Akala

Akala’s rappng reflects his personal struggles against ignorance, against racism’s divide-and-conquer imprimatur, and against the dumbing-down of the musical form that helped provide him with the answers he needed. "I remember when Wu-Tang Forever came out," he says, casting his mind back to 1998, and the second LP from the Staten Island collective. "And I remember going to buy books because of references I heard on there. I literally studied that album and went away and learned because of it. They weren't some obscure, underground rap group – that was the first rap album to go to Number One in the UK. What made hip hop powerful was its education, its culture, its musicality and its intelligence.”