Banning Eyre caught up with Malian rapper Amkoullel right before his stateside debut in NYC at The Shrine in Harlem. Amkoullel is a something of a trailblazer in Malian hip-hop. He was one of the first major MCs to come out of the country but when he started, he had to go to France to record. Amkoullel is also featured on our show, 'The Trans-National African Hip-Hop Train.'
Banning Eyre: If you could just introduce yourself.
Amkoullel: I'm Amkoullel, I come from Africa, West Africa, Mali, next to Timbuktu, in Bamako.
B.E.: You grew up next to Timbuktu?
Am.: No it's just a joke. When I say I come from Mali sometimes people don't know where it is. So I say Timbuktu, everybody knows Timbuktu but some people think that it doesn't exist! But it does exist, I was there four months ago for the Festival in the Desert and I did a show there.
B.E.: How did that go? I read about that actually. Did you enjoy it?
Am.: Yes I did enjoy it a lot. Because it was the first time a rapper came to this festival, and I'm very happy about that. It shows that the hip hop we are making in Mali is becoming respected and recognized. The festival in the desert is a great stage, and it's very important to have some hip hop there. Mani, the organizer of the festival, said he liked the kind of hip hop I'm doing.
B.E.: Yeah, it's beautiful. So tell me a bit of your story, what's your background?
Am.: I come from Bamako, I grew up there and spent some of my childhood in Berlin, Germany. And after I came back to Mali. Then I was in Paris for ten years doing law and music. I worked with people like Cheikh Tidiane Seck for something like three years. We did shows together, and I even featured on his last album. I also had the chance to meet and do shows with people like Manu Dibango, Keziah Jones, etc.
B.E.: Fantastic. Tell me more about the beginning, they call you the ''l'enfant peulh'... so is that your background? Do you have any musical training from that background?
Am.: Nobody does music in my family. As a Fulani family we're not supposed traditionally to make music. I was supposed to be a lawyer but I think that I'm doing the same job behind the microphone because the rapper is supposed to be the voice of the voiceless. So I'm doing the same job as the lawyer... I'm the lawyer with a microphone. At the beginning it wasn't easy because of family, because in my family I'm not supposed to sing. But after they accepted what I wanted to do.
At first I would just do it with my brothers, to entertain our family. After I did some little shows for fun, and a DJ discovered me and asked me to come on the radio to beatbox... So I went to do the beatbox on the radio [demonstrates]. And at the same time, I prepared a little rap as well. When I finished the beatbox, I asked if he'd mind if I performed a short rap that I'd prepared. And he said 'no problem', so I did the rap and it was so bad that he called me straight away to say they were taking me off the radio. So once that happened I decided to return home and work even harder at it, and thank god it's going better now. And here I am today.
B.E.: I read that it was in 1993 that you started to focus on rap. When were you born?
Am.: 1979
B.E.: So you were 14... did you have any thought of being a musician before or was it rap that made you want to be a musician?
Am.: It's crazy because I never really asked myself that question... yeah it's because of rap music that I decided to make music. It's because of the message. This is the reason that the message inside of my songs is very important to me. I discovered hip hop because of the song '911' by Public Enemy. It was in 1988 or 1989 I think. So I discovered this song, and it is afterwards that I decided to become... At the beginning I was just rapping to have fun with my friends, with my brothers. And then it became little by little more serious.
B.E.: So how did recording start? How did you get from being interested in rap and starting to do it yourself, to getting records out there and being on the radio?
Am.: My first recording was in Mali, in Bamako. There weren't any studios for rappers in Bamako so it was very, very hard to make a CD or record your song. So we went to the person who repairs radios, and we tried to record with cassettes there. So we took the microphone, put a cassette in, and recording straight out. Or we'd go to nightclubs and arrange to go there in the morning with the DJ when no one is there. Then we'd record there. Because in Mali there were no recording studios for hip hop. It was something new, we were the beginning of hip hop in Mali. So we had to do everything on our own. Before going to France in 1995/1996, I did a few videos which got broadcast on national television in Mali. You stood before a screen, you do the shoot, and then you do the rap in playback. So that's how we made the videos, and they went on television.
