1) DoubleThink. It's a shock to the system - a sonic kick to the groin deli… Read Full Bio ↴1) DoubleThink. It's a shock to the system - a sonic kick to the groin delivered with force and precision by someone trained in music's equivalent of deadly martial arts. It's not often that an album comes along that shares debts to Radiohead, Aphex Twin and Depeche Mode as strongly as to Public Enemy, the Wu-Tang Clan and Rakim, but the 26-year-old rapper, label-owner, and educator Kingslee Daley has made it his life's work to challenge preconceptions and buck prevailing trends; and he isn't the sort to allow himself to be fitted into any kind of mould. Breaking down the culture of cliché and stereotype that smothers the genre he loves is a major part of the mission he's taken on, and gives impetus to this third album of pointed, perceptive hip hop music from the convention-defying emcee.
At first glance, Akala is someone straight outta hip hop central casting. The often angry child of a broken home, his schooling was punctuated by rows with teachers. After teenage years spent playing football (he was on the schoolboy books of both West Ham United and Wimbledon), he dropped out of college. Aged 12 he saw his best friend's brother get a meat cleaver in the back of the head while sitting in the chair in a barber's shop, a tale touched on in the DoubleThink track Find No Enemy. "What interests me, looking back now, is that nobody stopped cutting hair," he says. "Even though I hadn't seen that before, I just accepted. I'd heard so much and knew so many people who'd been shot or stabbed that it was just a part of life."
So far, so rapper-backstory-clichéd. But it's in the gaps between these de rigeur hip hop CV bullet-points that the real Akala can be found. His step-father, a stage manager at London's Hackney Empire, would sometimes take the pre-teen Akala with him to work: so the wide-eyed kid got to stand in the wings, soaking up Sarafina! and Shakespeare. Despite being put in a special-needs class at six years old - he still doesn't know why - he fed a ferocious intellect with self-taught history and philosophy. His response, at 13, to racist remarks by a teacher was to write to the headmaster and governors to complain.
DoubleThink is partly a concept album inspired by the three classic novels of dystopian fiction: George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, "with a little bit of The Matrix in there too." The record takes its overall tone - the edgy paranoia, the sizzling menace, the spine-tingling tension - from these literary classics and transmutes their atmospheres into musical form. From Welcome to Dystopia's static-laden distortion to Peace's simple, sparse piano accompaniment, via the electro-funk keyboards and metal guitar riffs of Faceless People, the breadth of musical ambition is matched by the rich variety of topics Daley addresses.
“The only way we can ever change anything Is to look in the mirror and to find no enemy”
Race, politics, self-deception and social conditioning are among the recurring themes on a record that presents its concerns as barbed comedic satire. But in tackling those topics Daley finds himself confronting the issue that defined his MOBO Award-winning debut, It's Not a Rumour and the acclaimed follow-up, Freedom Lasso: lamenting the decline of hip hop as a social and political force, angrily restating the genre's credentials as the best, most powerful means of delivering what KRS-ONE called Edutainment.
Edutainment is something Daley knows more about than most. As well as releasing music on his own Illa State record label, Akala (the name means "immovable") is a teacher himself. He recently set up the Hip Hop Shakespeare Company, running successful Bardic workshops in schools. His prowess at communicating effectively with young people has won recognition in unlikely circles: among recent clients for his consultancy work has been the organising committee of the 2012 London Olympics.
His music has always reflected Akala's personal struggles - against ignorance, against racism's divide-and-conquer imprimatur, and against the dumbing-down of the musical form that helped provide him with the answers he needed. "I remember when Wu-Tang Forever came out," he says, casting his mind back to 1998, and the second LP from the Staten Island collective. "And I remember going to buy books because of references I heard on there. I literally studied that album and went away and learned because of it. They weren't some obscure, underground rap group - that was the first rap album to go to Number One in the UK. What made hip hop powerful was its education, its culture, its musicality and its intelligence. Yet immediately after that, it went from being about history and philosophy and culture to being - literally - money, cash, and hoes."
Indeed, Akala's refusal and inability to conform to prevailing stereotypes means that his records are largely ignored by the sections of the media that proclaim to speak authentically of the "urban experience": in that regard, he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Saul Williams and Gil Scott Heron, artists who he considers inspirations as well as heroes. But while the message is vital, Akala knows that it has to be delivered wittily and attractively, too: edutainment is mostly entertainment, after all.
So DoubleThink distils these messages in cogent and weighty blasts of musically fierce, lyrically adroit hip hop, but it's also an excitable, effervescent listen. There are, of course, some harrowing moments: in Yours and My Children, a track reflecting three months Daley spent in Brazil, he talks about favela children being killed by police; and that meat cleaver to the head in Find No Enemy isn't the only violent image on a record that refuses to pull any punches. But Akala's unquenchable appetite for intricate wordplay and his teacher's instinctive awareness that heavy topics need to be got across lightly mean that, despite the often serious points, the record is an affirmative and often explosively joyful experience.
There's XXL, which relentlessly chips away at the clichés but has some fun with them at the same time; Peace, a collaboration with the classical pianist Paul Gladstone Reid, MBE, which provides musical and atmospheric contrast to the juddering electro-rooted rap that sits either side of it; and, right at the end - the thought Akala wants you to take away from the album - there's Not That Serious, a jaunty slice of popped-up '80s-style buzz, poking fun at Akala's furrowed-brow reputation without suggesting you shouldn't care about the issues he wants you to consider. At the risk of descending into another one of those pesky clichés, there really is something here for everyone.
Akala touches on race, class, sexism, history, war, hip-hop culture and what it is to live in a world one knows to be inherently unequal, yet rounds it all off not with accusations or anger but inward self-analysis.
"My mum's a white Scottish woman and my dad's a black Jamaican, so for my life not to be about bringing people together would almost be a contradiction in terms," he says. "I want to reach everybody but do it truthfully and honestly. That's got to be your ultimate aim as an artist - that's what the best artists do. I'm not saying I'm there yet, but that's what I aspire to."
2) Lithuanian industrial band on Findesiecle media label.
At first glance, Akala is someone straight outta hip hop central casting. The often angry child of a broken home, his schooling was punctuated by rows with teachers. After teenage years spent playing football (he was on the schoolboy books of both West Ham United and Wimbledon), he dropped out of college. Aged 12 he saw his best friend's brother get a meat cleaver in the back of the head while sitting in the chair in a barber's shop, a tale touched on in the DoubleThink track Find No Enemy. "What interests me, looking back now, is that nobody stopped cutting hair," he says. "Even though I hadn't seen that before, I just accepted. I'd heard so much and knew so many people who'd been shot or stabbed that it was just a part of life."
So far, so rapper-backstory-clichéd. But it's in the gaps between these de rigeur hip hop CV bullet-points that the real Akala can be found. His step-father, a stage manager at London's Hackney Empire, would sometimes take the pre-teen Akala with him to work: so the wide-eyed kid got to stand in the wings, soaking up Sarafina! and Shakespeare. Despite being put in a special-needs class at six years old - he still doesn't know why - he fed a ferocious intellect with self-taught history and philosophy. His response, at 13, to racist remarks by a teacher was to write to the headmaster and governors to complain.
DoubleThink is partly a concept album inspired by the three classic novels of dystopian fiction: George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, "with a little bit of The Matrix in there too." The record takes its overall tone - the edgy paranoia, the sizzling menace, the spine-tingling tension - from these literary classics and transmutes their atmospheres into musical form. From Welcome to Dystopia's static-laden distortion to Peace's simple, sparse piano accompaniment, via the electro-funk keyboards and metal guitar riffs of Faceless People, the breadth of musical ambition is matched by the rich variety of topics Daley addresses.
“The only way we can ever change anything Is to look in the mirror and to find no enemy”
Race, politics, self-deception and social conditioning are among the recurring themes on a record that presents its concerns as barbed comedic satire. But in tackling those topics Daley finds himself confronting the issue that defined his MOBO Award-winning debut, It's Not a Rumour and the acclaimed follow-up, Freedom Lasso: lamenting the decline of hip hop as a social and political force, angrily restating the genre's credentials as the best, most powerful means of delivering what KRS-ONE called Edutainment.
Edutainment is something Daley knows more about than most. As well as releasing music on his own Illa State record label, Akala (the name means "immovable") is a teacher himself. He recently set up the Hip Hop Shakespeare Company, running successful Bardic workshops in schools. His prowess at communicating effectively with young people has won recognition in unlikely circles: among recent clients for his consultancy work has been the organising committee of the 2012 London Olympics.
His music has always reflected Akala's personal struggles - against ignorance, against racism's divide-and-conquer imprimatur, and against the dumbing-down of the musical form that helped provide him with the answers he needed. "I remember when Wu-Tang Forever came out," he says, casting his mind back to 1998, and the second LP from the Staten Island collective. "And I remember going to buy books because of references I heard on there. I literally studied that album and went away and learned because of it. They weren't some obscure, underground rap group - that was the first rap album to go to Number One in the UK. What made hip hop powerful was its education, its culture, its musicality and its intelligence. Yet immediately after that, it went from being about history and philosophy and culture to being - literally - money, cash, and hoes."
Indeed, Akala's refusal and inability to conform to prevailing stereotypes means that his records are largely ignored by the sections of the media that proclaim to speak authentically of the "urban experience": in that regard, he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Saul Williams and Gil Scott Heron, artists who he considers inspirations as well as heroes. But while the message is vital, Akala knows that it has to be delivered wittily and attractively, too: edutainment is mostly entertainment, after all.
So DoubleThink distils these messages in cogent and weighty blasts of musically fierce, lyrically adroit hip hop, but it's also an excitable, effervescent listen. There are, of course, some harrowing moments: in Yours and My Children, a track reflecting three months Daley spent in Brazil, he talks about favela children being killed by police; and that meat cleaver to the head in Find No Enemy isn't the only violent image on a record that refuses to pull any punches. But Akala's unquenchable appetite for intricate wordplay and his teacher's instinctive awareness that heavy topics need to be got across lightly mean that, despite the often serious points, the record is an affirmative and often explosively joyful experience.
There's XXL, which relentlessly chips away at the clichés but has some fun with them at the same time; Peace, a collaboration with the classical pianist Paul Gladstone Reid, MBE, which provides musical and atmospheric contrast to the juddering electro-rooted rap that sits either side of it; and, right at the end - the thought Akala wants you to take away from the album - there's Not That Serious, a jaunty slice of popped-up '80s-style buzz, poking fun at Akala's furrowed-brow reputation without suggesting you shouldn't care about the issues he wants you to consider. At the risk of descending into another one of those pesky clichés, there really is something here for everyone.
Akala touches on race, class, sexism, history, war, hip-hop culture and what it is to live in a world one knows to be inherently unequal, yet rounds it all off not with accusations or anger but inward self-analysis.
"My mum's a white Scottish woman and my dad's a black Jamaican, so for my life not to be about bringing people together would almost be a contradiction in terms," he says. "I want to reach everybody but do it truthfully and honestly. That's got to be your ultimate aim as an artist - that's what the best artists do. I'm not saying I'm there yet, but that's what I aspire to."
2) Lithuanian industrial band on Findesiecle media label.
Where I'm From
Akala Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴
Yo, OK, OK, Yeah nice, OK
Where I'm from its not presidents, I'm trying to see the queen
Different toilet same shit, they're fiending for the big cream
Scheming their dough to the ceiling, till the no longer breathing
And they do shit to make us look heathen
The reason?
Born to a broken home, tears of my mother
Only those that no cos they've been there through all the hunger
Others judge us and snub us
They shouldn't
Growing up in my house, don't think you could of
Mummy hustling
, no one ever did us no favours
Except the neighbours
We used to borrow sugar and some toilet paper
Embarrassing when its my turn to knock
But its cool, what don't kill you only make you stronger
Know they say I'm conscious my words are positive
Its not that, to me its just the truth is obvious
And rather than talking bollocks about who I'd be clapping
I'd rather tell the truth about what actually happened
Every bodies killing five hundred man in the booth
The roads are bad but
If as much man was dying in the streets as was dying in the booth
They'd be nobody left
Stop with dishonesty man
All my home-boys locked up, everybody who's lost a family member
Ain't' nothing sweet in the streets
Here in England now we got bloods and crips
I'm ashamed and embarrassed to have to admit
Our grandparents got chased cos they were black
Now we kill each other for colours in the union jack
Shit
This is not the sates, no American dream
Just a British nightmare with a similar theme
Same scheme, same fiend, same end to the dream
Same church, same hurt, same mother that screams
With the only difference being there's no opposites here
No Jigga no Simmons, no positives here
It is obvious we are not prospering here
What's horrible? I don't no if it's possible here
Our grandparents came here invited by our majesty
Tragically just to be treated like savages
No Blacks, No Irish and of course no dogs
And if it ain't' cleaning toilets then of course no jobs
With all the Teddy boys attacking us and calling us wogs
Boys in blue at it too, apparently that's not on?
And here we are fifty years later, nothings improved
Its like we've gone back a step, like we chasing our roots
Here we are fifty years later nothings improved
We've gone back a step
But we ain't' chasing our roots
Don't know where you come from
You don't no where your going
Teach the yout dem man
Value of self, Understand?
When your watching your TV
Learning your history book
Listen, listen, Because...
Its just a bunch of lies that we perpetuate ourself
Being from the hood is not a definition of self
Circumstances don't define you, you define you
My baby diamond shines so bright it'l blind you
That's why I'm everywhere, fronting where rappers would never dare
No bodyguards, trust me my people I'm never scared
Not cos I think I'm hard, just that iv seen your vision
A million thugs in prison would die for my position
They get there so frequent for various reasons
When we're told we ain't shit we really believe it
Whether by another brother, a father, a mother
The television, or the teachers, police or the judges
Its covering the fear that they already no
You can only break a diamond with a piece of the same stone
Where strong beyond measure, ask your professor
How do you make a diamond? A billion years of pressure
And a diamond is found where? At first within the rough
So no matter where were at there's a diamond inside of us
Forget repping the ends, what the ends do for you?
Your worth so much more, If only you Knew, You Know?
All this ends rah, rah, rah, nonsense
That's exactly what it is just nonsense
All these rappers on TV talking shit about how much they bust their strap and Yah, Yah, Yah
You do not listen to them, their talking nonsense
They live in big nice houses
They got security, and bodyguards, and people to take care of them
Its an illusion, you understand?
And all the bitches, and the chains and the neck lasses in the video
Its just bollocks man, That's nobody's reality
When did the hood become so sweet?
That's no hood iv ever been in
Understand? The hood I no is miserable
The hood I no everybody's trying to get out of
So why are all these rappers dying to get back in it? And dying to be rude-boys?
When all the rude-boys are dying to be legitimate
So, Its just nonsense man, just be honest
Where I'm from its not presidents, I'm trying to see the queen
Different toilet same shit, they're fiending for the big cream
Scheming their dough to the ceiling, till the no longer breathing
And they do shit to make us look heathen
The reason?
Born to a broken home, tears of my mother
Only those that no cos they've been there through all the hunger
They shouldn't
Growing up in my house, don't think you could of
Mummy hustling
, no one ever did us no favours
Except the neighbours
We used to borrow sugar and some toilet paper
Embarrassing when its my turn to knock
But its cool, what don't kill you only make you stronger
Know they say I'm conscious my words are positive
Its not that, to me its just the truth is obvious
And rather than talking bollocks about who I'd be clapping
I'd rather tell the truth about what actually happened
Every bodies killing five hundred man in the booth
The roads are bad but
If as much man was dying in the streets as was dying in the booth
They'd be nobody left
Stop with dishonesty man
All my home-boys locked up, everybody who's lost a family member
Ain't' nothing sweet in the streets
Here in England now we got bloods and crips
I'm ashamed and embarrassed to have to admit
Our grandparents got chased cos they were black
Now we kill each other for colours in the union jack
Shit
This is not the sates, no American dream
Just a British nightmare with a similar theme
Same scheme, same fiend, same end to the dream
Same church, same hurt, same mother that screams
With the only difference being there's no opposites here
No Jigga no Simmons, no positives here
It is obvious we are not prospering here
What's horrible? I don't no if it's possible here
Our grandparents came here invited by our majesty
Tragically just to be treated like savages
No Blacks, No Irish and of course no dogs
And if it ain't' cleaning toilets then of course no jobs
With all the Teddy boys attacking us and calling us wogs
Boys in blue at it too, apparently that's not on?
And here we are fifty years later, nothings improved
Its like we've gone back a step, like we chasing our roots
Here we are fifty years later nothings improved
We've gone back a step
But we ain't' chasing our roots
Don't know where you come from
You don't no where your going
Teach the yout dem man
Value of self, Understand?
When your watching your TV
Learning your history book
Listen, listen, Because...
Its just a bunch of lies that we perpetuate ourself
Being from the hood is not a definition of self
Circumstances don't define you, you define you
My baby diamond shines so bright it'l blind you
That's why I'm everywhere, fronting where rappers would never dare
No bodyguards, trust me my people I'm never scared
Not cos I think I'm hard, just that iv seen your vision
A million thugs in prison would die for my position
They get there so frequent for various reasons
When we're told we ain't shit we really believe it
Whether by another brother, a father, a mother
The television, or the teachers, police or the judges
Its covering the fear that they already no
You can only break a diamond with a piece of the same stone
Where strong beyond measure, ask your professor
How do you make a diamond? A billion years of pressure
And a diamond is found where? At first within the rough
So no matter where were at there's a diamond inside of us
Forget repping the ends, what the ends do for you?
Your worth so much more, If only you Knew, You Know?
All this ends rah, rah, rah, nonsense
That's exactly what it is just nonsense
All these rappers on TV talking shit about how much they bust their strap and Yah, Yah, Yah
You do not listen to them, their talking nonsense
They live in big nice houses
They got security, and bodyguards, and people to take care of them
Its an illusion, you understand?
And all the bitches, and the chains and the neck lasses in the video
Its just bollocks man, That's nobody's reality
When did the hood become so sweet?
That's no hood iv ever been in
Understand? The hood I no is miserable
The hood I no everybody's trying to get out of
So why are all these rappers dying to get back in it? And dying to be rude-boys?
When all the rude-boys are dying to be legitimate
So, Its just nonsense man, just be honest
In Akala's song "Where I'm From," the lyrics reveal a raw and honest picture of life in the hood. The first few lines contrast the British royalty with the harsh reality of the people living in poverty who will do anything to make a quick buck. There's a clear message of "trying to make it out of the hood" vibes throughout the song. Akala speaks on his personal experience growing up in a broken family, the struggle of not being able to make ends meet, and the judgment from others. Akala also speaks on the current state of society, with bloods and crips in the UK, and the shame that comes with it. The song's message is about the importance of valuing oneself, and not allowing circumstances to define one's life.
One takeaway from the song is the Queen's disappointment towards her people. Another is the struggle of everyday life in the street, fighting for survival with no resources or support. The song's lyrics hit hard when Akala reveals how black people were chased by their fellow citizens for just being black. He further highlights that the dream of moving to London is no different than that of the US, just a different setting in a different location.
To group it all together, Akala is saying that rappers glorify the "hood lifestyle," which is miserable and something people want to escape. The song continues by speaking to the youth to not get caught up in the illusion of the "hood lifestyle" and claims that the only way to thrive in society is to focus on valuing self and defining oneself.
Writer(s): Steven John Bailey, John Alexander Mcgeoch, Susan Janet Ballion, Reza Safina, Peter Edward Clarke, Kingslee Maclean-Daley
Contributed by Madelyn O. Suggest a correction in the comments below.
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