My mission is to give people hope – Nneka
Nneka seems the sort who won’t share more than she has to; she exudes a quiet intensity that doesn’t take kindly to digging. She doesn’t offer up much about her mixed-race mum either, believed to be half-German, although she frequently mentions her dad. But she can be frank and direct at times, happy to fill […]
Nneka seems the sort who won’t share more than she has to; she exudes a quiet intensity that doesn’t take kindly to digging. She doesn’t offer up much about her mixed-race mum either, believed to be half-German, although she frequently mentions her dad. But she can be frank and direct at times, happy to fill in the blanks surrounding her Hamburg experience, explaining that she moved to the country on her own and had no family support, taking on odd jobs which once had her cleaning toilets at 4am. Despite the lack of ethnic minorities and the odd racist barb, she says the most shocking thing about the country was that “people are very, very punctual and the traffic is smooth. In Lagos, if you want to get from one place to the next you have to calculate two hours ahead.”
She decided to pursue music to make ends meet and hooked up with German hip-hop producer DJ Farhot who helped develop her sound. She got signed to the independent Yo Mama label, and despite the extra marketing push, she was reluctant to create an all-encompassing brand name for her music. “That’s a very difficult, difficult question to answer because I don’t even know at times where to put myself,” she says. “I wouldn’t be able to put myself in any of these boxes, since my music is very diverse. There’s a lot of hip-hop in it, there’s soul, there’s reggae, there’s afrobeat. Maybe it’s best to call it African pop soul, I don’t know. I don’t really think too hard about the way I produce my stuff or what it is. It’s very important that I don’t rationalise too much. I think music should have passion. I use my heart.”
She moved back to Nigeria in 2007 and has since supported artists including Sean Paul and Gnarls Barkley, as well as landing a top 20 in the UK singles chart with the song “Heartbeat”. But while she still goes between Germany and Nigeria, she admits it’s been more challenging to promote her music in Lagos, where she now lives. “I’m hustling a lot,” she says. “There’s more work to do in Nigeria – 200 million people here have to hear your music and it’s difficult to get your music out. We don’t have proper record companies or distribution agencies. You have a lot of piracy and you have this big piracy organisation called Alaba. Some people even pay the Alaba guys to pirate their stuff, just to get popular. It’s crazy.” How does she make money? “I play gigs, I have my CDs with me, I sell them in small stores. My success in the UK has helped a lot. My video is running in South Africa, so that is helping me become more known within Nigeria.”
In the long term, she hopes she can put her degree to good use and might consider creating a museum which holds Nigerian artefacts because “we should not just sell them to foreigners”, and musically, she hopes she can continue to pay homage to traditional African music while giving it a modern spin.
“I think many upcoming artists that I’ve gotten to know are beginning to gain more courage to do stuff that is different, and also to mix styles like Western sounds with African indigenous elements,” she says. “It’s actually courageous in a way because you have too many old people not appreciating this kind of music. They are fixed on the past. But it’s cool, and at the same time it’s important that we preserve our culture, our indigenous music and not forget that authenticity.”
Culled from The Independent UK