Akala Talks Twitter, Hip Hop, and Spice Girls | The Russell Howard Hour

my first guest tonight is one of the most dynamic voices in the country akala is a hip-hop artist best-selling author and social entrepreneur in 2006 he won best hip-hop act at the mobile awards with his debut album it's not a rumor since then he's released three more albums a hit biography and has become known for his passionate activism appearing in multiple tv debates and recently released his debut novel the dark lady [Music] ladies and gentlemen please welcome my carlo [Applause] [Music] hello how are you doing i'm very well thanks for coming on the show no no worries it's an absolute pleasure to have you here i've been trying to get you on the show for a while yeah yeah yeah it's just been i don't know it's been difficult we're trying to get some new music together and trying to find the right time but i feel like we found the right time yeah yeah excellent i'm looking forward to it and with this there's lots to talk about so first things first you've got a new novel out to this i do yeah the dark light is your first novel isn't it first novel yeah the dark lady yeah what's it about so it was inspired by a shakespeare series of songs called the dark lady sonnets and it was inspired by that and then backed up by some great scholarship a scholar called miranda kaufman wrote a book called the black tudors and obviously i started the hip-hop shakespeare company in 2008 so i've always been into the elizabethan era in general and so a lot of the research i did about life in london then and just the elizabethan theater and how things were i kind of wanted to write a novel set in that world but i didn't want it to be about an adult so i imagined that this woman had a son and it's around her son who's basically a genius from what was at the time london's worst slum or one of the worst slums a place that was colloquially alone as the devil's gap and it so that so is it is it based on your kind of knowledge of history or is it sort of fabricated or is it a bit of both so it's historical fiction so a lot of the stuff that happens in the book so for example they go to see hamlet and they go to see romeo and juliet um they are witness to lots of things that happened in the elizabethan era right but they happened across a period of five or six years i've condensed them into one summer so there's a note at the end of the book to talk about where i've bent history and where i haven't right the map and the layout of london is is based on how london really was at the time um the accounts of what occurred when they go to the theater is really based on accounts of what happened at the time it was much more rowdy like going to the theater back then wasn't like going to the theater now yeah well it was it's so different like and the stuff around elizabethan theater was like properly wild wasn't it yeah i mean everyone who owned the theater also owned a brothel yeah i mean it was no it's true it's fully part of the underworld like it was outside of the city yeah you know down there on the south bank next prostitution and the baby isn't it like going to watch wicked and then getting a hand job seems so it's another meaning but that's what people that's literally what people were doing it was just really really underground really gritty i mean you entered the city gates of london back then yeah and there were rotten body parts of executed dissidents on the city gates on the entrance into london yeah so all of that sort of stuff that i've put in there about how gritty london was about how much of an immigrant population there was in a time about there being a french quarter uh about just the relationship between the state and the people being very very repressive the extreme poverty and so on all of that is based on the primary source material what elizabeth london was really like because that's the fascinating thing that people might have an assumption that elizabeth and britain is is purely white this really isn't the case is it well it's not just that that's true that that wasn't the case there was a as i mentioned earlier the book the black tudors deals with the black president specifically but also london was already an immigrant city as much as that would annoy people i mean the africans that lived in england at the time because britain hadn't fully yet entered the transatlantic slave trade you have a man like uh john blank who was at the court of uh henry vii he was paid we have receipts for his work the guy graham in my book is based on a real character an african who was living in elizabethan england who made needles and was a worker i mean there was racism obviously but there's it's important not to project back the last three or four hundred years of history into a period in which a lot of those things were not foregone conclusions so you've spoken a lot about um uh racial disparity in the last and and obviously it's it feels like the conversation has become mainstream in the last couple of years how does that feel um yeah it's good that there's a conversation um what will come out of it where america will go from here where the world will go from i don't really know um as someone who's art and music and work has always spoken about those kinds of issues the last couple years have been been pretty fascinating but what the legacies of 2020 so to speak will be remains to be seen it's kind of that thing like where you can sort of you you still see with footballers taking the knee and people getting angry about that even also just an odd thing to get upset about yeah you know for decades for obviously it's you know coming from america but for decades footballers in this country people from banana skins at john barnes and remember at the time john bonds and other black footballers were seen as sort of the troublemakers for saying anything and that there's always been a sort of strain of of that that's the funny thing is people today will look back and say oh it was pretty bad in the 80s wasn't it let's be honest yeah but that's what was said at the time and even more fascinating when you go back even further than that to much more extreme versions say in the 1920s in america you realize the same sort of thing was being said i don't complain about lynching it you know other people get lynched too so it's not about race kind of thing yeah um so there's always been sort of this strain of of of denial and and and it just is what it is do you feel like like a a a sort of a weight of responsibility to talk on an issue like that um i do but i've i've chosen to have an opinion i have a very particular i had a very particular upbringing i went to a special pan-african saturday school i was politicized very early my parents were very active in the anti-apartheid protest i grew up in a special theater called the hackney empire i don't think it's fair that basically every black person that goes on tv has to have an opinion yeah sure but but i think the difference is i've chosen to always have an opinion because i i grew up in the sort of vein of a chuck the gil scott heron bob marley dennis brown i never really knew till i got older that musicians didn't have an opinion on everything because all of the music i listened to growing up just had an opinion um i think it's only really in the last 20 years that music has probably perhaps not done that so much that must have been such a fascinating moment to go from like highly politicized songs to like listening to the charts yeah of like what the [ __ ] the spice girls like listen i don't know ziggler cigars i'm no not the smiley skills you know the spice girls were cold but i hear you like listen i remember zig zig yeah shout out to mel b um no listen now listen that kind of music has its place but i'm saying in my in my household maybe it's because of how my parents were yeah dad ran a sound system it was it was very heavy and so it's only when i came out into the world i realized this is what musicians do the first person i ever saw give a lecture was an african-american rapper called krs-1 his keras one stands for knowledge reigns supreme over nearly everyone so a lot of what was pushed sort of as mainstream map on what became mainstream rap those of us were hip-hop heads so to speak that isn't our possession of rap and isn't what we grew up on yeah i always grew up thinking of course rappers have an opinion or read books carrots wrote books too wu-tang you know if you're if you're united kid wu-tang you used to use words like benevolent and cometh in a rap song like very overtly deliberately shakespearean language yeah even though half of them have been to prison they've been shot they came from one of the worst housing projects in america all of those cliches but they really made it cool to be smart or in a jamaican context the jamaican dancer emcee called bounty killer you know he'd rap about the violence in the ghetto one minute and then he literally had a song called book and how important it is to go to school so i never saw that as a sort of contradiction so one thing to love about you is you're not afraid to debate and converse with people who hold different opinions to you in a world where people are trying to be shut down for having the wrong thing to say you're more than willing to to joust with them and i really like that um everyone draws the line somewhere there are some people i consider beyond the pale sure and i wouldn't want to give them a platform in terms of debating with them but i do also believe like one of the things of getting older is you also realize you're not that smart or that important and actually there are other people who have legitimately different views on everything economics history politics so on and so forth i tried to own that and that's why i suppose i'm open to and i also think lots of people have never been intellectually challenged before a lot of the time and so often when people are presented with a particular set of views particularly if it's balanced by or backed by evidence and logic and a clear argument and someone's been thinking about for a very very long time i find lots of people i end up talking to have never come up against somebody like me from a background like mine and not even aware of the whole pan-african saturday school movement and all that sort of stuff but i think it's important to uh the alternative to to to debate is not pleasant but that's the crucial thing isn't it that that we live in times where everything has to be black or white and everything is absolute and yet everything but do we things are changing all the time i think i wouldn't take twitter for the real world completely 100 agree with you but what's being sold in papers is twitter and all this and all the little small stories and also if people spoke as rudely in real life as they did on twitter a lot more people get their teeth knocked out like yeah twitter's not the i would say i'm in fact no one steal this i've got a chapter in a new book i'm working on or a sort of device that i'm calling twitter versus the barbershop right how people talk on twitter versus how men talk in the barbershop very different because in the barbershop there are consequences for being rude yeah and there are consequences for being disingenuous or overly sarcastic or failure to understand or at least attempt to understand someone and so look twitter's twitter and it just encourages sort of adversarial and social media in general gives that anonymous nature where you can be rude and not get punched in your face exactly and and therefore sadly face to face people are often much more civil and and much more uh aware that there's there's a level of rudeness beyond simplisticness beyond which is much harder to go when you're when you're face to face and talking to someone do you feel a sense of pressure upon you to be a certain way sometimes i was thinking then could you talk about liking the spice girls for example do you have those cold buffs two become one what that's a rhythm don't don't play with me no but i'm saying it's a picture do you have kind of guilty pleasures that people wouldn't assume that a carla is into i mean ish no i like angels by robbie williams you know i watch friends um if people knew in real life i'm i'm i'm i pride myself on being really really silly yeah like in real life like anyone who knows me is like i'll just be talking to you and i'll just do really silly things for no reason i don't know why i'm very zany in real life look you've got to be childlike not childish [ __ ] yeah i i you know i'll go carnival like go trinidad i drink my rum i do my thing but it's it's i don't know i'm not um i do feel a pressure to be a certain way sometimes but that's a prison of my own making in a way like i'll be in the party sometimes and people will come up to me and say oh my god i'm so surprised to see you out and i think what you think because i read books i'm a hermit like i've given people the impression that i'm like a shaolin monk or something and maybe that's my fault maybe i need to rap about sex more often or something i don't know like i have sex yes i do you know somebody someone asked me that question in an interview and it was a man i was like bro do you think i'm a monk just because i don't yeah i don't choose he said do you have sex he didn't say exactly that question but it was like it was almost like he was talking to me as if i was an asexual being right because like the assumption is particularly as a as a rapper if you're not rapping about sex all the time you're not having any and i was like no i just i don't and i don't really have a good explanation as to why like i love quote unquote for one of a better word ratchet dance or music like jamaican dance or music anyone listens to it you know is the most sexually explicit music in the world and i love it some of my favorite music in the world it's great i'm not actually judgmental of other people's um ability to credibly make music that is overtly and brilliantly and viscerally sexual but it just isn't your i just can't do it yeah if i could do it if i was prince and i could sing which i can't right if i could do all of that i would but but i can't credibly do a prince and make a song about head and it'd be brilliant just wouldn't work for me it doesn't doesn't sit with everything else i've done yeah um that doesn't mean that i i don't know that i don't enjoy certain things you know yeah of course but i have even the fact i can't see it right shows you that i have i don't know i've uh it's like i'm scared that my mom's watching us all right but yeah so interesting i talked to you for ages man um and you're actually gonna do a live performance for us later we are yeah i'm really looking forward it's an ensemble piece yes um so i because i'm you know i've made over the last couple of years i've actually finally got back to music i haven't really seen him in six years so i've recorded more than an album probably two albums but i don't know how they're coming out yet or what the process is and i'm putting all that together but then i did this feature for swindle so swindle did a is a great uk producer we did a whole live band album with a set of great musicians sort of jazz inspired um live hip-hop album and we're going to be performing a song nice i might you're going to see that a bit later ladies and gentlemen the fantastic akala you

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Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 13 2021