Cowering under a statue called ‘Belgium Bringing Civilisation to The Congo’, one of four large golden effigies in the entrance of hall of The Royal Museum of Middle Africa in Tervuren near Brussels, there’s a sculpture depicting a miserable African native, naked and blatantly ‘savage’ in the estimation of the colonial artist who fashioned it. Baloji, one of the most innovative rappers and video producers to have emerged from Africa in recent years, loiters next to this unseemly pair before our interview, tall and pensive in a two-piece suit of dark blue plaid, a peach pink shirt and elegant Puma trainers.  It’s a telling trinity: Europe the pompous ‘father’, Africa the down-trodden ’son’ and Baloji, the holy ghost or ‘super sorcerer’, the meaning of his name in Swahili, standing there all cool and dapper, like an embodiment of a young and creatively ambitious Africa which is ready to consign the cruel nonsense of colonialism and post-colonialism to the vaults of history where they belong.

Baloji is due to start filming his next video, a radical Africanisation of the Marvin Gaye song ‘I’m Going Home’, in the endless vaults of the Tervuren Museum itself, a scary place full of stolen fetishes and serried ranks of game trophies where irony lurks mischievously like a grimacing ghost monkey.  Baloji has even persuaded the Museum to part-fund the filming, a monumental feat in itself.  But that’s Baloji in a nutshell. Few other African artists have demonstrated such bone-headed tenacity in the face of indifferent labels, managers and public servants in their relentless drive for quality, innovation and creative power.  “What takes two weeks for Kanye West, takes me a year,” he says.

Once a member of Starflam, one of Belgium’s most successful hip hop crews, Baloji has been ploughing his own furrow for the past five years. He produced his first solo opus ‘Hotel Impala’ in 2007 and is currently limbering up for the worldwide release of his new album, ‘Kinshasa Succursale’.  It’s an ambitious attempt to marry hip hop with an glittering casket of African and African disapora styles, from mellifluous soukous through snaky funk and bumping ragga to the raw and rasping sounds of traditional Congolese music. It hits you a bit like Congo’s answer to The Beatle’s ‘White Album’, one of Baloji’s all time favourites.  Several tracks, including the other-worldly ‘Karibu Ya Bintou’, which rides an alien riff by Kinshasa’s finest, Konono No.1, are unlike anything that has ever come out of Africa’s musical imagination.

But it’s Baloji’s videos that reveal the true extent of man’s energies and creative power.  Self-funded, filmed on location in The Congo by the Belgian directors Spike & Jonze and cameraman Nicholas Karakatsanis, his clips for ‘Independence Cha Cha / Le Jour d’Après’ and ‘Karibu Ya Bintu’ are like mini masterpieces, short stories in celluloid, that draw power from Baloji’s fascination with cinema and photography (his cousin Sammy Baloji is a famous Congolese photographer).  Names like Almodovar, Jarmusch, Ken Loach and Francis Ford Coppola trip lightly from his tongue, with enthusiasm rather than pretence.

He was born Baloji Tshiani in Lubumbashi, south eastern Congo, in 1978, the product of an indiscreet liaison between a rich businessman and a hotel chambermaid.  At the age of three he was sent to live in Belgium, first in Oostende and then in the grim mining town of Liege, with his step family.  When Baloji was seven, his father lost most of his assets in an ethnic war that ravaged the east of Congo, and promptly disappeared from his life.  “Every day I wondered where he was,” Baloji says. “He was my only link with my own blood.”

I ask what it would have been like to meet the ten-year-old Baloji?  “Horrible,” he replies with a rueful laugh.  “I distanced myself from my family.  I was angry and aggressive. I failed all my tests at school, so they considered me retarded.”  He began to run with the Sicilian hoodlums of the Liege ‘hood, getting up to no good.  “Worse than that, I just had nothing to loose.”  He ended up in a special school for delinquents run by nuns, but said goodbye to formal education at the age of 15.  “In fact, I learned everything with the nuns,” he claims without irony.

Then rap came and saved him from the worst.  Thanks to his brothers, who danced professionally with the band Technotronic of ‘Pump Up The Volume’ fame, he discovered American

Baloji in the main lobby of the Musée Tervuren. (c) Andy Morgan 2011.

and then French rap.  Tonton David and the Marseille crew I Am where huge early influences. They taught him that his flow needn’t be dumb and simplistic.  “This was the first time I heard music that talked about people like me and my mates,” he tells me.  His first rap outfit, Les Malfrats Lingquistiques (‘The Linguistic Hustlers’), morphed into Starflam and Baloji became something of a Belgian hip hop heartthrob.  Meanwhile, living above a legendary record store called Caroline Music in Liège did wonders for his musical education. “I heard everything…PIL, Kraftwerk, Queens of the Stone Age, The Smiths…those guys really helped me.”

As grim, grey and racist as life on the cold plains of Belgium could be, Baloji can thank his adoptive country for his broad musical education and eclecticism, which is almost unique in the African music sphere.  Until recently, however, he hated soukous, the Congolese-born gold standard of post-independence pan-African pop.  “For me it was the worse music in the world,” he tells me.  Nonetheless, when he received a three page letter from his mother out of the blue, in 2007, his Congolese heritage came back to into the foreground of his life with a vengeance.  “She alluded the fact that I had been sent to Oostende as a child,” Baloji says. “To the city of Marvin Gaye. That’s how I discovered his song ‘I’m Going Home’”  The song seemed portentous and it spurred Baloji to return to his roots and record an album, a kind of soundtrack without a film, that would tell his mother what his life had been like over the past twenty years.  That’s how ‘Hotel Impala’ was born.

Baloji went ‘home’, to the Congo, to give the record to his mother in person.  He met her in a restaurant in Lubumbashi, dressed “like a little prince.”  But his mother couldn’t understand why he wasn’t a rich and successful careerist, like his father had been, rather than the struggling musician that she saw before her.  The meeting was a disaster, and Baloji is still working hard to build bridges.

“I want to make music that is very African, and very modern,” Baloji tells me.  “You have to be proud of who you are.  Rappers sample Bob James, Curtis Mayfield etc, but it means more when Talib Kewli or Kanye West samples them because that’s their heritage.  But we Africans also have an interesting heritage, which has a richness and a diversity that is huge and under-exploited.  We can also go deep into it and make it modern, celebrate its value, just like the Americans..”

It needed a special of sorcerer to conjure up that mix of heritage, modernity and blistering lyrical flow…a baloji perhaps, tall, dapper and fearlessly stubborn.

Andy Morgan. (c) 2011

First published in The Observer, UK – November 2011.

SMOD: (L-R) Ousco, Sam, Donsky

“Africa needs to speak out right now,” says Ousco calmly over a crackling phone line from Bamako. “Africa must stop crying.” It’s a neat little summary of what African rap is all about: No mincing words or metaphors. No ancient musical traditions that cosy up to power. No decadent ghetto fabulous fantasies. None of that. Just plain rhyming about the simple truth that everyone can see out of his or her window. “Africa is hungry, OK?” Ousco continues, making sure I’m getting his gist. “In Europe and America, people eat so as not to feel hungry. In Africa, people eat when they’re hungry. Everything is very very different, you know?”

Ousco is the ‘O’ in SMOD, a trio of hard working musician MCs from Bamako, the capital of Mali in West Africa. He met Donsky, the ‘D’ in the name, Mouzy the…ok, you’ve it now…and Sam at the Lycée Biya, a progressive high school in the Sogoniko district of the city. The four friends were fans of hip-hop but that was nothing special. Everyone below a certain age in Bamako was falling in love with hip-hop back in the late 1990s, along with the rest of Mali, and Africa for that matter. “Tupac Amaru Shakur, Snoop Dogg, Notorious B.I.G, The Roots, 113…they were our idols,” Ousco recalls.

The new rap sounds came in through the few liberal cracks in Mali’s media and cultural landscape, like the pioneering show ‘Generation 21’ on the national state TV channel ORTM, the radical Radio Kayira…’The Radio Station of the Voiceless’, or foreign channels like Black TV, M6 and NRJ.  They took hold of young kids who loitered on street corners around a charcoal brazier and a small bubbling enamel tea pot full of extra strong sugary tea, the kind that puts fuel in your motor in all weathers.  Such a cluster of aimless youth was called a grin in local Bamako street slang. There music was discussed, pirated cassettes were exchanged, frustrations were aired, and raps were born. Sam, Ousco, Donsky and Mouzy hung out in Faladié, one of Bamako’s most happening hoods, with its immense market and inexhaustible street-level energy. “We used to organize these little free flow jousts between the rappers,” Ousco remembers. “There was always a rap showdown or a dance showdown happening somewhere, and we always took part.  Sometimes we came first or second, sometimes lower down.”

Mali’s homegrown rap scene was young but spurting. Veterans like King Massassi, Fanga Fing and Tata Pound had pioneered rap in the local language Bamanan, with plenty of rude boy French thrown in, from the early 1990s onwards. “Tata Pound were the first,” Ousco states firmly. “And, tell the truth, we saw them as leaders.” But hip hop was still an illicit adventure for most kids, the kind of thing they wouldn’t dream bringing back home to meet the folks. “We were like clandestinos. My parents didn’t know anything about my rapping, right up until the time when our songs started to be played on the radio and our videos appeared on TV. Rappers were considered delinquents at that time.”

The four friends were beginning to get quite a following in their locality, so they had to solidify and find a name quick style. They opted for the acronym route and settled on SMOD. That was in 1999. Then, just a year later, Mouzy cut loose and left for Europe, like so many other Malians of his age.  The remaining trio stayed loyal to the name as a token of their lasting friendship with the departed Mouzy.  “Sometimes we even do interviews with Mouzy,” says Ousco reassuringly.  “In a way, he’s still in the band, and still in our hearts too.”

Sam, Dronsky and Ousco found a space to breathe and rehearse in the house of Sam’s parents, who happened to be the imminently world famous blind Malian couple Amadou & Mariam.  “We got together there every evening, in ‘seventh heaven’, on my parents’ roof,” Sam recounts.  “That terrace has always been our place of creation, of inspiration.” The trio were grafters right from the start. Sam says that hard work was the most important lesson his parents ever taught him. “Music is a tough career. Nothing is ever preordained and you have to persevere.”

The first fruits of this work ethic appeared in 2002 with the release of the group’s debut cassette ‘Dunia Kuntala’ (‘The path of life’).  It was recorded at Bamako’s famous Bogolan studios, with help from Amadou and Mariam’s French manager and friend, Marc-Antoine Moreau, and the French producer / arranger, Marc Minelli.  SMOD’s appearance at both the opening and the closing ceremonies of that year’s Cup of African Nations, which was held in Mali, brought national fame knocking at their door. They then toured all over the country, supporting the Afro-disco coupé décalé sensations Magic System, as well as Tata Pound and others.  “It was great to play in places like Gao and Timbuktu,” reminisces Ousco. “They really know their hip hop there.”

At that point, SMOD were following the rap textbook pretty closely. It was all about fat beats, baggies, white trainers, b-boy stances, skewed baseball hats and no instruments. The style is evident on the video clip for their song ‘Dakan’, which appeared on the band’s second album ‘Ta I Tola’ in 2004. But the independent spirit of African rap asserted itself in the flow. ‘Dakan’ accused the country’s leaders of being a bunch of robbers, and the video was censored by ORTM. It was typical of SMOD’s lyrical concerns. “We talk a lot about politics, about corruption and injustice,” Ousco asserts.

Everything changed when Sam decided to learn the guitar in 2004. “We couldn’t beat the Americans at their own game,” says Ousco. “We had to try and come from our own culture. So Sam took up the guitar and we tried to mix African singing into the rap.”  SMOD developed their own hybrid, which they call ‘Afro-Rap’, with rich tactile instrumentation and bubbling afro-centric rhythms providing a warm bed for their lyrical flow. It’s not American, or French, or even recognizably Malian. But it’s fresh and African. “In some ways I think we opened a breach,” says Sam.

SMOD got to know Manu Chao up on the roof, in the balmy air of the African night, above the raucous hubbub of the streets. He was in Bamako in 2005 to record the hit album ‘Dimanche à Bamako’ with Sam’s parents. One evening, when most of the household were already in bed, Sam found Manu strumming his guitar down in the house, so he invited him up. Manu was charmed by these three hard-working dreamers, with their radical lyrics that reminded him so much of his own. Being a night owl, Chao spent most of the following evenings up top, buzzing on tea, chatting, jamming and minting new friendships. “Whenever he come up to the roof to take some air, he would see us there rehearsing,” remembers Ousco. “Jeez! – he said, “Those guys are real warriors!” One of SMOD’s songs, ‘Politic Amagni’ (‘Politics Are No Good’), found its way onto ‘Dimance A Bamako’.

Back in France, Manu Chao sent SMOD an email telling them that he really liked what they were doing and would love to produce an album with them, if they had the songs

“We wrote back saying that if he was interested, we were interested too. To be honest, we didn’t who Manu Chao was at the time. He was an international star, but he wasn’t known in Mali.”

Manu Chao came back six months later and recorded SMOD with his little portable studio, up on their roof, or down in the house. His credo was, “You don’t mess with what happens on the terrace.”  In other words, keep it simple, natural, rooted. Then Manu took the tapes home with him to mix. “ The album ‘SMOD’ was released in May 2010 in France, and will soon be released in the UK.

SMOD started touring Europe in 2008, supporting Touré Kinda, Matthieu Chedid, Tiken Jah Fakoly, Salif Keita, Amadou and Mariam, Oumou Sangare and Manu Chao amongst many others.  They also took time to experience the French hip-hop scene and see an old idol like Snoop Dogg, in concert at The Zenith in Paris.

But far from being hypnotized by the bright lights of Paris and Europe, SMOD’s attention is still focused on their homeland. “To help hip-hip in Bamako,” Ousco explains, “We’d like to set up a studio with some French friends, because there are plenty of rappers who have no means of their own. We want it to be free. And we’re hoping to do more tours in Africa. That idea is dear to our hearts. We care about what’s happening around us. I mean, look at Ivory Coast. They have two presidents! We always said that Africa should never have celebrated the 50^th anniversary of its independence.  How can you talk about 50 years of independence when there’s no real democracy.”

In many ways, SMOD, along with many other Malian rappers, embody a new spirit, a new freedom of expression, unchained by old social constraints or the need to kow tow to the rich and powerful.

“Hip-hop is rebel music,” Ousco affirms. “It came along because things weren’t working right. Back in the day, the griot sang the praises of the King, except that the king wasn’t thinking of his people any more. Many people were marginalized and rejected and it was those people who became rappers. They said to the king, “Your power may be fine and all that, but there are people dying of hunger. And we who are from the ghetto, we want something better.””

Andy Morgan. (c) 2011

Artist Biography for Because (France) – March 2011.

If you type ‘Little Mogadishu’ into Google, you get an instant overview of an exploded people with Somali communities implanted like shards into the poorer parts of cities all over Europe and North America. Refine your search to ‘Little Mogadishu + Toronto’ and you’re transported to the high-rise grime of Dixon Road, between Kipling and Islington Avenues, with its halal butchers, exotic groceries and underground khat dens run by refugees from Hargeisa, Kismayo, Baidoa and Mogadishu. It’s a ‘hood that keeps local law enforcement and social services busy whilst feeding the distant boasts of politicians and city fathers who prefer to airbrush the daily grind of their struggling immigrant populations into a happier vision of Toronto as one of the most successful multi-cultural conurbations in the world. It’s also home to the largest population of Somalis outside Somalia itself.

Back in the early 90s, K’naan (‘The Traveller’) Warsame made the painful journey of exile with his mother from Mogadishu via Harlem, New York, to Dixon, Toronto, at the supposedly tender age of 12. The fact is that tenderness and innocence had already been all but garrotted from his life, outwardly at least, by the experience of growing up in the crossfire of Somalia’s brutal clan wars. His close encounters with hand-grenades, trigger-happy militiamen, prison and death have already been well recounted in the countless interviews that Africa’s brightest young hip-hop star has given since the release of his blisteringly candid and original debut CD ‘The Dusty Foot Philosopher’ in 2005. These experiences alone would have been enough to feed the mind of any talented street poet for a whole lifetime, but K’naan is the child of a globalised not a localised world, and his music is unique and fascinating because it articulates the confrontation between the contrasting brutalities, philosophies, poetries and lifestyles of Africa and North America. To fully understand him you need to consider both Mogadishu and Little Mogadishu.

“Dixon is world famous now,” K’naan tells me in a tired gentle voice over the phone from his hotel room in Berlin, where’s he’s concluding a heavy-weight promotional tour of Europe to support the release of his new live album ‘The Dusty Foot On The Road’. “It’s still all Somali. Growing up there, all my friends were survivors and we all loved hip-hop because it was the only thing that spoke to us. But the ghetto story that we were hearing couldn’t speak to the magnitude of the struggle that we had experienced back in Somalia. We would all snicker and laugh whenever we heard (puts on an exaggerated homey ghetto voice): “In my neighbourhood, you know, I see somebody get killed one day!” And we were just like “Man, somebody just gotta say something. This is ridiculous.” So my friends would look at me and be like, “Man, you pretty good at this stuff. Why don’t you say something.”

This battle for recognition in the hierarchy of the hard is the subject of one of K’naan’s best loved tunes, ‘What’s Hardcore’, with its immortal line “If I rhymed about home and got descriptive / I’d make Fifty Cent look like Limp Bizkit.”’ But what might seem like ghetto-boy posturing was actually part of a deeper struggle to gain respect. “In Dixon we’d have many clashes with gangs from other neighbourhoods and different parts of the world,” explains K’naan. “We were relentless in our pursuit of being respected and having dignity. We kind of redefined our reputation and reintroduced the idea that Somalis weren’t necessarily people that you could push around. Dixon was the neighbourhood that this sentiment came out of, and it’s also where my music came from, so…”

In inner-city ghettos like Dixon, respect is a protective shield, and so the desire of K’naan and his fellow travellers to earn that shield by pointing out that local struggles amounted to nothing more than a picnic on a sunny day compared to life in K’naan’s native Wardhiigleey (‘River Of Blood’) district of Mogadishu is understandable. But when the time came to take his music to the world, K’naan felt frustrated with the inevitable drooling focus of the western media on all the ‘exotic’ real-life stories of bullets and blood that peppered his repertoire.

“I made music initially in order to get over the past, and to deal with some of the pain by transforming it, sort of like pottery, and shaping it into beautiful melodic music. Later, when the whole press and interview thing came along, the titles were like (said with mock eagerness): K’NAAN SHOULD HAVE DIED A LONG TIME AGO…ha ha. Why??!! How come they’re killing me all the time? It was like this insane sensational thing going on. And culturally we don’t believe in that. If I’m so much better for surviving then what about my friends who did not survive. How do I console that? Were they not good enough humans or something? And I was always saying, look, if you want to speak about Somalia and war, you have to speak about the poetry, and the beauty and the ocean as well.”

So by winning the ghetto war and gaining the respect not only of his neighbours but also, eventually, of the wider North American rap community, K’naan inadvertently set up another struggle, to establish himself as a bard of beauty and soul as well as war and death, which he now pursues with characteristic eloquence. When I ask him if he reckons he might even outgrow hip-hop and adopt another vehicle for his poetry, the question reveals an uncertain future.

“That’s what I don’t know,” he says with sigh. “And I’m not saying that for drama. Hip-hop was urgent for me, especially when I needed that verbal barrage to explain these scenarios which I couldn’t otherwise. And that need is still part of me. But I also love other things that I do now, more in the vein of Fela meets Dylan, or something. I feel that’s as natural for me as hip hop.”

Whatever musical direction K’naan eventually takes, his verbal skill seems certain to remain his most impressive and bankable asset. Whether in his lyrical flow, or in his interviews, K’naan wields his adopted language with the deft ease of a master troubadour or a laureate philosopher and it’s this talent that sets him apart from many of the more mundane ghetto rhymers. Songs like “My Old Home” paint his lost homeland with novelistic depth and accuracy.

There could be something pre-ordained about this talent for words, however, if you consider Somalia’s deep historical attachment to poetry. “The country teems with poets,” wrote explorer Richard Burton who spent six months in the Horn of Africa in 1854. In what was essentially a nomadic culture, where an abundance of material possessions was only an encumbrance to mobility, poems were the gemstones of family, clan and tribe. K’Naan, whose grandfather was the gifted poet Haji Mohammed, and whose aunt Magool was one of Somalia’s most famous singers in the 1970s and 80s, recognises the debt he owes to traditional Somali poetry, with its treasury of proverbs and sparkling imagery. “When I sing certain phrases like “my own home smells of good birth” and things like this, they owe a lot to the traditional poetry. Like, when a birth is successful the feeling of it is a sense. It’s very proverbial, and very connected to that old way of seeing things. And naturally, not always consciously, that world comes out in my lyrics but it comes out in a way that is kind of now, kind of current. And so it feels both old and new.”

Thanks perhaps to his millennial poetic heritage, K’naan attributes a power to poetry that goes far beyond any base desire simply to outshine his rival rhymers. “The articulate have a home,” he explains. “A shelter from the storm. Back in Somalia, we dwell in this beautiful Shakespearean African kind of world. And when you’re completely snatched from it by violence and migration it’s like you’re skinless in this world, and really feel like you’ve left your home.”

A few years ago, K’naan took a year off to read books, holing himself up in a cabin far from the noise of the city and the distractions of the telephone and television. He devoured tomes by modern cultural theorists and linguists like Ngugi wa Thiongo, Eduardo Galliano and Neil Postman, and novels by afro-American authors like Toni Morrison. “It was kind of like an important developmental stage for me,” he remembers.

I ask him whether this dive into deep intellectual waters inadvertently distanced him from the ‘innocent’ wisdom of the street, of the dusty-foot philosopher in tattered trousers and faded shirt running about the dirt-roads of Africa, who K’Naan praises like a kind of alter ego. “Yes, I understand what you’re saying,” he answers. “But the innocence kind of weaves itself into a sense of values, informed by the street and by underprivileged philosophy, and perhaps that is no longer my entire point of reference but it has become interweaved with my value system.”

Yet the bonds which tie K’naan to his troubled home remain visceral and unbroken. Asked whether he would go back if the situation improved and he replies “Instantly.” He rails against the years of ham-fisted foreign intervention that only served to fuel the arrogance and firepower of Somalia’s clan lords and expresses qualified praise for the Islamic Courts Union who last year managed to open a small window of peace after 17 years of bloodshed. “It was an amazing accomplishment.” K’naan asserts, “They managed to do what the international community had failed to do for 17 years. I’m not necessarily a supporter of Islamic groups, but I’m a supporter of anyone who is able for a second to stop the pillaging and the rape.”

At this year’s Glastonbury festival, K’naan took part in the Africa Express extravaganza on the Park Stage on Saturday night, alongside a host of fellow African music luminaries including Amadou & Mariam, Rachid Taha, Baaba Maal, Toumani Diabate and Tinariwen who were invited to share the platform, on an equal footing, with the likes of Damon Albarn, Fat Boy Slim, The Magic Numbers, Billy Bragg and Hard-Fi. It was an unforgettable evening, hailed by Emily Eavis no less as “one of the best things I’ve seen at Glastonbury in the past 10 years.”

The evening highlighted one of the dilemmas facing artists like K’naan, who sometimes find themselves classified as ‘world music’ with all the baggage of ghettoisation, stylistic confusion and philosophical prejudice that the term can carry with it. K’naan’s sorely noted absence at this year’s BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music poll-winners concert at the Barbican in London was received in some quarters like a declaration of defiance, a terse cry of “I am who I am!” even though the man himself clearly explained that his no-show was entirely due to the birth of his first child. But what does he think needs to happen before the immense musical talent and potential in modern-day Africa can be accepted in Europe, North America and other parts of the world on an equal footing with the pop, rock, urban mainstream.

“I suppose that question is more for the manufacturers of cool culture,” he says. “That’s kind of where there needs to be a redefinition. Because a lot of cool young culture has no connection to the sources of things, the origins of thing. They don’t know about it and anything outside of the Eurocentric languages is already ruled out. To change that you would readjust the system of cool so that it’s not stuck in this situation where either it’s the poor in Africa who understand it or it’s the privileged in the west that have the leisure to go and check it out. It needs to be in the streets here as it’s in the streets in Africa. You need something like an American hip hop street star connecting with an African artist in a real sense, not in the manufactured sense that these record labels often deal with, to actually introduce these artists to how the mother of all streets survives, to the things that we deal with, to our street language, and to the flame that is in our hip hop over there. If you did projects that connect street to street, rather than street to privilege, then you would break a new cultural barrier, and have new ground to work on.”

Street to street, Wardhiigleey to Dixon, it sounds like K’naan’s already out there rhyming, philosophizing, breaking new ground.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2007

First published in The Independent – July 2007