Blitz on NPR

Driving around upstate NY last week, we tuned into NPR, to hear Samuel Bazawule talking about the one thing he wanted as a young kid growing up in Ghana: tapes of Tribe Called Quest, de la Soul, and the Jungle Brothers. And more than anything else, he loved Public Enemy.

Samuel Bazawule? Yup, that's Blitz the Ambassador. For "most African families," he says, "it's all about education. It's really about having the standard jobs: the doctor, the lawyer." So of course, he went to Kent State, and graduated with a business degree. But he found himself drawn back to rap, to rhyming.

We sat in the car, eating blueberries intended for a tart, listening to that story. I was trying to convey to my partner, who grew up in Bombay, why this story resonates for so many '80s kids from Africa: rap told us that across the water, there were these Someones, saying it smarter, harder, and sometimes cruder. And we wanted to say it like that, and be like that. Not our tame, boarding-schooled, uniformed, behaved selves, headed for degrees in medicine, law, and engineering. We wanted to engage as they did, and recognise our part in 'it' (whatever that 'it' was). So when my pal from down the street in Kitwe, Zambia blasted some old school rap on his beat box at the university we both ended up in Iowa, a Southside Chicago guy showed up at the dorm room, wondering why we were behind times, but…still, cool enough. We weren't 'African' in Zambia, but in Iowa, we were becoming just that – because we loved the same music, and wanted to engage with the message  - at whatever juvenile level we could, at the time.

Here's Blitz on NPR, speaking about how 'complex rhymes' helped him memorise whatever he had to for classes in Kent State, and how he now teaches rhymes to kids as a substitute teacher whenever he's not recording.

Photo Credit: Tobias Freytag