‘People think it’s just for emo or gothic kids’: the Kenyan metalhead leading a new wave of African rock | Global development
[ad_1]
Aas a teenager, Martin Kanja spent countless late nights listening to heavy metal on a local radio show. Furious riffs, screams, growls and distorted sounds drowned out his anger. “What drew me to music was that it was so ‘physical’ – very present, very now – there was no room for negative thoughts or feelings,” says Kanja, who soon decided he also wanted to be a metal artist.
In 2010, when he was 19, he left his hometown of Nakuru in Kenya’s midwest for the capital, Nairobi, believing it was his best bet for a foothold in the underground scene.
Fourteen years later, Kanja, aka Lord Spikeheart, is a veteran of African metal, redefining the boundaries of the genre with the experimental sounds of his debut solo album, the adept. The album, released in April through his new label Haekalu – the first in Africa dedicated exclusively to the darkest and heaviest genres of music – is a tribute to his great-grandmother Mutoni wa Kirimathe only female field marshal in the Mau Mau anti-colonial uprising, who died last year.
Kanja, 33, says he wanted to “honor her legacy and what she did for the country and appreciate all the struggles [the Mau Mau] passed in the struggle for independence so that their names would not be forgotten”.
The album runs through political themes. Using highly distorted lyrics and sounds, from muffled screams to piercing screams, Kanja expresses his anger at the daily oppression he sees across the continent, such as land inequalities originating from the British colonial era, the Chinese debt diplomacyand exploitation of resources.
Researchers trace African metal back to the 1970s, but in many countries on the continent it remains on the fringes due to perceived associations with Satanism, aggression and drug use.
“Metal has always been a minority in the world – people just hear the growls or the screams and are afraid of them, but for me the lyrics and sounds are like poetry or literature, dealing with real issues that you can relate to,” says Kanja. Behind the heavy and aggressive sounds of his music lie messages of empowerment, self-actualization and social awareness.
Until recently, Kanja played as part of the band Duma (“darkness” in his native Kikuyu language), which he formed with Kenyan guitarist and producer Sam Karugu in 2019. The duo gained international popularity for their manic industrial metal that flouts the traditional rules of the genre. touring cities in the US and Europe.
Kanja’s new album borrows from this chapter, challenging the boundaries of metal through collaborations with artists in genres as diverse as trap, hip-hop and noise, especially those experimenting in their own fields, including American rapper Fatboi Sharif and Japanese producer Saionji BBBBBBB. His songs, which are in English, Swahili and Kikuyu, are infused with traditional African instruments and sounds.
“These are the sounds I grew up with,” Kanja says. “Since Africa has not been well represented on the global metal scene, it’s time to offer something different, fresh and exciting.”
Kanja was raised in a Christian home. His mother, a civil servant and devout church leader, wanted him to go into the ministry, while his father, also a civil servant, did not see music as promising. But Kanja’s affinity for music was evident from his early childhood, when he would stage make-believe concerts with his siblings in the family living room, singing along to their favorite tunes on the radio. As an extrovert with a cheerful disposition and love of nature, he did not fit into the stereotypical notions of a metalhead.
after the promotion of the newsletter
“People think [metal] is only for emo or goth kids, but it’s the other way around,” says Kanja, who has found a diverse and close-knit circle of friends in Nairobi’s small but active underground metal community.
Kanja created his first group, Lust of a dying breed, after arriving in Nairobi as a teenager. It was put on hold shortly after they released their first record in 2012 as the band struggled to make a living from music. He held a series of jobs, working in a security company and later in gold mining, farming and the family tourism business. But it wasn’t long before he started writing again and began playing with other artists in makeshift studios and friends’ basements as part of another band, The Seeds of Datura.
In 2017, he decided to pursue music permanently and grew dreadlocks, which he vowed not to cut, believing they would deter employers from hiring him if he was ever tempted to return. His friends named him Spikeheart because of his spikes. As a solo artist, he has performed at events including the Venice Biennale, the Roskilde Music Festival in Denmark and the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands.
Breaking into the global metal scene is not easy, says Kanja. African artists face many barriers in creating, producing and marketing music on the continent, such as access to instruments and record deals. Also, there are fewer audiences, venues and promoters for metal in the region.
“I’ve seen artists get taken advantage of because they don’t have the information or the resources, so they just pick these really bad deals that don’t help them in the long run,” says Kanja, who credits his burgeoning career to supporting other artists in the metal community.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them,” says Kanja, who hopes to help other African artists spread their music through his label Haekalu (“temple” in Swahili), which is based in the Ugandan capital Kampala, where he lives now. “A lot of artists in my scene don’t have the resources or the tools to navigate the music business side of things and it’s easy to get stuck. So having a home label that can help artists push their music further than they thought it could go is very important to [regional metal] scene”.
[ad_2]
