Interview: Grace Atkinson
Photography: NXSH

BAFTA and MOBO award-winning rapper, writer, and political activist, Akala is best known for songs such as ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Fire In the Booth’, as well as his battle discussing racism with EDL’s Tommy Robinson on Question Time in 2013. He has written for The Guardian and The Independent, spoken on Newsnight, and has given lectures at Manchester Metropolitan and Oxford Union. In 2009, he founded the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company.

Grace Atkinson speaks to Akala about the internal conflicts of his success, the ugly facts of modern-day society, and the poetics of rap music.

In his new EP ‘Visions’, Akala refers to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s dystopian novels, as if they are a lesson for how we live today, but he rejects that we’re living in a dystopian age.

“I don’t feel that we live in a complete dystopian anarchy, or a mad dystopian world, but I do think that elements of the Orwell/Huxley worlds exist. The use of popular culture to numb people, the complete lack of trust people have for popular media because they just talk bollocks so much. All these things are there, all those elements that were predicted in those novels or satirised in a way, I think are there.”

Akala tells us what he considers to be the ugliest thing about society at the moment.

“Anti-intellectualism: that ‘My ignorance is as good as your knowledge’. […] I think that’s a very big problem within the ‘post-truth’, that anyone can have an opinion, which is fine, you know, anyone is entitled to an opinion, but not everyone’s opinions are equal. My opinion on science is clearly not equal to Steven Hawkins’, it’s not equal, there is no way around it.”

For Akala, mainstream history is tailored to a specific perspective, a false truth that is accepted as fact.

“When I was in school I was taught that Britain was the first country in the world to abolish slavery which his just completely not true, and that the reasons for the abolition of slavery were all moral which is also completely not true. If we believe that the British government abolished slavery because they were just so moral, then we will believe that the British government is moral today. […] So history can often be a weapon of the ruling class, and I am trying to undermine some of that.”

The rapper has gone also through some conflict of truth with his own personal narrative.

“I got so bored of every young brother, even if he’s got a Saturday job, thinking that he has to pretend he’s a killer. I kind of rebelled against that to a certain degree. Now I feel a bit more centred, I feel like the scene has got a bit more balanced and I can be a bit more honest again. It was almost like a I was lying about my own life, I was not always a good boy, you know, as I admit in the book later, I used to carry a knife. My best friend used to steal his dad’s gun from under the mattress.”

“It’s easy for people to think that I’m not one of ‘those black boys’, it makes it much easier for a lot of people to say ‘He’s different’, you know, and ‘He’s so smart’, and its almost like the rest of the kids are instead treated like, ‘Aw they couldn’t have been like him anyway so whatever.’ It’s accepted as no loss when young people get killed and when they go to prison because they were bad, but I was one of the bad boys.”

As we discuss Akala’s back-catalogue of creative work, he says he disagrees with those that claim that rap music isn’t poetic: “No one would argue that Shakespeare’s words are not poetry.”

He adds, “Shakespeare was written to be performed, so clearly their issue is not someone using rhythm. Clearly their issue is not someone speaking it, because Shakespeare’s work did that, but it is poetry. So I think again it is a thing about class, and cultural contempt for the people producing particular types of music.

“Basically, being playful with language and expanding the boundaries of language and using language to convey a message in a way that is not prose, is poetry. A rapper is someone who performs poems to music. Homer was literally a performance poet, an illiterate, blind singer, [who] is the foundation of western classical poetry. So clearly its not that we think that even people who are illiterate cant be poets, otherwise Homer wasn’t a poet.”

Akala has an exciting year ahead of him, and he spoke about how he works through the internal contradictions of becoming successful.

“It’s a bitter-sweet feeling where it feels like the country is getting worse, it feels like the problems with young people are getting worse, but I feel personally quite privileged. Therefore I feel a duty to try and use that privilege to help other people in any way I can.”

“My art is about the irony of someone like me getting to where I’ve gotten through doing what I do, and then having that weird tightrope as an artist. How do you keep your integrity while being successful?”

“I think it would be wrong to say [someone] has to take a vow of chastity and a vow of poverty for their art to be credible, but, if you are lucky enough to become successful doing what you love, then you should try and give back, you should try and help, you should try and use your voice where you can.”

Akala is preparing for the tour of your new EP ‘Visions’ as well as the release of his first book Natives.

“For me, ‘Visions’ was something really different, it’s a comic book EP, so literally the music is a soundtrack to a comic, and I don’t really think that’s been done before in hip hop. So I’m really proud of it as a project. I think it’s different and innovative and interesting.”

“Natives, yeah, I’m really proud of it as an achievement. It’s the first time I’ve written a book of that length, so obviously I’m really proud of that because it’s not an easy thing to do.”

Natives launches Thursday 17th May, at the o2 Academy in Brixton and Akala comes to Manchester’s O2 Ritz on the 18th April.