Yugen Blakrok and Kanif on Johannesburg’s Underground Scene, the Wu-Tang Clan and Black Panther

Rising Johannesburg rapper Yugen Blakrok catapulted from the local South African stage to a global spotlight thanks in part to an appearance alongside Vince Staples on last year’s Kendrick Lamar-curated Black Panther soundtrack. However it’s her lyrical sorcery and beguiling mix of sci-fi sounds and meditative melodies that transfixes listeners and continues to command the attention of an international audience. Tackling political unrest through rhymes coded in astrological similes and metaphors, Blakrok puts her own spiritual spin on the hip-hop sounds of the ’90s, aided by boom-bap beats provided by long-time producer Kanif. In February of 2019, the young MC released her sophomore album, Anima Mysterium, which translates as “the mystery of the subconscious.” In this edited excerpt from Red Bull Radio’s Peak Time, Blakrok and Kanif speak with Vivian Host about growing up in South Africa, finding inspiration in Zulu history and the metaphysical secrets they’ve unearthed.

Yugen, could you tell me a little bit about growing up in the Eastern Cape? I understand it’s really different from Johannesburg, where you live now.

Yugen Blakrok

The Eastern Cape is one of the poorest provinces, in terms of the education and health system. I grew up in the middle of the Eastern Cape, in a small town surrounded by smaller rural villages, so there was always a connection to nature.

As a kid I was a big daydreamer and not much has changed. There’s so much going on. It’s just that as you grow up you find that you filter out a lot of stuff to survive day-to-day life. But with the stories that I heard growing up, there was always an element of magic in them, whether it was African folk tales or stories from America or Europe. There was always that sense of a hidden world that we can tap into. Even in our own cultures, there’s space for all of this, so we live side-by-side with these realities. The storytelling aspect in Africa is more than just entertainment. It’s a way to keep certain energies alive – not that energy can be created or destroyed, but to keep it in mind is to keep something alive.

The stark contrast between where I’m from and Johannesburg is that the pace of life is slower. When I do return home, maybe I’m a little bit more impatient than everybody else is, and that’s just the Johannesburg influence.

Growing up in the Eastern Cape in the ’90s we were getting a lot of stuff from America, especially cultural references to draw from. I think that’s what connected me to hip-hop in the first place. It was a voice that was burning to be heard, and it was going to be heard by any means necessary. It was powerful in that you could say so much in such a short space of time, and I think South Africans, in general, are quite into lyrics because of that sense of urgency.

Who were some artists that really stuck with you? Were there any particular albums or artists that you really resonated with?

Yugen Blakrok

When I first started listening to hip-hop, it was more whatever was available, the more mainstream artists. What really led me into being an active member of the culture was the stuff Wu-tang was putting out. When 36 Chambers dropped, I wasn’t really old enough to get it but the Forever album is what got me to start digging into earlier stuff. I found that with De La Soul as well. You reach them at a certain point in life, and then kind of go back and find all these wonderful discographies. I also remember listening to Keith Murray and Flipmode Squad... It’s a little bit out there, but it’s also part of what formed my idea of what hip-hop could do in the sense of community.

Kanif

Artists like Public Enemy, De La Soul and Arrested Development resonated with us and were quite influential in the development of South African hip-hop.

What was going on in South Africa during that time? What were you guys feeling in terms of what needed to be spoken out against?

Yugen Blakrok

It was the end of the apartheid experiment. When we were growing up, they still had curfews and tanks patrolling the streets. In my home, where we grew up, there’s still a little bullet hole in the window from the ’80s that they just never bothered fixing. There was a lot of tension in the streets – like a physical, palpable tension – but because we were pretty young at that time, your mind couldn’t really grasp the kind of war that was happening.

Kanif

I was a bit lucky growing up because my mother was into theatre, and specifically resistance theatre. Within the artistic community, you felt like these were some of the people that were also working towards changing mindsets on a bigger scale, so there was definitely a resistance in the air that was quite tangible.

Kanif, production-wise, I could see you being really into Public Enemy. Similar to their style, it sounds like the music on this record is so layered and is telling a story through all of these different samples.

Kanif

When I first heard the Bomb Squad production, the layering of the sound was what really flipped my mind. I think that some of that resistance is present in Yugen’s Anima album too, just because we’ve been traveling and we’ve been meeting a lot of people and discovering more about the global resistance to the present struggles that we’re all facing.

I find a lot of references in the production, but also in the lyrics. You could almost be Googling all of these different things that you’re talking about, whether they’re other dimensions, astrological references, books or philosophy. When you guys were listening to Wu-Tang or Public Enemy in a pre-internet era, did that music also seem sort of mysterious to you? Because Wu-Tang would be talking about Shaolin and these very New York-specific things.

Yugen Blakrok

That’s the hip-hop I enjoyed. Some of these really intelligent MCs really schooled me, you know? It’s nice to have a dictionary there and discover some stuff you didn’t know before or look through an old encyclopedia because here’s a concept or an animal you’ve never heard of before. Even with slang and, you know, American vernacular in general, this is how we learned how people speak in the streets.

I’m sure there are hundreds, but can you give me some points of connection for you guys? Like if I asked you to recommend me some books or documentaries, what sorts of things are you really into?

Yugen Blakrok

William Burroughs. I really, really like his style. When I discovered him and the Beatniks it was a history lesson for me as well in terms of art and culture. As far as movies, we like really obscure sci-fi.

Kanif

Coming out of South Africa, Credo Mutwa would be definitely worth mentioning. He’s the custodian of the Zulu people’s history and it’s passed on orally.

Yugen Blakrok

He has a great book called Indaba My Children, which influenced both albums. In terms of African creation myths, there’s a lot to draw from there that you can put side-by-side with all these other ancient world texts and creation myths. It fills in the story in terms of a people being represented as well, not just the Christian sagas or the Roman stuff, but all the way down in Africa. Something that’s really substantial, you know? I’m really into that.

How does this go down in the current rap landscape of Johannesburg? A lot of the music that I’m hearing coming out of Joburg is trap, essentially. It sounds a lot like what’s coming from Atlanta.

Kanif

There’s a really interesting underground scene in Joburg. There are a lot of people making a lot of interesting stuff and mixing up sounds. A lot of it for me is quite progressive, for example artists such as Morena Leraba and the band Mr. Freddy out of Swaziland. Within that circle of people we feel that there’s a nice competitive vibe going on and just seeing who is pushing what boundaries.

Yugen Blakrok

The movie District 9, where the spaceship comes out from underneath the shack, is a great analogy for South African art really. There’s a lot that you don’t see. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but once you dig, there’s some super futuristic, leftist, against the grain movements happening in the alternative scene. I think it’s nice now because the internet has made it easier to find people to speak to in South Africa and get the real story about what’s going on instead of people projecting whatever they think.

Can you tell me a little bit about the title of your 2019 album, Anima Mysterium, and how you got from that title into the sounds and the lyrics of this record?

Yugen Blakrok

We started working on this shortly after the first album, and it’s just been a collection of thoughts and concepts for a number of years. In a short translation, the Mysterium is a shadow world. And I took the concept of the anima from Carl Jung; specifically about the anima and the animus, the male and female aspect, or shadow aspect of the human being.

So we were really exploring this hidden world with these concepts, where the unseen is given as much importance as the world that we can see. And this also comes from old African cultures, as well as other different world cultures – that concept of tapping into these different dimensions or different worlds.

With the lyrics, I kept to the things that I have an affinity for: astrology and astronomy. The perspective comes from South Africa but connects with the rest of the world through these concepts. Kanif produced the bulk of the album but we also had guest producers on there: Joel Assaizky and 7th Galaxy, as well as a few other different features from South Africa and all across the world, from Historian Himself to Fifi The Raiblaster to Kool Keith. All these people held that galactic view of things in their art already, so they were the first people I thought of to add to this Mysterium we were building.

This interest in other worlds, mystical metaphors and astrology and astronomy was already present on your 2013 album Return of the Astro-Goth. How do you see that album as different from Anima Mysterium? Are the concepts different or have they evolved on the newer album?

Yugen Blakrok

I definitely think that Astro-Goth was quite airy and was coming from quite a mental perspective. Also, I like to look at the elements: the air, the fire, the earth and water elements. If you look at it like that, I feel like Anima Mysterium is more towards the earth and water realms. With regards to the subject matter, my intent was to go deeper, to be a bit more visceral and more in tune with the emotions. Whereas with Return of the Astro-Goth, it was the very first album I’d put out and we intentionally wanted to make something like a time capsule. [Anima Mysterium] is more present. It’s more now. It’s also the future that we imagined growing up.

You appeared on the Black Panther soundtrack on a track with Vince Staples. When TDE called you and asked you to rap on a beat, did you have any idea what it was for or what it was going to become?

Yugen Blakrok

I had no clue. We were in Europe on tour and we were towards the end, so the focus was just on getting back to South Africa at that point. Even working on the recording was so quick, you know? It was like a blink-of-an-eye kind of moment, and only in retrospect did it become a really big thing. Yeah, that was a really weird twist in life.

How long after you had actually recorded it did you find out what it was for?

Yugen Blakrok

About two or three months. We’d gotten off tour and I was already in South Africa enjoying the sun. I hadn’t completely forgotten about it, because when TDE calls you, you don’t really forget. It was in the back of my mind that I had done something, but I wasn’t sure. I thought it was just a test, you know? Then they called to say, “Hey we’d like to use this for the [Black Panther] movie,” and everything just turned around from that moment.

I’m curious to get your perspective on watching Black Panther. Here in the United States it definitely reinvigorated a conversation around Afrofuturism. I think Africa has been on a lot of people’s minds politically but also with all of the great music coming out of the continent that’s getting bigger throughout the world. There’s definitely more of an awareness now of all the different sounds and cultures of Africa.

Yugen Blakrok

More than anything, I felt like we were seen. Because culturally or stylistically, [Black Panther] really represented the different tribes and subtribes in the aesthetic. That was really, really good to see. There’s so much meaning in what we wear and to be able to see that in a more cosmopolitan scenario in a futuristic world was a great feeling.

The concept of being under scrutiny is pretty new for Africa. Because even though I feel like we always have been, we haven’t been observed just for us. In the past, it’s been about exoticizing us or finding a way to make money. So to be seen and have people be interested in what is actually happening is welcome because it also pushes us to keep that eye on ourselves as well.

One thing I thought was really beautiful about the movie was the way that they actually used music by African artists and didn’t doctor it.

Yugen Blakrok

I really appreciated that also. I might have not been able to make it had I known under what circumstances I was doing this. Not knowing just encouraged me to put more of myself in there. And I think in general, the soundtrack gave me that vibe as well. It was music from the heart.