PUNK MEETS PUNK - OFWGKTA COMES TO BRIXTON

If ever there was a place on earth made for OFWGKTA, it's Brixton.  The birthing ground of punk-rock, urban originality, Black British consciousness and the riots of real resistance, Brixton still bangs the best of British swag and energy. In 2012, it's become a fusion of several generations of every ethnicity under the sun with more flavour, throbbing with colour, real static and pride.  It has it's own currency - and I'm not just on about the Brixton pound. Here, the realest style cuts the bargain.

Commuters coming home on the 133 bus note the half mile long line of kids spilling out onto Stockwell Road, winding round from Brixton Academy.  This is strange - as is the 20 degrees boiling, blazing hot March day - far hotter than the L.A. I left a day ago. The same L.A. which spawned OFWGKTA who can't quite contain their excitement at finally hitting Brixton, UK.  Inside, the huge dome of the Academy is ramjammed with bodies - at least half of them questionably underage wearing OFWGKTA t-shirts or Earl (Sweatshirt) sweatshirts.  For those of you who don't know:  OFWGKTA (Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All a.k.a. Odd Future) is the latest musical furore sweeping the internet and any cool-thinking person's brain right now.  Not so much the charts or the cash registers yet but...all that is beginning to change.

If you were trying to place this event in a genre, you'd be lost.  50-50 white/Black/Asian, mainly young emos, punks, hip hop heads, older serious music geeks, loners, couples, gangs, groupies (male and female)...one thing is for sure.  They are all impatient for OFWGKTA to get on stage.  'Wolfgang! Wolfgang!' they keep chanting.

Finally, at 9pm, Syde (the mohican only female of the group) hits the dj decks with more swagger and style than any dj I've see this decade, regardless of sex.  She pins, swoops and swings as one, leaving the decks at one point to launch full litre bottles of Evian at the gasping crowd.  Already, they're held in this tiny Los Angeleno's hand.

When she's joined by the others, the electricity becomes palpable, the floor leaping up into the air as one.  The collective is bigger than Wu Tang in 1994, with a more vicious, speeded-up energy and less menace - more fun.  Crowd-surfing starts from the first track on. There doesn't seem to be any Frank Ocean or Earl Sweatshirt but Tyler (the Creator0 and another member both sport arm-casts: evidence of a commitment to throwing themselves onto the crowd.  They pace, launch, leap, acrobat around the stage like monkeys on speed, up and over looming monitors, at one with a crowd now a surging mass of sweat and arms.

But I'm not going to lie: the sound sucks now and I can barely hear the lyrics.  Still, there's no escaping the fact that people are getting their free on.  Never have I been to a hip hop gig where people have just let loose like this.  Is this hip hop though?  There's no posturing here - the members wear casual street gear, sport plaster-of-paris rather than gold chains and are more reminiscent of the Sex Pistols and Joy Division than any of their hip hop ancestors.

Probably the greatest tragedy of Odd Future is that their sophisticated irony in both music and lyrics is wasted on the ignorant who take their 'SWAG' and 'Nigga bitch f**k' peppering so literally.  If they were another colour, would the standards of political correctness be the only measure by which their art is judged?  Free Odd Future. It's about time.  Let their music redefine them - not narrow minds.  If they can survive the hype, not disappear up their own exhaust pipe and make their energy and creativity work FOR them, the future is bright. And Odd.