When I first saw Lonehill Estate live, back during the best of those Cokefest things no one talks about anymore, they were wearing red blazers. Like real estate agents. It’s funny, see?
Look, I get it. Being a South African musician is kak hard. You train from your earliest days to be a stand-out talent, playing serious music that carries deep messages about your life experiences. You operate in a fickle marketplace, playing in a few decent venues to a shrinking audience. Your peers barely innovate their sound, let alone their marketing, content to remain knock-offs of their favourite international acts while hoping to export that same sound to other markets already over-saturated with a dozen guys who sound like Kings of Leon and Fall Out Boy.
What’s a bunch of clever guys with instruments to do?
Well, apparently, this:
Responding to a cuddly music video of a little girl named Sophia Grace singing (and likely horrifying feminists everywhere when she did) Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” on Ellen, local pop-comedy (apparently) rockers Lonehill Estate decided to kick off their latest video in an homage to aspiring hip-pop princesses everywhere. Now I realize I’m probably beginning to sound like a go-to dissenting opinion in local music here, but it’s as if the boys from Lonehill thought to themselves, “Viral video seems to be working out pretty well for everyone else in 2010”, then completed production on theirs in January 2012. They literally waited till the end of the world to do something everyone else wrung the life out of.
I’ve already written about Die Antwoord today- no one did better off the viral video scene in 2010 than them. And when Jax Panik was looking to relaunch himself, from his earlier (better) incarnation into a mock pop diva back in 2009, he released a clip of himself covering Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” to synchronized dance moves in someone’s back courtyard. I guess that makes Lonehill Estate the derivative hip-pop Nicki Minaj to Jax Panik’s ironic she-bitch Gaga in a very awkward, very literal way.
It’s not that I can’t appreciate it. As the eternally-uncomfortable lead in a comedy band myself, I completely get where they’re coming from. Unfortunately here, Lonehill went a leap too far. Unlike the red blazers, which were almost too clever, the (not so) sneaky inclusion of their existing video for “Daans!” here seems like a corny attempt to go viral by some guys who’ve already had sharper ideas.