Growing up in his native Ghana, Blitz the Ambassador adored the American hip-hop album It Takes a Nation of Millions (to Hold Us Back).
In fact, Blitz (real name Samuel Bazawule) was crazy about all of Public Enemy’s records. Although their politically charged lyrics impressed, he was especially fascinated with the way the group combined disparate sounds to create sonic montages. “They’re taking sounds that nobody would really logically put together and found a way to make them all fit,” Blitz said from Atlanta this week.
“If you look at my music, it pretty well followed the same pattern of juxtaposition. … For me, the album [It Takes a Nation of Millions], and also their albums prior and after that, have always been a blueprint for when I’m making music now.”
The Brooklyn-based hip-hop artist and his horn-heavy band perform tonight at the Victoria Ska Fest, sharing a bill with Tanya Stephens and Elaine Lil’ Bit Shepherd.
Blitz isn’t your garden-variety New York hip-hopper. The middle-class son of an attorney and a teacher, he emigrated from Accra, Ghana, when he was 17 to take a business administration degree at Ohio’s Kent State University. Although Blitz is also a visual artist, music became increasingly an obsession. After graduation, he moved to New York City to pursue his hip-hop career.
His music, not surprisingly, reflects both his African and American backgrounds. Blitz’s latest disc, Native Sun (2011), features African drums and lyrics in Akan (the language of Ghana) as well as English and West African pidgin English. Some of his rap is in 6/8, an unusual time signature for hip hop, but a favourite in Afropop.
Blitz, who was enthusiastic and thoughtful on the phone, said his “fantastic” home life in Ghana provided fertile ground for his future music career. He recalls as a boy reading from a library of political books his father, a human-rights lawyer, had in the home. His dad also collected LPs ranging from Middle Eastern music to Stax and Motown, jazz (Miles Davis and Nina Simone) and African music (Hugh Masekela). “It was great, with books on one hand and vinyl on the other hand in the house. You really can’t go wrong,” Blitz said.
Aside from Public Enemy, two other recordings were tremendously influential for Blitz. One was a collection of Fela Kuta’s Afropop hits, The Best of the Black President. The other was the single Funky President (People It’s Bad) by James Brown, later sampled by many hip-hop acts. Blitz’s decision to use a live band with horns stems, in part, from Brown’s influence.
Blitz says his heritage as an African immigrant helps make his music distinct. Yes, he’s a black artist living in America — however, his journey was much different from that of the typical African-American hip hopper.
“My relationship with hip hop is partly voyeuristic and partly participant. For the first half of my life, it was voyeur[istic] — we were growing up in Ghana, looking at a culture. We wanted so badly to be part of that culture. And that’s a unique story to tell.”
Blitz says he’s putting out the message that hip hop should be viewed as a global phenomenon rather than one confined to certain regions of the United States. He notes the man widely credited as the pioneering architect of hip-hop music, DJ Kool Herc, was a Jamaican-born DJ who exported his innovations to Brooklyn.
“When you go to b-boy [hip-hop dance] competitions, global competitions, you find out the best are coming from Korea, they’re coming from Japan. … That’s the way the culture is supposed to run. It’s not supposed to run as a little, small subset,” Blitz said.
“There’s other people that have been down with that culture from day one. And you cannot ignore those voices.”
What: Blitz the Ambassador (on the bill with Tanya Stephens and Elaine Lil’ Bit Shepherd)
Where: Victoria Ska Fest, Ship Point stage at Inner Harbour. Also at Comox Valley’s Vancouver Island MusicFest on Friday
When: Today, 5 to 10 p.m.
Tickets: $25 at ticketweb.ca or Lyle’s Place, Ditch Records, The Reef
