Blitz Hip Hop's Most Sincere Ambassador
By: John

With the release of Native Sun, Blitz the Ambassador’s fourth album, the artist strove to show the ties of West African music and modern hip hop. The result is a blend of afrobeat, blues, rock, and rap. Alongside the album, Blitz made an accompanying film using footage spanning time and space to further connect the dots. The Brooklyn-based Blitz took time to discuss his new album, his roots, and the fate of hip hop.

How’d you get the nickname Blitz?

It revolves around the style that I started. You can hear it on that double-time, tongue- twisting. That was always my style. They’re saying, “Oh, you blitzed that,” and it stuck. It’s been my forte. “The Ambassador”, however, revolves around what I ended up being, which is a vehicle between these two worlds.

Native Sun has a live band. Tell me about that.

That actually came around when I was working on Stereo Type- I realized that if I wanted to expand the sound I was working on, I’d have to break out of the eight-bar loop I was using, sampling other people’s records. So, I started bringing in these musicians individually, to help me expand that. After a while, when I started to perform these records, I had to have the band there to have it make sense, to play it for what it was on the records. That’s how the band came together. That’s how the live instrumentation became a staple of what I do.

Do you write all the music parts of things?

All the non-sampled parts I do write. The thing, however, is that I’m not musically trained. It’s a very interesting concept, coming up with the music as it is. It’s me singing all these parts and these musicians trying to play what I sing. Some songs I have 35 to 40 tracks that are just horn lines and harmonies, guitar lines, strings, but it’s all sung. So, with the musicians we chop the music. That’s how we end up with what we have.

Do you bring the band with you on tour?

Absolutely. The live band is really how we sell the music we make. Without the live band there’s really not a lot to see, you know, so I bring the band with me: a horn section, drum, bass, guitar…

You play drums, right?

I play percussion in the band, yeah.

You were born in Ghana. Did you grow up there? When did you move to New York?

I grew up in Accra. I moved to New York when I was 18, and I’ve been there ever sense. I love it. Someone was asking me today about that, and I don’t even think I could come up with what I’d do outside of Brooklyn. There’s something about the environment that you can’t duplicate anywhere else.

I guess there’s something about the fact that most people that live in Brooklyn immigrated from elsewhere, so Brooklyn just has that vibe where most people are there to build something. It’s a collaborative vibe that exists and all the musicians that I personally know, they’re collaborative. I’m lucky to be here.

You rap in English and another language. What is that?

The other language is Twi. I grew up speaking that.

As far as the movie goes, how’d you go about compiling footage for that?

Was it the one with the album or the one on Youtube?

Youtube.

That was edited by my partner, Terence Nance, who does all our visual work and who I co-directed the film with. We were trying to get a visual background to the music. Music as unique as this album- we felt it was important to create a world people could relate to and understand [the sound] better.

My favorite song on Native Sun is “Dear Africa”. I will listen to it and hit the back button. Can you tell me about that song in particular?

That song has been something I’d been writing for a while, inside of me, and I was fortunate that on this album I had the elements come together to make it happen. Obviously, there’s a late-Neubian feature on the song. The Nubians, to me, are cool pioneers when it comes to having an international presence in popular music, in America. When they were Grammy-nominated for their first album very few people had even attempted a French album in America, so it was something very affective.

The song came together. It’s probably the best example on the album of the bridge of these two worlds, where the hip hop element is obviously present, but then there’s this drum n’ bass vibe, and then a pure afrobeat vibe to it, so it’s the meeting point. If I had to choose one song on the album that represented the album, it’d probably be “Dear Africa”.

I had a personal question about the difference between hip hop and rap? Are they interchangeable?

Yeah, honestly, I never really understood that argument, you know. I’ve heard people come up with definitions for rap and people come up with definitions for hip hop. I mean, to me, what really is rap and hip hop? I don’t know. As far as I’m concerned, it has to do with the culture. Honestly, if it’s connected to the culture- if the answer is yes- then it’s about the culture. You got to remember, you don’t go to school to learn hip hop, you know what I mean? These guys didn’t graduate Julliard. These are guys that made something out of nothing. To me, that’s as hip hop as it gets, somebody taking nothing and flipping it into something. That’s the culture that I respect.

Whatever you choose to call it, I don’t deal with semantics, but I do care that it is a voice for a different kind. As long as people are able to express themselves fully without it existing already, that’s as hip hop as it gets.

You’re 28, and I love the movement I’m seeing of young artists pushing the boundaries, and I want to say thank you for doing what you do. It’s important.

I feel strongly that it’s time. I should add this because it’s important to say: What I’m doing is part of a larger movement. It’s part of a larger movement of people being able to combine their backgrounds with popular culture, and there are people making these strides, and at the end of the day it can only survive as a movement. I don’t believe Native Sun is in isolation. It’s part of a larger movement to move people to this point in hip hop. I’m hoping what this album achieves is bringing it all together, people with diverse backgrounds that have found a way to combine it with what they do. Hopefully it expands the culture and it expands the art.