COLORSxSTUDIOS

What gave you the confidence to listen to music that felt true to you?

It wasn’t really confidence or bravery—these artists were just too irresistible to resist. I just really liked them, that was it. I think the first time I really experienced that deep feeling was when ‘The Whole World’ by Outkast and featuring Killer Mike played on the radio. I kept missing the name of the track. Every time I was in the car, I wanted to hear that song so I could figure out what it was called. We have a certain attraction to things that we feel relate to us, and this includes music. That’s what I felt when I discovered Outkast and artists like them.

Who are some of your biggest influences?

The music my father and mother used to play really influenced me. I was never reluctant to listen. When I started to go digging through music stores myself, I mainly looked through the CDs to find interesting artwork. That was how I came across work from Digable Planets and Gift of Gab.

In middle school, I went through a phase of really trying to fit in because I got made fun of a lot. I tried to give what other people were listening to—artists like Lloyd Banks, 50 Cent, Lil Scrappy, and Bone Crusher—a chance. Later, I found music that felt more true to myself, by artists like N.E.R.D., Digable Planets, and Outkast. Outkast was the first duo that deeply resonated with me. There were other artists I enjoyed, but I could see myself in Outkast. Lupe Fiasco, and Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) were also an important part of this very pivotal turning point in my musical journey. Lupe in particular was the catalyst for me to start merging my poetry and rapping.

When and why did you start to make your own music?

I started writing poetry in the equivalent of second grade. My first poem was called ‘Africa’. By fifth grade, I had switched from African to public school. There, my cousin got me to write a rap which we called ‘The Spinners on My Truck Go Round and Round’.

At my high school there was a computer lab that had GarageBand. It meant we could make our own beats. My cousin’s father was a DJ, and he had lots of CDs that had instrumental tracks with vocal stacks on them. Subconsciously, I started making connections between these tracks and the African music that my father was playing, which also had stacked vocals. One day, someone messed up the computers, and all of the loops and software instruments disappeared. I started to rap and use my own voice as a placeholder in my compositions, thinking that I would replace it when the instruments came back. But they never did. As a result, vocals became a staple part of my style.

Tell us about DoloBhana, the artist collective you founded in Brooklyn.

When I signed with Atlantic Records, I started this art community called the DoloBhana with my DJ friend dashMOON. It was intended as an incubator for creative growth. There were around seven to eleven artists involved, and we all lived together and focused on our respective crafts. Everyone was so talented, and I grew and learned so much from them. Some of the members included Siimbiie Lakew, who I’ve collaborated with numerous times, Michael Excell, who starred in all the music videos for ‘Gorgeous Fortune’, my first project with Atlantic, and my older brother, who’s an amazing musician. They’re such a cool bunch of people, and beautiful friends that I have to this day.

To date, you’ve released projects including ‘TheKAMAU-CASSETTE’ (2014), ‘TheKAMAU-CASSETTE: ŭRTH GōLD’ (2017), and ‘TheKAMAUU-CASSETTE: MíXD GRēēNS’ (2019). How did you approach creating these albums? What was your creative process like?

My approach to ‘ŭRTH GōLD’ wasn’t traditional or methodical. After releasing it, I realized that I was, like I mentioned before, expressing myself rather than communicating. On my next project, ‘KAMAU-CASSETTE: MíXD GRēēNS’, I consciously tried to communicate more. There are moments I feel I was communicating effectively in my earlier projects, but it was more purposeful in ‘MíXD GRēēNS’. I had a similar realization when making my latest project that’s coming out, so I tried to focus on communicating more aggressively, to the point where I told the producer that if there were any songs he didn’t understand, I would delete them and start over.

For my first EP with Atlantic, ‘A Gorgeous Fortune’, I worked with a producer group called ‘No Wyld.’  We pretty much went into their apartment and we stayed there until the project was done. My debut studio album, ‘Lacuna in The House Of Mirrors’, was made using a similar process: I stayed with Mick Schultz, my producer, and we did everything together. So ‘A Gorgeous Fortune’ and ‘Lacuna in The House Of Mirrors’ mirror each other in a way. This said, there’s not a very strong throughline through all of my projects. There are consistencies, but they are more unconscious, habitual things that are a part of my personality rather than an actual method. For my next project, which will be a musical, I’d like to experiment with coming up with the story I want to tell before I actually start working on it.

Is there one lyric in the song which is particularly meaningful to you?

In the second verse I say: “I could teach you how to get a lot of cheese, I got the dialect of dairy in my diary, I’m from a lactose intolerant community.” It means that the actions we perform demonstrate that we are not able to tolerate or handle ‘cheese’ or money. Then I say: “But I want to circulate the units in the unity, the continuity of opportunity, stacking bands, opportunities that configure with your family, I can show you how to get the figures in advance, I don’t see nobody else but us giving a damn.” That last line sounds very simple, but I think it’s easily the most important lyric in the song. There’s not one group of people on the planet that are so benevolent that they will actually go out of their way to help Black people. When we take charge of ourselves and the people closest to us, whether they’re immediate relatives, cousins or people we live with, our actions can become contagious locally. Right now, be a hero for yourself: “Because I don’t see nobody else but us giving a damn.”