Every Song I Love — 6. DJ Mujava : Township Funk

I’m not really sure why it took me quite so long to become a music blogger. Blogs really started to take off in the early 2000s, around the time I left University. I had a lot of time on my hands and no responsibilities. I would spend almost all the free time I had listening to music, and I loved to share the music I loved with other people. I was writing reviews for a friend’s fanzine already, so surely it should have occurred to me to get on this new-fangled internet and start putting my thoughts on music out into the wider world.

I think it was lack of confidence, that feeling of “why would anyone want to read what I write, why would anyone care about my music opinions” (and I still feel like that, I just decided I’m going to write anyway), but eventually, by my late twenties, I’d decided to give it a go. After the music blogging boom had peaked and started to decline, as it turned out, but that’s a story for another day.

I started up a blog on Google’s blogging tool, the name of which I can’t even recall now, and pondered exactly what to write about, and, more importantly, how to get anyone to read it. This was not quite pre-social media, but it was before most people were on it, and certainly before it became apparent that social media was the place to share creative work online. At this point I was relying on people finding my writing through Google searches, and it seemed that the best way for that to happen was to write about songs no-one had written about yet.

But, how to do that? I had no idea. My friend who wrote the fanzine would get advance CDs mailed to him by record companies, but it had taken time to get on all those mailing lists, and I was not a patient man. Then, one day, I was scrolling through my emails, reading a message from some small record shop in Manchester, and they happened to mention this electro-house track from South Africa I had never heard of before. I found it on the still nascent YouTube, and was blown away. That track was ‘Township Funk’ and it was brilliant.

It combined the deliberate hugeness of the electro-house that was popular in those times, like Justice and Boys Noise, with the primitive bleeps of earlier Warp records, whilst adding an unforgettable riff and elements uniquely its own, perhaps inspired by the South African townships from which it took its name.

Notably, no-one seemed to have written about it yet, so I wrote an enthused piece and, to my surprise, people started reading it. People were actually googling ‘Township Funk DJ Mujava’ and finding my article. It felt revelatory. I wouldn’t say I went viral, we’re talking hundreds of reads here rather than thousands or millions, but it felt a lot to me, and made me think there might be something in this music blogging malarkey after all. I also felt like I was bringing the joy of this wonderful piece of music to people who had never heard it before, perhaps the closest a non-musician can get to the power of creating music oneself.

Soon after, the track starting appearing in the nightclubs I still occasionally frequented, like Manchester’s Warehouse Project, and I felt slightly smug, when I was able to tell my friend the name of the track he had just heard for the first time and had been raving away to. Shazam would have ruined this for me, had it been around then.

Within a year or two, I had pretty much given up nightclubbing, and Township Funk holds a special place in my heart for being the last big tune of my clubbing days, one of those tracks that everyone is waiting for, one of those tracks that, when it finally drops, the crowd goes wild.

As for blogging, and trying to be first, neither of those things lasted. I soon realised that I didn’t have the time, energy and inclination to sift through hundreds and thousands of new songs, to try and be the one to bring the attention of the world a great new band or song. Let others do that, and I will enjoy the fruits. I will just write about the songs that I love, no matter how old or well known they are, and no matter if anyone is reading, because I love the writing and I love the music. I’ll never forget that first giddy rush of hearing Township Funk though, and being able to share that joy with the world.

Originally published at http://markjwray.com on February 19, 2024.