GFOTY Apologizes For Referring To Toumani & Sidiki Diabaté As “Bombay Bicycle Club blacked up”
Lotic and Le1f respond on social media.
Update, 6/8/2015, 4:15 PM: Lotic wrote a Facebook post in response to GFOTY's deleted iMessages. "'i told you' isn’t even the right response to this," he writes, before calling out the "press/club culture:" "[Y[ou can congratulate pc music et al. for their mystery and 'clever' use of 'irony' or you can just investigate and realize that it's merely a vapid art project by a handful of rich kids (mostly male, with female avatars btw) that's diluting the club pool and that your making excuses for their boring music is part of the problem. you actually don't have to pretend that anything that’s even vaguely non-conforming is good or cool?" "'[C]onceptual' and 'mysterious' usually turn out to be an abdication of responsibility," he adds. "[I]'m upset that we all just kind of allowed these people to 'blow up' based on hardly anything."
Read the producer's full post below, and his GEN F here.
“i told you” isn’t even the right response to this. like, i understand that white people don’t feel like they have ‘...
Posted by Lotic on Monday, June 8, 2015
The producer GFOTY called Toumani & Sidiki Diabaté, the father and son duo from Mali, “Bombay bycicle club blacked up” in an iMessage. GFOTY (Girlfriend Of The Year), who is associated with the label PC Music, was doing iMessage reviews of Field Day—a music festival held at East London’s Victoria Park—for Noisey.
Many of her comments about the event were banal: “So many sun glasses,” “I love the toilets,” “Pretty damn fucking annoyed that no one has played any of my songs during their sets.” But then she encountered Toumani & Sidiki Diabaté. “I saw a tribal band play on the main stage,” she wrote. “I think they were covering Bombay Bycicle club / Bombay bycicle club blacked up.” Bombay Bicycle Club is a young English band that has shown a sporadic interest in African music. Toumani Diabaté, who turns 50 this summer, is renowned for his work with the kora, a traditional instrument from West Africa. He recently teamed up with son to release an album of kora duets.
Sam Wolfson, executive editor at Noisey, responded to tweets from The Quietus which called GFOTY’s messages “shit & racist.” “Think GFOTY says nothing but ridiculous and charmless things but there are limits to that and this shouldn’t have been publishd,” he wrote. He added, “It was an editorial oversight aka we fucked up and that part of her review has been removed and the change acknowledged.”
The rapper Le1f commented on the GFOTY's messages via Twitter. "Is she attributing traditional african music to young a white indie band?"
GFOTY took to Twitter about half an hour ago to apologize for her iMessage. "I was actually trying to make a joke about appropriation," she wrote. "I fucked up and it wasn't funny. I'm sorry."