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$cantraxx, Commercialization and the Great Gostosa Swindle

Posted by on Jul 30, 2009 in Uncategorized | 26 comments

As promised, Gostosa. Along with the Q-BASE line-up, her identity has been released. The bio on her site (www.djgostosa.com) is so dramatic it’s almost a Hollywood box office hit, the amount of meant-to-be sexy pictures is so large it’s almost a Playboy issue. Time to investigate.

Let us start with a detail that the rest of the hardstyle world does not seem to have picked up yet. Gostosa, in Brazilian-Portugese, basically means ‘hot chubby’. You know the type – the somewhat plump, but extremely self-assured and thus charming Southern-American lady with the gorgeous behind. ‘Our’ Gostosa seems quite the opposite of that – skinny, made-up, following the Western ideal of beauty. Just one of the many things about her that beg for the question: is Gostosa real?

Of course, half the internet has already answered that question with a firm ‘no’. The other half has no brains, thinks she’s hot and doesn’t care. Yet what proof is there for her being ‘fake’?

First of all, let’s consider her biography, which is to be found on her own website. In typical broken hardstyle English, it tells the dramatic story of Sindy, who has been born and raised in Brazil. She’s so poor that she doesn’t even have a surname, apparently. Anyway, after five years of saving, she buys a flight to Gran Canaria, eventually meets Headhunterz and the rest is history. She apparantly earned her money by cleaning up a local club in the morning. Her desire to leave Brazil already developing in primary school is another detail that makes it all just a little too sweet ‘n easy.

Okay, so far, we only have a site that’s taken care off suspiciously well, a launch straight into every major DJ’s CD map, and a biography that seems just a tad too dramatic to be true.  Some, however, are convinced that she already made her first appearance on an ’07 SWAT flyer. Here is Sindy.

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Try not to pay attention to her nakedness and not all that big tits, but to her characteristically crooked face instead. Now here is a SWAT flyer.

Several investigative minds point at the face the girl on the SWAT flyer is making and its resemblance to Sindy’s. However, when looking at both girls’ eyebrows and lips closely, one observes a few differences. *Edit/update: we now have confirmation that it is NOT Sindy appearing on the SWAT flyer. See comments for source.*

Now let me state clearly that I think though the story is dodgy, at least part of it is probably true. Of course, Gostosa & co. did their best to make it look as dramatic as possible, but there’s no hard evidence to prove that we really are dealing with a great swindle. Moving on to the ‘ethical’ side of things though, there is a lot more to say.

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Hard dance has by now seen dozens of pretty faces that don’t mean much – Korsakoff and Stephy to name a few. It seems Scantraxx decided they needed their own sock puppet to enter in the competition. At least they are not being secretive about it – even in the ‘clip’ we can all clearly see the production work is handled by Headhunterz. Still, the development worries me. So much time and money has been invested into Gostosa – a shiny website, promotion, production, and so on – it seems hard to believe Scantraxx does not believe to make a lot more out of it. And this is a prime example of the kind of commercialization the true fans don’t like to see – drawing in casual fans with a pretty face and a pair of tits. Even though beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it takes just a minute or so on Partyflock to realize that people are falling for it by the hundreds.

The productions themselves are actually quite good, from what we have heard so far. The question, now, is what direction things will take from here – will Sindy join Headhunterz in the studio, learning to produce for herself, eventually becoming a respected and valued addition to the Scantraxx team? Or will she keep on being just a DJ, content to capture men’s hearts at parties, face of commercialization in hardstyle?

In the first case, we can all shut our gobs and enjoy the music – she was just lucky to meet the right people and get launched like this. In the second case, well… in the name of all people who truly enjoy music, instead of just listening to it, I’d like to ask all record labels – this is not aimed just at Scantraxx – to stop being whores. Of course, since the very existance of the record industry, this has been an issue – but for good reason: hardstyle will die like hardcore and jumpstyle before it if it gets too big.

Don’t push it, guys.