It would be too easy to celebrate Akala for bridging the gap between hip hop culture and the intelligentsia. Cockney rapper, poet, Shakespearean, lecturer, activist, colleague of Ian McKellan and of Kabaka Pyramid – Akala is often set apart for combining his shrewd intellect with underground music. But he has taken great pains throughout his career to show us that hip hop is in itself intelligent. As he showed us in his documentary Life of Rhyme, hip hop is lyrical. It makes use of complex rhythm and rhyme schemes, has a rich political and social history, and more than warrants being studied as a contemporary form of poetry.
What Akala should be celebrated for is having spent the past decade pushing socially conscious hip-hop into mainstream culture. Rather than following the gun-worship and bravado of some American rappers, Akala’s lyrics cover racism, class, sexism, capitalism, and war. All this whilst appearing on Channel 4 and the BBC, where white privilege cannot hide from his sharp criticisms and powerful poetry.
The 10 Years of Akala tour is a memorable testimony to that. The setlist in itself is a great survey of Akala’s attacks on discrimination and neo-colonialism. It features hard-hitting tracks like Murder Runs the Globe, Peace, and Let It All Happen – the last taken from The Thieves Banquet, Akala’s adaptation of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Devil on the Cross. There is room for Akala’s tongue-in-cheek side too when his alter ego Pompous Peterson appears, an aristocratic parody here to teach us how to be an “utter s***”. Akala delivers each poem with a flair that his fans have come to know and love – it is difficult to fault the ease with which he spits bars.
Accompanying Akala’s set is a vast collage of video clips. Some are his music videos, interviews and lectures, many of which contain subtitles so we can see Akala’s vast vocabulary, on-point social commentary, and poetic skill evidenced on the screen. Other clips are more miscellaneous. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin’s final speech in The Great Dictator are featured, perhaps referencing the class rifts inside urban London and the endless wars that get in the way of global equality.
It is heartening to see Akala, half-Scottish himself, supporting Scottish rap artists as well. He recommends hip hop staple Young Fathers and features Shogun, Scotland’s newest grime artist, as his opening act. Shogun live makes an impressive MC, running off lines at an incredible speed. It is noticeable at times that his meter does not quite match his backing track. Separately they sound great, but together need a little more synthesis. This perhaps is to be expected from a new artist – Shogun himself admits that he is still working on his craft.