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Akala Interview
RnB/Hip Hop | Thursday 15th December 2011 | Osh
Akala has just finished a tour with Nas and Damien Marley and is now on the road with Dead Prez, this talented British musician has lots to say aswell as being very talented with his word play. Now Akala can talk a lot, but he talks a lot of sense i thought I'd see how far we could go in the 5 minutes that we had, but i realised that the world needs more than that for Akala.
Hey, how’s it going?
Yeah I’m really good, looking forward to carnival actually. It’s interesting because people forget why it even started. Just for the record it did start because of the immense racial violence in that area. They killed a gentleman then claimed it wasn’t the first gentleman they had killed just because he was black and he was walking by. So when the conflict ensued after he was murdered, Claudio Jones and all those guys came on board and they decided to start a positive festival to promote a positive image of the area, and that’s what created Notting Hill Carnival. So a lot of youths go to the Notting Hill Carnival, and the irony now of the in-fighting amongst young boys in England, particularly at carnival, is quite interesting considering why carnival started.
So people need to recognise the history.
Yeah, people need to recognise that carnival is here because of racism, because of the racial oppression that our grandparents suffered when they came here. Carnival is one of the manifestations of that and it’s turned into the second biggest street festival in the world. It’s starting to be colonised, it’s starting to become something that isn’t about Caribbean culture anymore which is interesting because if we have a festival for Asian culture for example, which would be a beautiful thing, I don’t know how much there should be heavy metal floats or this or that. It’s not about saying it’s in any culture, it’s about saying that if this is for Caribbean culture then let it be for Caribbean culture. Let’s not start trying to internationalise it and co-opt it like is always done with so-called black culture.
Yeah, they were always trying to take things away from carnival, putting on big events elsewere on the same day.
Yeah, putting on big events the same day in South London and in Hyde Park. It’s uncomfortable for people for immigrants to have such a big presence in this country, a lot of people just don’t like it.
For real, but there are lot of people from the ends who do remember what it was like a long time ago.
Yeah I love to see the floats and the sound-systems and get my rastaman dance on - that’s carnival for me!
Yeah some places never change. So, there are a lot of people out there generally just talking shit on the mic, and as far as I’m concerned you’ve been keeping it real for a long time, but there’s a lot of success in the UK right now.
Define success.
There’s people on the road to potential success, there’s a lot of urban artists out there in the top 10, and people doing number ones - there’s things happening all the time for UK artists on an international level. Do you think that some of the smoke might clear and there might an opportunity for some more real artists to come through in a while because of this hype.
Well we have look at what’s happening, this isn’t the first time this has happened and I think we’ve got a short memory. If we look back to 10 years ago with So Solid, Pay As You Go, Heartless Crew, Genius Crew - 10, 15, maybe 20 garage acts got signed, Urban music was the shit for a minute.
What happened?
The problem is we’re not doing something with a foundation like jazz music, reggae music, real hip hop music - the only reason commercial, cheesy hip hop can exist now is because of what Public Enemy and Wu Tang and KRS1 have all done for the last 40 years, because of the credibility that hip hop is built on, the cheesy shit can exist. But we’re forgetting that you can’t go backwards, you can’t start off cheesy and go back to credibility. Rock music has a credibility, so you can have cheesy bands like Busted because you’ve got Radiohead, and it doesn’t affect the whole genre. In the UK I think we’ve never quite understood that with Urban culture which is why none of our cultures have had the permanence that African-American or African-West Indian cultures have had because we’ve tried to build a culture off cheese and charts. It’s cool, I’m not knocking them, good for them - get your money, do your thing. But do I think in 40 years people are still going to be buying the records the way they’re buying Bob Marley records? I think the artists themselves would tell you themselves that isn’t the case. Until we build a culture based on a genuine movement representing who we are, a genuine voice with a message, we’ll never have something that has any lasting success.
Is there anybody else carrying that torch with you?
Yeah! Ty, Swiss, Klashnekoff, Low Key, Black the Ripper. There’s so many guys that are doing it, I just think it takes one person to become visible enough doing it. There’s a lot of people who aren’t who they are pretending to be - and that’s the truth. I do workshops in jail so when men are telling me, “If I had an education I probably wouldn’t even be here,” - it’s fake. We have to start saying that, actually, celebrating destroying your own communities is fake. We live in the hood because of specific socio-economic policies of the governments that we live in. We don’t live in council estates out of choice, let’s not pretend that it’s our choice because we don’t even own it. When the council knock it down and rebuild it they’re going to move us out, which is what’s happening in Brixton and Harlseden, it’s happening to all those communities. We’re in Hackney right now, go to Dalston and compare it to ten years ago, there’s nice apartments now - where are they moving everyone? We have to be very careful I think.
Yeah, thanks for talking to us, we’ll catch up again soon!
Yeah definitely, thanks.
