March 25, 2016 Photo by: “I definitely want to be as big as Jay Z, or even bigger,” says Rejjie Snow, one of Ireland's most promising young rappers. Photo by Rebekah Campbell.
Simi Crowns speaks with an accent that reveals both sides of his history. Born in Lagos, Nigeria—a country best known musically for its pulsating Afrobeat and traditional Juju—the 26-year-old and his family left their native soil to start anew in Dublin when he was just 11, and while the rapper’s voice still holds onto his West African roots, there are times when he’ll lean into a syllable in a way that reveals his adopted homeland.
“I speak Yoruba, which is the native language in Nigeria,” says Simi. “That plays heavily into what I am. I’m trying to fuse some of that into the music, in terms of the language, the slang, the attitude. I really feel like I have the best of both worlds."
On the ear, it’s an unusual mash-up. Nigerians tend to speak with a rhythm, their words popping in time, as though being delivered by a well-tuned jazz drummer. Heavily-accented Dubliners, on the other hand, often sag into a consonant-free drawl, as if their jowls have been doused in Novocain. But Simi’s particular mix has become more common in the city as the children of Africans who first arrived on Irish shores over a decade ago come of age.
For Simi, rap offers an outlet to tell his story—a story mirrored by many young Irishmen of West African heritage. The young MC channels his natural vocal tics in a barbed flow that punctuates his intelligent lyricism and strong songwriting chops. Having hit the Irish summer festival circuit last year, his career is starting to gain some traction, with appearances on a handful of national radio stations and a few favorable blog write-ups to his name.
It’s October 23, 2015, and Simi is headlining a show in Dublin’s snug, seated Sugar Club venue in support of poverty eradication and disaster relief charity Oxfam. Calling the small crowd to rise to their feet and surround the stage, he uses the intimate gig to consider his experience of coming to Ireland and the hardship of growing up with a label over his head.
“Instead of being Simi Crowns, I started being the guy who’s black, the guy who’s an immigrant, the guy who’s a nigger—I wrote this track in reflection of those times,” he explains to the crowd before launching into “Lagos (Where I’m From),” a song that flips Anthony Hamilton’s “Comin’ from Where I’m From” into an ode to Simi’s hometown, warts and all. “Welcome to the state of Lagos, where they claim everything starts but with chaos,” he spits, “and we know that the government never cease to fail us.”
“Growing up we had no role models from our background,” Simi tells me after the show. “There was always that element of being shut out or misrepresented. But now, people are realizing that my story is just as important to tell as that guy with a fucking guitar’s.”
From Thin Lizzy’s triumphant blues rock and U2’s stadium-filling anthems to My Bloody Valentine’s woozy shoegaze and Van Morrison’s heart-wrenching rhythm and blues, the tiny island of Ireland—still divided into two countries, The Republic and The North—has punched well above its weight when it comes to producing internationally-heralded rock acts over the years. Irish musical tradition, though, stretches almost as far back as recorded history, and the image of a heavy-set, Guinness-fuelled guitarist perched on a bar stool, bellowing out trad songs from the great Irish songbook has been a lasting one. It’s no accident that Ireland is the only country in the world that has a musical instrument—the harp—as its national emblem.
What you won’t see in a pub corner, though, is two turntables and a microphone. To the typical Irish citizen on the street, rap is much like any other underground scene: insular and other. Here, the genre remains largely associated with throwback gangster rap imagery and the jewel-encrusted stars of the bling-bling era, little of which would appear applicable to the realities of life in this one-time Catholic stronghold. The country’s rap acts have typically been dismissed as novelties, while much of their output has sounded confused and gimmicky—a sloppy tongue-kissing session between the rappers’ Irish roots and those of the U.S. artists that inspired them. Until recently, Irish hip-hop was represented by music that had little replay value or hope of traveling beyond the island.
Simi Crowns, though, is part of a recent surge of rap inventiveness that’s being pioneered by kids of African migrants and asylum seekers, many of whom have been forced to flee regions stoked in cruelty and corruption. Much like how the influx of Jamaican immigrants into the Bronx sparked the birth of hip-hop in the ’70s, the kids of these migrants—who sought the cradle of the Emerald Isle to help forge a better life for their families—are causing a new wave of creativity in Ireland. For the artists, laying their stories down on wax allows their voices to be heard.
The population of Nigerian citizens in Ireland grew by 82 percent between 2002 and 2006. By 2011, there were over 40,000 Africans living amongst the Republic’s 4.5 million people. Comfortably fitting into this new-age land of opportunity, though, was not straightforward. For generation after generation, Ireland has been a one-note nation. With a recent history marred by sectarian violence, wondering what kind of Christian your neighbor was—Catholic or Protestant—was about as tuned to diversity as people got. Anyone who wasn’t 100 percent white was seen as something different.
“It’s still a very new thing to have African people in Ireland, so we want to speak for those,” says God Knows, a Zimbabwe-born, West Ireland-based MC who forms one-third of the group Rusangano Family. With a razor-sharp flow that tugs at UK grime and Jamaican dancehall, God's rhymes slice to the core of heavy topics like racism in Ireland, immigration, and being an African raised in a country where any person of color is still assumed to be an outsider. On “Standard,” he opens up about life as a black kid in an all-white school, while “Throw the Spear” sees him decry those who would use racist slurs: “The n-word, I don’t trust that word/I don’t glorify that word, answer, or reply to that word.”
The group’s producer, mynameisjOhn—an Irish music nerd who came up with hip-hop, electronic, and psych-rock ringing through his hoodie-hidden headphones—gives God and the group’s newest member, MuRli, who hails from Togo, plenty of ammunition for their visceral words, including skittering hi-hats to wah-wah funk to squelchy, DOOM-esque loops. More so than any Irish rap collective, though, Rusangano Family harness their African roots, sewing highlife guitars, triumphant horns, and rattling percussion into their tracks.
For the trio, their music is not just about introducing Irish listeners to African culture—it’s about establishing themselves as Irishmen in their own right. As the country becomes increasingly pluralist, the one-time obvious tenets of Irishness are being challenged, and God Knows and MuRli have a unified message: They’re proud to be black, proud of their African heritage, and want to proudly represent their home country.
“I don’t want to be just the black guy,” asserts God. “I’m an Irish person full-stop, as opposed to a black Irish man. I’m an Irishman that’s doing music, that’s pushing Ireland to the forefront, as opposed to pushing blacks or Africans.”
“My perspective is shaped by everything that I’ve been through both in Africa and in Ireland,” adds MuRli, who cites his grandfather, a funeral singer, as his biggest influence, along with the Method Man and Ludacris tapes he copped from his schoolmates after arriving in the Irish city of Limerick in 2003, at age 12. “I don’t need to say I’m multicultural, I’m the portrait of multicultural.”
Rusangano Family: "Wasteman" (via SoundCloud)
Trotting that self-identity gambit is familiar to Emzee A, who credits hearing Nas’ “One Mic” during his childhood in Nigeria as his original rap inspiration. “It’s that balance where you want to adapt to the culture here without forgetting where you’re from,” he says. “And that’s the hardest part. Why I can’t just be fully Irish or fully African? Why do I have to find a balance?”
Today, the young Nigerian is trailblazing his own unique style of hollowed-out cloud rap, drawing lyrical inspiration from sources as far flung as the writings of the Dalai Lama, to an interest in the inner workings of the mind and dreams. Having tasted stardom when he was pulled onstage and rapped alongside Jay Electronica at a Dublin gig last year, Emzee pictures himself as not just a local hero, but a global star, and he credits the emergence of fellow Dubliner Rejjie Snow as a motivating force. “He’s opening a lot of doors,” says Emzee. “He made me believe it’s possible.”
Emzee A: "Lucid Dreaming" (via SoundCloud)
At 22 and without an album to his name, Alex Anyaegbunam, aka Rejjie Snow, is already Ireland’s most celebrated rapper of all time. Emerging under the moniker Lecs Luther back in 2011, the quick-tongued MC dropped a couple of videos that infiltrated the U.S. rap blog circuit to an unprecedented degree for an Irish MC. With his nimble but laidback flow and fondness for jazzy, minimalist beats, he’s drawn plenty of Earl Sweatshirt comparisons.
Anyaegbunam’s output since has been slow, especially in an era of ultra-prolific studio loiterers like Young Thug. But over the last couple of years, he’s stepped out of Odd Future’s shadow and established himself as one of alt-rap’s bright young things. Having uprooted to the U.S. and UK, he has a burning ambition to take a seat at rap’s head table. “I definitely want to be as big as Jay Z, or even bigger,” he tells me, speaking over the phone from Los Angeles.
While most Irish rappers have utilized their heavy accents to pepper their rhymes with wry, region-specific gags, the baby-faced Rejjie was determined not to fall into the trap of just being another local star. While he wears his nationality proudly—one of the tracks that catapulted him is called “Dia Dhuit,” a greeting in the Irish language—his writing is loaded with snappy one-liners that travel, and his songs usually cover universal themes like love and growing up. And he’s quick to acknowledge the icons that inspire him. “Back in ‘92, Dr. Dre came/ The Chronic in my room, daddy would play/ I started making raps around ‘98/ When Big L died, the lord give and takes away,” he spits on “1992.”
Rejjie Snow: "1992" [ft. Loye Carner] (via SoundCloud)
“I definitely wasn’t naïve to the fact that coming out of Dublin and having an Irish persona and aesthetic was just going to reach a certain demographic, so I knew from early on that I had to do something a little bit different to catch the attention of other places,” says Anyaegbunam.
The rapper’s parentage is a mix of Nigerian, Jamaican, and English, but, unlike Simi, Emzee and others, he was born in Dublin and raised in Drumcondra, an inner city suburb on the city’s north side. One of the only black faces in the area, he grew up amid a background buzz of racist diatribes. “It gave me tougher skin and in general made me who I am today,” he says with a brave face. “I think it all has to pass by. Growing up was obviously tough at times, because a lot of people are ignorant. But my parents and grandparents told me to not let it really get to me.”
The vitriolic racism suffered by Anyaegbunam is far from isolated. When Africans flooded to Ireland in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the country was enjoying huge economic growth stimulated by low corporate taxation rates, the targeting of foreign direct investment, and the leveraging of the country’s EU membership. Overnight, Ireland was transformed from one of the poorest countries in Western Europe to one of the wealthiest. But antiquated ideals would take far longer to overturn.
The ’80s and early ’90s were a bleak period of economic stagnation for conservative Ireland, a country where divorce was not legalized until 1995. Heroin plagued Dublin’s low-income housing neighborhoods, which became increasingly cut off from the city. These were the battlegrounds that many black families would be dropped into, haunted by the burden of a nation that viewed them as outsiders. As a recent study confirmed, “black Africans” face the most racist abuse in Ireland to this day.
Rejjie Snow: "Keep Your Head Up" (via SoundCloud)
Chris Montana, who raps under the name Tafari Pesto, left Congo at age 7. Moving into the public housing neighborhood of Jobstown in Dublin, he distinctly remembers sleeping with the lights on to discourage neighbors from stirring trouble, and being subjected to constant racist abuse throughout school.
But, as his classmates looked upon American rappers as distinct and separate, Montana saw them as symbols of strength. No matter that they were half a world away, there was comfort to be taken from the iconography of strong, powerful black men. “50 Cent’s album came out in 2003 and my life changed,” he says. “All of a sudden it was cool to be black.”
Today, Montana forms one half of the group Dah Jevu alongside partner Bobby Basil. The pair makes bleak, hard music that serves as a medium to decry racism. The video for the brooding “Incubus,” sees them burning masks reminiscent of those donned by the KKK as a symbol of their rejection of the prejudice within Irish society.
Like Emzee, Dah Jevu dream of making an impact globally. Bobby, in fact, envisions the day when the pair uproots from Dublin and heads to a corner of the world boasting a richer hip-hop history: Brooklyn. “We’d like to get the hell out of Ireland because I think there’s a lot more people out there who would appreciate our music—and us as people—than there would be here,” he says.
While Rejjie Snow has already departed in search of becoming the great American rap star, and others look to follow in his footsteps, the Ireland they leave behind is not the same country they struggled in as children. Strolling through the bigger cities reveals an increasingly pluralist nation. The “us vs. them” mentality is fading, while calls for the introduction of hate crime legislation are becoming louder.
The U.S. may offer riches, but it’s in Ireland that these young rappers’ music is most important. A decade after they arrived in this brave new world, their music is Exhibit A of their human struggle, and of the nation’s struggle to change with the times. It’s evidence laid down on wax forever. As God Knows puts it, “This is for the history books.” Now, for many of these artists, it’s about leaving that struggle behind forever and wielding a whole new kind of legacy.
“I associate myself being equally Nigerian and Irish,” Simi Crowns tells me, dodging fans and well-wishers as the Sugar Club staff push us to the exit. “I feel 98 percent Nigerian and Irish. The remaining two percent I just want to be me.”