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British rapper Akala carries on a tradition of musicians as social critics.
British rapper and writer Akala, appearing in both Dunedin and Christchurch this weekend, is teaching kids about Shakespeare and TV hosts about racism. Philip Matthews reports.
The rapper, writer and thinker Akala has a spare 30 minutes in a Sydney hotel room between writers’ festival appearances, music performances and a book he has to finish. Busy guy. He landed just yesterday. Jet-lagged? So he claims, but you wouldn’t have guessed.
He is 35 years old. His real name is Kingslee Daley but the Akala stage name – apparently a Buddhist term, meaning “immovable” – is also the name he writes under and the name he is called when the Sydney publicist hands him the phone.
He was born in Britain in the 1980s, “in the cliched, single-parent working-class family,” as he writes in his book Natives. His mother is Scottish and his father is Jamaican, but they separated before he was born. He grew up in Camden, north-west London, and the first time he saw someone stabbed, he was 12 or 13. People he knew went to prison.
He started releasing music in 2003 and his first proper album came out in 2006. His older sister is the singer and rapper Ms Dynamite. But we’re not on the line to talk about music. We’re here to talk about Shakespeare, British history, media and racism.
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Surprised? There may still be a chunk of the population unable to get its head around the idea that a rapper could also be a legitimate intellectual, such are the stereotypes and expectations. Akala is all too aware of them.
“He’s black, he wears hoodies, he wears a woolly hat, he’s got dreadlocks, he raps,” he says of himself. How could a rapper also be a serious historian, people sneer on social media. But that’s “not an intellectual comeback”.
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‘We forget that Shakespeare wrote the performance poetry of his day,’ says rapper, writer and Shakespeare expert Akala.
His intellectual skills were on display when he appeared on Good Morning Britain in March to debate knife crime with host Piers Morgan. It was remarkable for the calm and steady way Akala challenged prevailing opinions about black youth in Britain. He had facts and figures, he had footnotes and references. He demonstrated how race, not class, still dominates the conversation when people talk about violent crime.
“If a black person does something negative, the entire black community is to blame,” Akala told Morgan and the breakfast TV audience. “A black person does something positive and they suddenly regain their humanity.”
Morgan was quickly nodding along in agreement and offering his own examples of stereotypes, using the topical instance of the Christchurch terror attack. All Islam is implicated in a Isis-inspired attack, Morgan offered, but no-one ever believes all white people are to blame for white supremacist attacks.
“We don’t hear this side of the coin enough,” Morgan conceded.
In its reconciliation, it was an impressive 10 minutes of television. Akala likes to think that even those who disagree with him at least respect that he has bothered to do the research before appearing.
“We live in a dangerously anti-intellectual age when we’re encouraged to think all opinions are equal,” he says. “But my opinion on what it takes to build a decent bridge is not equal to that of a structural engineer.”
Once someone is presented with facts, “it takes a special kind of ignorance to say, ‘I don’t give a crap, I’m going to stick to my opinion'”.
To be fair to Morgan, he changed his mind as new information came to light. But the optics were fascinating: there was Morgan and two well-groomed white women getting an education in racism from a black man in dreadlocks and a woolly hat. The accents also told a story.
“It’s only really in recent years that people who are not posh have been on British national television,” Akala says. “When I was growing up you never had people with Welsh accents, thick Liverpudlian accents or Cockney accents.”
The notion that a rapper could be an intellectual does not seem odd to him. The first person he ever saw give a historical lecture was the African-American rapper KRS-One. There is a tradition of rappers and singers as street scholars and voices of the community. Think of the Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Lauryn Hill. “That social critic has always been my understanding of the musician’s role in society.”
As a social critic, Akala was also one of the first to suggest that the victims of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, which took place near his home in London, were victims of poverty.
The 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, starring Claire Danes and Leonard DiCaprio, showed how Shakespeare can be made accessible.
Shakespeare might feel like a leap, though. Akala founded the Hip-hop Shakespeare Company 10 years ago and he is bringing the show to Christchurch. One obvious way to talk about it is to say that it is a more accessible route into Shakespeare for school kids who might otherwise be perplexed.
Yes, some of the old language can be difficult but the Baz Luhrmann film of Romeo and Juliet showed that if “Shakespeare is done in an interesting and innovative way, it can really penetrate a mass audience and reach a range of audiences still”, Akala says.
“We forget that Shakespeare wrote the performance poetry of his day. His audience was overwhelmingly illiterate.”
He often starts with a quiz, asking audiences if he is quoting a line from Shakespeare or a line from hip-hop. Example: “The most benevolent king communicates through your dreams.” Is that by the Bard of Avon or the Wu-Tang Clan? (Look up his Ted Talk for the answer.)
His rap track Comedy Tragedy History squeezed 27 Shakespeare titles into one song. Does he have a favourite play? Depending on the day you ask, it might be Macbeth or Hamlet or King Lear. Or it could be Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, “and obviously Othello“. He tends to agree that A Midsummer Night’s Dream could be the most over-rated.
His next book comes out of the same fascination. The Dark Lady will be a young adult novel set in Elizabethan London, inspired by Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets and The Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann. “It’s London 500 years ago from an unexpected perspective, with a little bit of magical realism in there. A bit of adventure. It’s my first novel.”
It will be out in 2020. Natives, which appeared in 2018, blended a memoir about growing up black in Britain in the 1980s and 90s with a thoughtful history of racism and British views of empire. It was widely acclaimed. Rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah called it his book of the year.
The last chapter, “The Decline of Whiteness”, is especially relevant. The Christchurch mosque shootings – “Rest in peace to the victims,” he says – have led to useful thinking about white supremacy and the paranoid fears of cultural decline and “white genocide” that feed it.
“People can’t afford to bury their heads in the sand and not assume this is a massive potential threat,” he says. The real danger is if militant movements become married to state violence. “That really would be a tremendous problem.”
Education is the best way to combat it. In Britain, that includes deromanticising the history of the British empire and the myth “that we invade other countries because we love them”, to bring them the gifts of democracy and the rule of law.
“How bloody ridiculous. If we love people so much, let them come and live with us. And recognising that powerful people lie. That is a near universal.”
Or as Shakespeare knew, the powerful get away with everything.
Akala is talking about hip-hop and Shakespeare at Papa Hou (City YMCA), Hereford St on Sunday, May 12 at 2pm. He talks about Natives with Sasha McMeeking from the University of Canterbury’s School of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the same venue at 6pm. More details at wordchristchurch.co.nz. He also has events in Dunedin on Saturday and in Auckland on May 17 (sold out).
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https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/112446768/we-live-in-a-dangerously-antiintellectual-age-akala-on-rap-racism-and-shakespeare