Yugen Blakrok: Out-Rhyming Ya Favs, Radiating Light
When I go to visit Yugen Blakrok’s musical home Iapetus records, headquartered in Yeoville, recently, it’s after 3 years since we spoke at length about the emcee’s career, and 6 since her debut. She spends stretches of time in-between projects. Return of the Astro-Goth, on which she’d worked since 2009, was released in 2013.
She’s finishing off recording her sophomore album, and is excited about the range of acts involved this time around. “This is the stuff I’ve always wanted to be doing,” she says.
The stakes are at fever pitch for Yugen. She’s no longer the underground Jozi rap artist who “moved around a lot” before crafting a space in the home of hustlers and thieves; she’s a capable emcee whose decade-plus drive and determination has produced formidable results, one of the latest being her inclusion on the Black Panther soundtrack, on a song alongside rap rubble-rouser, the Los Angeles native Vince Staples.
It all started with an e-mail.
Sender: TDE, Anthony Tiffith and Kendrick Lamar’s record label.
This was towards the end of an extended European tour, in-between their Berlin dates.
“We were planning for the next one when I got the request to do a verse on a track. I didn’t hear what it was for, [or] who’d be on it.” Yugen recorded and sent the verse, and forgot about the deal.
Sort of.
“It’s TDE, you don’t really forget,” she says. “Later on, we get the call to say ‘hey, this track, we wanna use it for the Black Panther soundtrack, are you down with it?!’”
She was.
And it was kind of hard to believe that someone of TDE’s standing would reach out, “but not really.”
Adds Yugen: “You put your work out there for it to be found. When it happened, it was so mind-blowing that it would lead to that [opportunity].”
Twitter had a collective meltdown when Kendrick tweeted the tracklist. The black division in Mzansi recognised Busiswa, Sjava, Babes. Few voices made note of Yugen’s appearance.
When the soundtrack was released, the Internet collectively gushed at the spitter out-rhyming Vince Staples on “Opps”.
Billboard magazine called her “an embodiment of dark strength and complexity”, while Pitchfork thought she was the “Johannesburg alt-rapper” who “steals the show”.
It’s safe to say that she’s known, now, more than she was back then.
And this causes one to examine why the entire music industry blatantly ignores anyone who chooses to play left-of-centre, away from antics employed to garner the attention of gatekeepers who get surprised when told that they are clogging the pipeline for other talent to emerge.
“It’s hard no to see it that way. I mean, you’ve got the Internet. Things come with ease; things that are advertised, things that are in your face, are not necessarily things that you want. And if you’re not looking, you’re not gonna find,” she says.
People familiar with her work are those who’ve been searching, wading. Eventually, they found her.
“When people from the mainstream suddenly come into contact it’s a ‘hey, where have you been?’, whereas they’re not that target market. I’m not an advertising, promotional machine. I’m an independent artist pushing a certain lifestyle that is not maybe conducive to what is already being pushed on TV.” With this, she echoes the voices of so many in the underground whose efforts at engaging a broader demographic have been shunned and ridiculed, and this to the detriment of a sustainable, equitable music industry.
Yugen says that they’ve submitted videos — like the striking, layered video for House of Ravens — over the years. “[We had] a solid ‘NO, this is not what we’re looking for, for our channel.’”
Her reckoning is that these decisions have little-next-to-nothing to do with quality, but that the content “simply does not fit with what they’re trying to push.”
I encountered Blakrok — the Yugen came afterwards — well over a decade ago, on a mixtape curated by a radio show called The Hip Hopcalypse that used to air on Rhodes’ campus radio station, RMR. This was after she’d had a stint as a student in Cape Town, and before she moved up to Jozi.
“From there it kind of caught on. Hype Magazine was doing reviews; we were excited. Our hip hop at the time just reached to Grahamstown, and then there’d be other towns in the Eastern Cape that would know about it,” continues the Queenstown-born Yugen. “From there, I got to know that there were cats like Ootz the Afronaut, Dplanet from Pioneer Unit…these cats came, and they’d do remixes of the tracks…Nyambz, cats up here as well. From there, I kind of moved up here slowly,” she says.
She spent time in limbo before Shorty Skillz (he of The Muthaload fame, the first compilation of South African hip hop), introduced her to the likes of Hymphatic Thabs, her producer Kanif, and the late Robo the Technician; well-known figures without whose inclusion, the history of South African hip hop, when written, shall have gaping holes.
Yugen exists within the Iapetus records ecosystem, a creative warehouse stashed floor-to-ceiling with talent that overflows into endeavours beyond music-making. Their artist roster alone will make you gush — Fifi the Raiblaster, Zetina Mosia and Hymphatic Thabs; filmmaker and soon-to-be-published author of fiction Boitumelo Moroka: A fore-runner in rap video directing via her early work with Basemental Platform; and Gin-Grimes, organizer and host of Scrambles4Money, currently Mzansi’s longest-running rap battle league.
Yugen’s been associated with the Jozi-based label since 2009.
She brings up the broadcasters subject again: “Not to say that [my music] is not for getting down, or it’s not for having a good time, it is. There’s more than one way to have a good time; there’s more than one way to turn up. There are many people that are in tune with this kind of vibration, with this kind of thing. And they want to see it on mainstream media. What are the forces that are stopping it?”
Before we conclude our conversation, and as she readies to jump on the mic and record, Yugen says that the media attention she’s garnered off of the Black Panther experience alone has made her appreciate not being known. “I’ve never had a problem with being an unknown artist. I was focused on being an artist, so I would like to continue to do that and not caught up in being a socialite or any of that.”
Oh wait, the Black Panther premier. Did she go?
As it turns out, the plan, which came before the invite to be on the soundtrack, was to let the hype die down. “At some point there was a ‘grrr, do we get caught up in it?’ And then we were like no, we really wanna check it out on a quiet night,” she says. “We’re sticking to the plan, [which is] to make the silent moves in the night.”
Wait until she hears whose refrain it is they use to guide the action during that chase scene.
