Music
An epiphany and some soul-searching have brought the Los Angeles rapper back to his roots.
Less than 10 years ago, Damani Nkosi, the LA rapper and Snoop Dogg affiliate, dropped a song called ‘Gotta Stay Paid,’ which featured Too $hort. But when Damani raps about being ‘rich’ on his forthcoming album, ‘Thoughtful King,' it’s about being wealthy in spirit, in integrity and as a person, not just financially.
Damani attributes the shift to an epiphany he had in 2011.
“I was driving down the street in Inglewood,” said Damani, who was once signed with Sony Urban. “It just hit me. It was an ongoing search for truth and knowledge and trying to be better. One day it hit me. As you’re searching for something, you’re going to find it if you keep looking. I was always trying to figure out how to be better. ‘What can I do to be a better person?’ ‘What could I do, aside from rap?’ Just period.”
What Damani did was travel. He went to China as part of a deal to design a shoe for a friend in the NBA. “It’s hard to explain. That’s my life, though. It’s fucking all over the place,” he said.
“When I went to China,” he went on, “I learned so much about the history, so much about how they see us. I’m looking at how they live and I just started thinking beyond me. In doing so, I started thinking about what really matters in the world. Here I am how many thousands of miles away from home, and it got me to thinking about life for real. I wanted to make stuff that’s timeless, and certain topics are not timeless.”
Already one to overanalyze, Damani’s senses in China were overwhelmed. The environment provided a heightened version of what he experienced at home. “The rich is dumb rich and then the poor is dumb poor. It look like organized slavery,” he said. “So I just started looking at the world’s problems, so the first thing I want to do is figure out what can I do. I’m not a politician. I’m not into that. But with my art, I have the power of my voice. I can voice whatever. I’m not even an activist rapper, but I do like to speak about truth and love and just keep it 100 and have some type of entertainment with that in some type of way. That was my contribution.”
Damani’s new album ‘Thoughtful King,’ which he is releasing independently, was borne out of this energy and emotion. The songs on the album are far removed from the Sony Urban years.
Contemporary jazz pianist Robert Glasper and R&B singer Musiq Soulchild appear on the song ‘Now That’s Love.’ Eclectic keyboard player and soul singer JP Morton plays on ‘A Man.’ But while the new album represents a new sound and a new direction for Damani, in many ways, he says, it brings him back to where he started.
“In 2005, when I first started working with Warryn Campbell, we came up with a sound for me and I stuck with it,” he said. “What happened was, when I got signed, that sound was too grown. It was too mature, too sophisticated for the crowd that they [Sony Urban] were trying to market me in, so I ended up scrapping those records and getting into more of what would fit on radio. I was dumbing down my whole career because I felt like I couldn’t even fit in with rap because it was too somewhere else. The type of rap I’m into is what I did on this album. It doesn’t exist. My point of view doesn’t exist. Labelwise, it just doesn’t work. You can only sell what you know how to sell from experience. There’s no experience if it doesn’t exist. There’s no shelf space for that.
“It’s the same old song and dance for anybody that ever had anything higher than dumbed-down – not dumbed down, but dumbed down for who I am. I could do much more than the records I put out. Even though people like the records I put out in the past, I can do much more than that. I can be very musically inclined.”