Ghetto Palms: Township Palms pt. III / Kwaito / DJ Cleo Exclusive Interview
- story Eddie "Stats" Houghton
Township Millionare part three! …and yes this is the last kwaito crusade, at least for the moment, because in the three weeks I’ve taken to focus on South Africa, Jamaica has probably released roughly one billion new dancehall riddims for me to wade true. (Seriously, sometimes they actually give the stuff l away faster than I can steal it)
The final installment in the series is an exclusive interview with kwaito super-producer DJ Cleo, given name Cleophas Moneypao. Though he is neck and neck with Elvis Maswanganyi aka Mujava for best given name in the history of names, there is no contest when it comes to DJ personas — Cleo is the known as the Timbaland of kwaito and is definitely the King of South Africa as far as beats are concerned. This is an extremely abridged version of the convo recorded at his studio somewhere west of Johannesburg in November ‘07 for the South Africa feature in Fader 52. This is because there were a lot asides that just don’t make sense in transcript form, a lot of him playing beats and running ad libs on the music like “Right here, 1:36…uh! Oh shit, etc.” Also the day before this interview was conducted Gerrard “Gee” Foster and myself spotted a local newspaper headline about Cleo raping a dog which was apparently written by one of his rivals. This naturally provided a lot of disgruntled commentary and jokes that won’t necessarily make sense out of context.
