series of photos of lesbian couples that she considered “pornographic”. The photographs are by Umlazi-born Zanele Muholi, a self-described “activist-photographer” who last year was awarded a Fanny Anne Eddy accolade by the International Resource Network in Africa and won of the Casa Africa Award at the 2009 Bamako Encounters photography biennial in Mali.

*spoiler alert Enter Alice in Wonderland 3D – The Tim Burton Experience. Put on your glasses, leave all civil adult cynicism at the door and allow your faculty of wonder to be awakened and the child in you to be entertained. This is what I told myself when going to watch the Alice in Wonderland, remembering that it was a book that once captured my imagination, an animation that I consumed daily with feverish enthusiasm because before I even knew

Riding high on the back of you know who, we're going to see a lot of fresh new original Fletse stuff like this...

It was the kind of weekend where no one judged you for the stains on your pants and there was great music everywhere. Now generally I rankle at writing overly positive articles for the fear of being accused of being bribed. And here I must clearly state that, yes, there was a pay off. That pay off, that massive bribe, was Ramfest itself. Unfortunately personal reasons made it hard to fully enjoy it. I had been dumped, on Facebook, the

Score free tickets to the biggest gig in Stellenbosch tonight! Jack Parow, Tidal Waves, Thieve, Die Heuwels Fantasties… all on stage tonight at Klein Libertas! Click here and ask nice for your free tickets!

Your first off-the-bottom-off-the-top combo occurs in Glenwood, in a road renamed after a person that doesn’t exist. You put your car on its rail and carve between a granny in Honda Jazz and an irate plumber indicating at an orange light – shouting into his cell phone at his ex-wife while his three assistants catch a couple Z’s in the back of his tiny old bakkie. A bather hurls himself out of harms way and rolls down a bank into