Manifestations, the debut album from M.anifest, which stands for “Music-Always Needing Illumination For Every Soul Today,” seems destined to become a classic of Twin Cities hip-hop. The Ghanaian-born MC has already been named “Picked to Click” by the City Pages, and has received glowing reviews from most Twin Cities papers and a smattering of national websites. Along with Brother Ali, the buzz around him is the most for a Twin Cities hip-hop artist in recent memory.
The 25-year old MC, born in Accra, Ghana’s capital and largest city, came to the Twin Cities in 2001 to pursue an Economics degree at Macalester. Upon arriving, he decided to take a break from rapping, which he had been doing throughout high school with a group called The Rebel Camp. “We had no subversive content,” he told me,” we just thought ‘The Rebel Camp’ was a flash name.” He only began rapping once again in the last couple years, which makes his lyrical skills, memorably full of metaphor and allusion, all the more startling.
Ghana’s no stranger to hip-hop, with a wealth of artists, as well as its own distinctive hybridization of hip-hop and indigenous musical traditions, hip-life, and the tradition of speaking in a rhythmic style over musical rhythms and sounds can be traced back to long-held of traditions of West African griots. While M.anifest embraces where he comes from, it certainly does not exhaust his artistic identity, pigeonholing him as a gimmick. “If somebody picks up Manifestations and they couldn’t tell that this guy’s from Ghana, Africa, then I’m not representin’ truly what I’m doing.”
Yet while this forms the core of his identity, he recognizes and displays on Manifestations all of the different things globally circulating that have helped create him as a person living in and between different cultures. (This is visible in the liner notes, as well: he not only talks about how he recorded and mixed the album at “anywhere I’m at” studios, but also thanks his immigration lawyer.)
The completion of the album was funded in large part by a short jingle he did for Pepsi’s website, which is still online. “I sold out even before my album dropped!” he says jokingly, maintaining that this was a one-shot deal with Pepsi and that there’s no plans to work with them again. “I don’t even drink soda!”
While Manifestations is not just about clever rhymes, there are plenty of those, such as a line from the album opener “Spell Check,” how we wants to “spark the night like I’m Edison,” or on “eMcee PSA,” his challenge to the MCs of the world, how he’s “kind of like Braille/‘cause I know y’all are feeling me.”
M.anifest also lyrically invokes not only hip-hop history—give a listen to the title track for invocations for Poor Righteous Teachers, Kanye, and an offer to “Oblige you like Mary J.”—but also the history of African American musical culture. On the same song, he checks Miles and Kind of Blue, which have certainly been done before, but digs deeper to throw in Freddie Hubbard, a trumpeter not normally named on hip-hop records. On “Change Gon Come,” he seems to combine all this when he spits how he’s “traveled the globe with my African robes/from the Accra heat/to the Minnesota bitter cold” and flows “like Coltrane in the land of Purple Rain.”
In conjunction with M.anifest’s lyrics, however, the record’s beats also attest to this multitude of musical cultures and ideas that circulating and influencing his work. For the album, he amassed the 4Shades Crew, consisting of himself and three producers, GMOBeatz (a 15-year old beatsmith from St. Paul who has the most songs on the album), O-D (hailing from Milwaukee by way of the Seychelles), and Katra_Quey (also from St. Paul, but by way of New Orleans, and the producer of the title track from Desdamona’s The Source). There are also three Ghanaian producers, Coptic (based now in Brooklyn), Dee, and M.A.
A booming reggae beat undergirds “Babylon Breakdown,” samples of the Bar-Kays’ performance at Wattstax (also sampled by Public Enemy) dot the album’s musical landscape, spirituals on “Swing Low,” and Ghanaian drumming patterns all contribute to the feeling of Pan-Africanist politics, as well as world-traveling on Manifestations. More than any other, however, Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti is the inspiration for M.anifest. “Fela’s the innovator, he went full circle. He started doing highlife, then he created something new out of it. He traveled but he kept to his Africanness.” M.anifest creatively pays tribute to Fela throughout the album by dropping into Fela’s characteristic pidgin English, but most explicitly on “Gentleman, ” adopting and melodically imitating the refrain from Fela’s 1973 song of the same name (I no be Gentleman at all, no/I be Africa man original).
In a time where African artists are achieving much more widespread success than the standard “world music” record bin, folks like Akon, K’naan, and, soon, Emmanuel Jal are bypassing the stereotypical “world music” characteristics, firmly entrenched in hip-hop, rather than the often exoticised fantasies of diversity and hybridity. M.anifest’s breathless motto, heard throughout Manifestations is “represent Africa with a spectacular street vernacular,” and the MC breathes, speaks, and lives all that this statement entails. Watch for much more from M.anifest in the future.
