Rapper Nickson Thabane Translates Emotion Through Sound

‘It’s my first time here’ Nickson says, ‘It’s like you’re in the city but not in it. You see it from the outside but you don’t expect to see this when you’re inside. With the plants, and the space itself, architecturally it’s very interesting. Very curated.’

‘Yes’, I reply, scanning the space we are in, ‘There’s stillness here. It’s like we’re in our own cocoon in the city.’

He’s referring to Ouh La La Café at the Alliance Française de Maseru. Looking over around me, I see what he means. From where we sit, lunch-time traffic has picked up, but the absence of rush within Ouh La La’s fenced garden allows us to watch the cars and people as outsiders. We are in two different timelines from the hooting cars and people obliviously rushing past this ‘time capsule’ in the heart of the city. The city itself has just emerged from winter. The people around, some in shirts, some still in their winter wear, slip inside the new warm, weather like one tentatively trying on a new shirt, a tentativeness of someone adjusting the clothing where too much skin is revealed. Summer has not arrived quite yet, not yet at its full ability to bring out colour and lightness in people. The Alpha Renaissance Tape 2, Nickson Thabane’s always interesting and dynamic project, is full of such colour. 

The light-footed deftness in his rapping and overall musicianship announces him as a talent that is impossible to ignore in Lesotho’s growing music landscape. Perhaps even more prodigiously, is his auteur-driven approach to making the project; he wrote, produced, performed, mixed, mastered, the whole of it himself. It pulses with the kind of energy that signals a musician who is curious about the sounds they are making as they are making them, always pushing his verses and soundscapes to new, unexpected plateaus just at the moment the listener gains footing on familiar ground within the song, resulting in a listening experience where you follow his frenetic pace of ideas just as they frenetically come to him. He’s the conductor of his world and you are never bored because of it. In Arriba for example, the beat of the song speeds up just as Nickson paints a picture of the ‘jiggle’ of the ‘rear-end’ of person he’s interested in, with the witty ad-lib, ‘It’s a nyash-pit!’. Elsewhere, the quietly complex Kuenane’s Interlude brings the beat back just at the moment one would expect the rapping to stop, inviting the listener to languor in the mood he is creating.  Nickson orders a Corona and I order a Heineken Zero.  It’s unsurprising that the architecture of our chosen interview place was one of his first observations, during the course of our conversation, it is a subject that will feature prominently.

I ask him how architecture informs his music. Emphasizing that he is an overall artist whose interest and practice isn’t solely confined to music, he explains that architectural principles underpin the process of making all art.

‘Part of the process of designing is starting with a concept called Precedence Studies’ he says, ‘where you look at something preexisting and use it to fuel whatever new design you’re doing.’

And what music informed The Alpha Renaissance Tape 2? He lists Nasty C’s music, Big Sean, A-Reece, MashBeatz, Aminé, Kendrick, Drake, and Leon Thomas, ‘…. because I’m doing a lot of singing too on the project.’

He is quick to expand however, that his Precedence Studies aren’t solely confined to music.

‘When I say I’m making music’, he says, ‘it could be watching a movie, because to me, I’m gathering experiences. I’m an antenna. The more I take in intentionally, the more accurately my intentions can be expressed. I went through a period where I went through all the classics, the Godfathers, Pulp Fiction!’

‘Pulp Fiction!’ he repeats, his eyes widening with enthusiasm.

‘I want to get into film directing one day’ he adds, ‘I just don’t have the bandwidth, or the time. I’m an artist, let me put it that way.’

He mentions open-world video-games like Minecraft, as well as The Last of Us, ‘Minecraft I got into initially because it was open world and creative. Until I realised there’s a narrative…there’s a story. And there’s progression. The more you gather your XP’s (experience points), the more you gather your materials…. there’s a story that is being told. It’s the same story at its core but it can never be told the same way by two different players. The Last of Us, I’m in love with that score, it’s unbelievable.’

That cohesion of vision, and fidelity to storytelling comes through in the music. The Alpha Renaissance Tape 2 begins with a statement where he invites listeners into the ‘ventures in the multiplicity of the sonic space, an escapade of manipulating vibrations, and creating vibes’. The multiplicity is carried through in the ease he has in rapping as well as singing. Throughout the project, he showcases this dexterity in songs like Mad Again, where his singing easily segues into rapid-fire verses where he raps about ‘wannabe rappers’ being mad again because he’s outside. In Sample he establishes a flirtatious scenario between him and various girls, where he teases that all they can have of him is a ‘sample’, not all of him. Album closer Met Gala finds the impetus of the song being a hypothetical scenario of him being at the Met Gala. The radio-ready standout Opposite of Limbo further speeds up the momentum and energy of the project.

‘The coolest thing about ‘‘Opposite of Limbo’’ was that it wasn’t as planned as some of the other songs’ he says, ‘I visualised myself in an arena or stadium, and I tried to match the epic nature of the vision to the instrumental, so that it was just the matching of visions. I have performed it three times in clubs, but you need to see it in an arena or stadium. It’s a push to get there, I guess.’

A few years back, Nickson found himself frustrated. In 2018, he had just released three songs, but didn’t like them. However, those early attempts had him asking himself how else he might elevate his art.

‘I never wanted to make instrumentals like that’ he says, ‘But I’m very meticulous, very detail-oriented, so a while ago, I grew tired of trying to explain my vision to producers. So, during school I used to do this thing that I called ‘silent research’, where I would make beats during classes. Periods were like 40 minutes long, and I would force myself to start five beats in a class on my laptop. I got in trouble all the time.  And then during breaks I would play the beats for my friends without saying, ‘Yo, listen to this!’ That’s where the research part came in. I was trying things and seeing how it was reacted to.…. this works in this way, let me try this.’

‘It’s a matter of purity,’ he says, ‘I try to put the me that’s sitting in front of you now into the music as well. I’m not trying to do anything, I’m just expressing myself, and I try to do that with the instrumentals as well.’

The subject of ‘purity’ seems to be of particular interest to him, he leans forward in his chair as he talks about it, ‘And the reason that I think I’m one of the best producers in the country is, and I haven’t heard anyone else talk about this…. translating emotion. I’m able to do this thing now where I can listen to someone else’s song and capture how I feel, or how it made me feel, and be able to replicate that feeling in something else. It doesn’t have to be the same instrumental, and that ability brings me the edge to express myself as accurately as possible.’

‘The reason that I don’t have to pay attention to whatever emotion I’m translating is that once I feel, the songs write themselves. It’s not really planned. A lot of the songs in the project started from just making a beat and seeing where it goes, whatever I’m feeling at that moment, then I realise what the song is about as I am making it. The fun thing about being able to produce all this by myself is that it’s in real-time. I don’t have to wait for the instrumental to be finished. I don’t have to wait for my lines to be written, everything happens in real-time.’

With the passion he talks about music with, I grow curious and ask him why he decided to study architecture instead.

‘I’m really into philosophy’ he says, ‘…so I considered going down that path, especially the Stoic Philosophy.’

He explains Stoicism as the principle of gratitude at the lowest points in life, not overreacting to any situation.

‘But as a musician I wanted more financial stability…as much as I liked philosophy, I can study it on the side, so I wanted a way to blend art with something practical. Because I didn’t want to study art as well, I thought I was already doing it with music.’

He lists the meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca the Younger as being fundamental to his understanding and grounding in philosophy, ‘That’s when I really changed my life. They gave me a handle on my life…because I was unhappy for a good while, I started to question everything…I didn’t feel fulfilled, and I didn’t know why. I was a dancer at that time and started asking myself, do I like the attention that comes from doing the things that I love, or do I like doing the things that I love because I love the attention?’

He speaks of how he went through a metamorphosis. He questioned if he was a good person. He started searching for a higher truth by stripping away all the parts of himself that he felt weren’t authentically himself.

‘I almost fell within a similar trap with the music, where, once you release a song, for you to conclude if it’s a good song, it’s how many streams it’s had, or how many people say it’s dope song. Which is why I find gratitude in the process. So, when that outside validation comes it’s just a bonus, when you don’t seek it.’

Unsurprisingly, these types of philosophical quandaries colour the line of his conversation. When recounting the meticulous way he ordered the tracks, he suddenly interrupts his own flow of ideas by stopping at a track called Wwnd? (What would Nickson do?) an interlude that gains aporia-like proportions in the project.

‘Have you listened to it?’ he says, looking up at me, completely derailing the prior string of conversation that we were on.

‘Yeah’ I say, ‘Talk a bit more about it.’

His face, up till now which has been alight with the excitement of talking about the project, suddenly grows sombre, ‘I hadn’t really dealt with it…. mentally, I was quite honestly avoiding it, I suspect. I want to support both of my boys, but I don’t know which boy to support in terms of what people would think.’

He’s referring to a public war between two other musicians featured on the project. In the skit, Nickson’s younger brother plays a character that asks what he would do if two of his friends were fighting. As the character speaks, the interlude is accompanied by a tolling bell that signals doomsday. Is the proper thing to get involved or take a step back? If he picks one side, he is an enemy to the other. But then again, if he takes a step back, ‘things might get dangerous,’ and would lead to some ‘bad stuff’. Cleverly, the skit is placed right in the middle of the respective songs where the musicians are featured.

‘What if what they’re fighting about is so bad’ his younger brother says, ‘that things don’t go back to how they were?’

In the interlude, Nickson’s answer to this is a resigned, ‘Yoh…mfanak!’, confronted with a dilemma where, for him, it’s a lose-lose.

‘And it’s interesting that the project takes a darker turn after this skit, at Kuenane’s Interlude’ I say, referring to the song coming after Wwnd?, Kuenane’s Interlude. Here, Nickson doesn’t rap, and instead, lets Kuenane Bereng, the other musician in the middle of the war, take centre stage.  Over a spidery, sprawling instrumental Kuenane raps animatedly about revenge, violence, and owning up to one’s ‘dark past’; a memorable, and yet, unsettling moment in the project, heightened by the real-world context of very grave allegations that are, though interestingly wrangled with through art, are rightly being handled by the arm of the law as well.

‘But it’s truthful!’ Nickson says, ‘It was more of a dark twist that at that point needed to happen. At that point, I couldn’t take either of them off the project, so I decided to put both of them on it. But because it was such a dark situation, I did deliberate on it a lot. But at the end of the day, my music is my baby and I sacrifice a lot for it.’

This endless pursuit of truth, both in his art and in his personal life, results in a self-coined philosophy named the 2808 Way. The numbers are on the cover art as well. He explains that 2808, other than being his birthday, is the description of a ‘pure’ lifestyle, the issue of ‘purity’ and ‘truth’ having been touched on earlier in our conversation. For him, it represents stripping away all the parts that aren’t himself and leaving behind all the true, bare essentials. Living life as authentically as possible and finding bliss in that.

‘The moment that I started having fun in music, and in life’ he says, ‘was the moment I started stripping away all the things that weren’t authentically me.’

The matter of authenticity gains further poignancy in an artistry like his, and perhaps, with other Basotho artists who not only rap in English, but visibly find other precedence from other sources that can be argued aren’t authentically Mosotho. For example, three of the biggest artists in Lesotho are artists who make songs fully in Sesotho, and present the aesthetic of the Mosotho archetype of a ‘herdboy’; knob-kerrie in hand and woollen blanket draped around their necks. In contrast, Nickson favours chains and presents himself not unlike how a rapper would present himself in America. The aforementioned artists have found considerable success internationally, as well as locally with high streaming numbers and large crowds at their performances, as well as frequent bookings. I ask him if there is pressure on his part to bend his sound to fit that expectation, with the implication being that this path would lead to a wider listener-ship, and thus, bigger success.

‘To tell you the truth the pressure is there’ he says, ‘But I try to put my own imprint on the culture. Going back to the 2808 way, I try to put the me that’s sitting in front of you now in the songs. So, the way I speak, is the way I try to write, and present my lyrics.’

He chews on that some more, looking away from me at the greenery, the question of authenticity hanging on the table before us like an iron brick, before taking another stab at it, ‘I do want to say, one of the biggest things in terms of authenticity, is the question of debating between ‘true reaction’ or curating a reaction for the sake of the people you love’

‘Expand on that more’ I say.

‘I’ll expand by asking you a question’ he says quickly, ‘Are you good with gifts or surprises?’

The question echoes earlier philosophical quandaries which frequently inspire his conversation as well as interludes like Wwnd?

‘No, I don’t like surprises’ I say.

‘That’s exactly where I’m at’ he says, ‘to the point where, say, if I have a gift for you, and maybe let’s say….’ he trails off.

‘…. Yeah, it’s a fight between true reaction and being polite.’ he says, ‘That’s the easiest way I can explain it through the analogy of the gift. How do I stay my most authentic self, without coming across as a ‘dick’…especially in terms of protecting my vision. Sometimes you do have to be rude.’

The project is certainly a big artistic statement, and for the sake of clarity behind all big statements, I ask him to make his ‘artist’s statement’ through breaking down the title; The Alpha Renaissance Tape 2.

‘‘Alpha’’ because I think I am far ahead from a lot of my peers’ he says, ‘And I say that with respect. It took my three years to get comfortable with saying I’m a producer.’

‘‘Renaissance’’…the revival of art and culture’ he says, ‘It’s a reminder of something that hasn’t been said yet. This is a result of what the culture has given me and how I’ve experienced it, and this in turn is the result of how I think it should be done, and how I’m doing it.…that was ‘’The Alpha Renaissance’’, and I’m doing it again with ‘’The Alpha Renaissance Tape 2.’’

And what would he like to see in the culture? What type of revival would he like to see?

‘Truth’ he says, without hesitation, ‘…and I say that because it’s sad to see a lot of people who are interested in music but get into it for the wrong reasons. Maybe some guy is getting into Hip-Hop because he thinks it’s cool to dress like that, or get attention, but then you can tell from the lack of meaningful content in the music. I think as a creator you have a responsibility to your craft, because it creates a certain stigma that comes with, especially as a new artist, when you’re like ‘I make music’… it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re trying to be a rapper.’ People that are in it for whatever true reason that may be...that’s what I would like to see.’