2020/21 has been a strange time for this industry. But while it has temporarily taken away the old way of doing business, it has opened up a bunch of new ones – some of which have advanced the artform in exciting ways!
The 2021 Goldie Awards took place over the last couple of weeks, with the heats and finals spread across a week or two in February – this was the first Goldie Awards in a while, as the 2020 edition had to be cancelled, for obvious reasons.
You can watch the whole final, with snippets from previous years and the heats in the first 45 minutes or so, right here – it is an incredible, inspiring watch!
The Goldie Awards take on two disciplines – a beat battle, and a DJ battle. The beat battle final featured Buck Rodgers, Tsuruda and OddKidOut – each with their own distinct style. As A-Trak makes clear to the other judges, DJ Craze and Baauer, in the beat battle, its about the sound coming out of the speakers – not the performance. Which is good news for Tsuruda and OddKidOut, as Buck Rodgers is a beast when it comes to his performances of his beats! They drop some absolute fire in this battle!
However, probably of more interest to readers here is the DJ battle segment. Anyone who caught DJ Lazyboy‘s set from the heat will know what I mean when I say that it is a brain-melter! Here’s a section from it to give you an idea, as well as snippets of the other 2 finalists’ sets from the heats… DJ Lazyboy’s full routine can be found at about 22 minutes in the above Twitch embed, its worth watching in its entirety! In this battle, the performance is a critical element of the judgement – and it shows!
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The final featured the aforementioned DJ Lazyboy from the USA, Fummy from Japan, and DJ Michelle from Dubai – who, incredibly, is just 8 years old! I won’t spoil the suspense by saying who won, but lets just say that the production levels, wit and creativity were INSANE! The way they used the medium of online submissions was genuinely at genius level – it’ll be fascinating to see which of these concepts and ideas percolate their way into physical, in-person battles. For now, the online bar has been raised to a very tall height!
If you want to skip the full thing – the DJ battle winner’s winning sets are all played together at about 2hr13m onwards – they are WELL worth your time, although the whole thing is incredibly dope! Massive props to A-Trak and Fool’s Gold for creating this new competition to rival Red Bull 3style and the DMCs!
And now that you are all inspired from this incredible battle, head to the Heavy Hits pool to pick up some amazing music, and check out the Instagram and Facebook pages too while you are at it! And for the Twitchers, you can find me on there several times a week, right here. Peace!