‘Possessed of an intense lyrical flow’ **** The Times
‘Smart, addictive and right on the mark’ **** The Independent
‘Tight, funny and impeccably delivered’ Daily Telegraph
‘Pushes things forward. Now let’s see Akala’s peers follow his lead’ 8/10 NME
‘You’re about to witness the second coming of real rap’ **** Blues and Soul
The streets gave birth to hip hop, and the streets are where it lives. But the corporate world stole rap. Now Akala’s stealing it back.
‘Garbage’ is how Kingslee ‘Akala’ Daley, 22, describes ‘what was once, not that long ago, the most charismatic, enigmatic, energetic, lyrically creative music on the planet’, because it has turned into a reflex idiolect for plastic players with false values and arid imaginations, who know the price of bling but the value of nothing. With his debut album, ‘It’s Not A Rumour’, (released May 1st 2006 on Illa State Records), Akala attacks a lazy, retrograde rap scene from all sides, intent on moving it both forward and back into what it was in the first place – a generational voice for change, empowerment and salvation, for himself, his people and for the streets.
Akala makes claims for himself that a cursory listen to a track such as ‘Shakespeare’ will convince you are justified. In double-speed couplets over the grinding breakdown of Tomcraft’s trance smash ‘Loneliness’, he spits lyrics that bend the laws of street linguistics from slang to poetry to science and back again into the manifesto for tomorrow’s hip hop.
Kingslee Daley chose the name 'Akala', a Buddhist moniker that means 'immovable', yet Akala the artist/MC/entrepreneur is anything but: he is a mutable, restless hip-hop polymath born under the sign of Sagittarius who has rolled through school (straight As at GCSE), the sports scene (he played for West Ham and Wimbledon) and the fast-food trade (he ran an Ayia Napa jerk joint), all before he turned 20. He is full-beaming energies onto the business of hip hop, producing his own videos, distributing white labels, mixtapes and founding his Illa State label. Akala designed the Illa State logo: a Union Jack in the black, gold and green of the Jamaican flag. This colour scheme couldn’t be more appropriate: in the Jamaican original, gold represents natural beauty and wealth; green signifies resources and hope; black denotes hardships endured.
The next project is here: ‘It's Not A Rumour’ is an album that crystallises everything that’s gone before it and smashes through current rap conventions. It draws on a spectrum of influences from balladry and soul to trance, punk and far beyond. You’ll hear echoes of Jay-Z, Curtis Mayfield, Sil Austin, Naughty By Nature and cult NY folk band The Honey Brothers. You’ll also hear Akala shift into a territory unfamiliar to rap: elemental guitar rock built on distorted chords and thundering drums. Music hasn’t been this gregarious since Aerosmith & Run-DMC, or Public Enemy & Anthrax.
With ‘It’s Not a Rumour,’ what you hear really is the sound of hip-hop’s most engaging new imagination expanding into a full album. On ‘This Is London’, Akala takes off where The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ left off - check that chiming guitar intro - and lifts the lid on the grimy cheek-by-jowl of the capital. On ‘Stand Up’, a incendiary Van Halen-style riff soundtracks a call-to-arms for every UK ghetto: Moss Side, Longsight, St Paul’s, Toxteth, Chapeltown. For ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’, Akala samples doomy, Black Sabbath-style guitars and attacks modern fakery in all its forms. On the sublime ‘Hold Your Heard Up’, he lays down a hard-lived autobiography over a rolling Isley Brothers soul groove. But it’s on ‘Shakespeare’, and that inspired Tomcraft sample where Akala busts out the level of lyricism that skyrockets him beyond the reach of any contemporary. It is, like says, ‘Shakespeare with a nigga twist.’
True to hip hop’s original template, ‘It's Not A Rumour’ is alternately reflective and anthemic, stone to the bone and rocked-out all the way to one louder. It may move you to insurrection, to tears or just nearer to the centre of the dancefloor. Just as New York crews rapped over AC/DC’s ‘Back In Black’ way back when, Akala’s album synthesises the raw rock dynamicsm with the lyrical ingenuity of rap with no compromising either – that’s why its appeal extends far beyond the narrow hip hop scene into a far broader music sphere.
Akala started as he meant to go on – controversially. Back in ’04, he rapped from the top of a police car in the video for his breakout white label, ‘War/Banga 4 Da Streets’, a raw freestyle on inner city deterioration. Channel U viewers went nuts on the text line. On his incendiary mixtape, he spat hot-blooded Phd grammar over C.R.E.A.M, Dead Prez and other bangers. By early 2005, he booted ‘Roll Wid Us’ out across London’s pirate radiosphere, tore up clubs and supported 50 Cent. The pressure grew some more. In October he released ‘Bulls#!t’ – a frank, hooky discourse that set modern life to rights. The track splintered out of soundsystems and climbed the Karmadownload rankings with no promotion or radio playlisting. Like Akala says himself - it’s not a rumour.
His debut album arrives when the time is precisely right. It bristles with the insight, honesty, energy and lyricism of someone who’s lived a life most who struggle to fit into 50, let alone 20 years. On ‘Carried Away’ Akala packs 22 years of experience into three minutes of dazzling lyrical dexterity, flipping the word ‘carried’ into an equivalent 22 different contexts, all of them heaftfelt. Akala grew up in the ragged roads of Camden, hassled by police, humiliated by teachers and watching his mother deal with breakup, cancer, discrimination and poverty.
He is the kind of person who adapts circumstances to his advantage, forcing opportunity from adversity. That’s the mark of ambition. His role models are Bob Marley, Muhammed Ali, Jay-Z – icons who took themselves from grime to grandeur. ‘I can see, I can hear, I can rap,’ he says. ‘I can open a business - how can I not be ambitious?’ He shares the same starry self-assurance, penetrating intelligence and luminous good looks that lifted his sister Niomi – Ms Dynamite to you – to success.
Ambition infuses Akala’s writing style, which is in fact a non-writing style – he has never committed a single lyric to paper. When he downloaded years of internal dialogue, reflection and intuitive lyricism into the Chelsea studio of production partner Reza Safinia - collaborator with Wu-Tang Clan, Timbaland and Kylie Minogue - ‘It's Not A Rumour’ is what resulted: an album whose depth of thought and brilliance of delivery are matched its breadth of musicality.
Tracks were produced in collaboration with an underground production elite whose pedigree speaks itself: Danny ‘Bigfoot’ Langsman, best known for his giant hit ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’. Dash, Croatia’s premier hip hop producer. Mikey J, star producer for Kano and The Mitchell Brothers. And Blackjack, one of London’s hottest producers, the man behind Sincere’s underground smash ‘That’s Not Gangsta’.
In 2005 Akala debuted the set across UK clubs and festivals (Leeds, Reading, V) with a live band and a DJ, warming up for Saul Williams and Common Sense among others. The crowd reception proved rock and rap are no longer mutually incompatible – not when Akala’s behind the microphone, in any case.
‘The only music which seems to capture my imagination is rock,’ Akala says. ‘I’m listening to a lot of different shit, from White Stripes to Editors, still my all time favourite has to be the Chilli Peppers, their old shit’s still on a whole other level to everyone else.’
‘It’s Not A Rumour’ is hip hop, but not as we know it. ‘When I make music I strive to make hip-hop in the truest sense of the word,’ Akala says. ‘Hip hop is music that knows no boundaries, music that effortlessly fuses contradictive cultures, styles, genres, and points of view. Rap - hip hop’s long lost son - has forgotten all of those things and failed to recognize the family traditions of integrity and honesty.’
But ultimately, ‘It's Not A Rumour’ is the realised vision of a singular talent hip hop’s street-level community recognise as Akala, Kingslee Daley, 22. Like KRS-One said, rap is something you do; hip hop is something you live. ‘It's Not A Rumour’ is the manifesto for tomorrow’s hip hop and tomorrows life. Get with it, or get rolled over. It's your move.
David Jensen Photography:
https://www.davidjensen.co.uk/
