New Music: Blitz the Ambassador

OCGente’s New Music Month

With a lightning-fast mind, the political boldness of Chuck D, and the sixth groove sense of Fela Kuti, the Ghanaian-born Blitz the Ambassador is a New York-based MC, composer, and producer unleashing psychedelic Afrobeat colors and triple-time rhymes on the recent CD and short film Native Sun.

Blitz the Ambassador will be in Los Angeles alongside Malverde with Maleco Collective on July 29, 2011, 8:00 pm at Grand Performances free concert series.

Native Sun—as both musical journey and a striking short film—unfolds from a kaleidoscope of perspectives, with help from a Rwandan sweet soul singer (Corneille on the track “Best I Can”), from sleek Francophone sirens (Les Nubians on “Dear Africa”) and from Congolese and Brazilian samba-loving MCs (Baloji and BNegão on “Wahala”). Blitz even got a boost—including an invite to play at a packed Central Park SummerStage show—from Public Enemy’s Afrocentric thinker and rapper Chuck D himself (whose shout outs grace “Oracle”).

Blitz grew up when the fierce promise of Afrocentric, intellectually discerning rap was at its peak. In the Accra (The capital and largest city of Ghana) of his youth, the golden age of hip hop lived on long after rap began to go (Dirty) South in the U.S. In barbershops and on well-loved cassettes, young people rallied around a fresh and defiant expression of their concerns and perspectives.

“When you hear young people have such a command, speaking so assertively about how they feel, it resonates with you no matter where you are,” reflects Blitz. “Especially if you live in a stricter society with strong social codes where young people’s voices aren’t heard, hip hop can be a major outlet.”

Blitz was surrounded by a profusion of other music in Accra, from the highlife swaying at a nearby soccer field to the kora and drums played for chiefs and sub-chiefs. Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson, and local reactions to rock and funk all made their mark, spinning on the sometime unreliable family record player.

With the DIY skills of hip hop’s old-school outer-borough instigators and decades of lo-fi innovators across West Africa, Blitz crafted his tracks from scratch, singing reference tracks for every trombone and background vocal, often laying down thirty or more lines for each song. “I don’t have any music theory training. I have no idea what I’m doing,” Blitz laughs. “That means I do things that a trained composer would never do. That’s when it gets interesting.”

This “outsider thinking” also led Blitz to make a short film with director Terence Nance as a companion expression for the album, a shorter take on the larger whole that Blitz fears might get lost in the age of the IPod shuffle. The short was filmed in Ghana with a cast of 55, it maps the transformation of a boy from marginal village orphan to master of his destiny, with a poignancy and panache rarely seen in music videos.

“Native Sun the album is a journey backwards, back through hip hop, the Caribbean soundsystem culture that preceded it, back to its African roots, with the final kora,” notes Blitz. “The film looks forward, to what could be. Both are about the longing for home we feel in the diaspora, and about letting go of old notions and embracing new ideas. The sound in itself speaks to that.”