KAH-LO ON HOW #BLACKLIVESMATTER IS CHANGING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY FOR GOOD
“I can feel it in my veins.”
Right now, Kah-Lo should be having the time of her life on tour with Tove Lo. Instead, she’s video-calling me from an apartment in Brooklyn where she is bunkered down with her boyfriend; they’re spending lockdown there and waiting for flights to resume so they can return to Nigeria. But how has the experience been? “Well, it’s been four months,” she says, laughing, “it’s not been easy but you know, it’s for the greater good.”
Kah-Lo believes that the recent surge in the Black Lives Matter movement is going to have a big impact on the industry. “The Black Lives Matter movement has been happening for a while now, but this is the first time I actually feel it in my veins, like I can see it, because black creators are speaking up, black artists are speaking up and they’re calling people out on their shit, you know?” This is the first time she has seen such a huge response that isn’t focused solely on police brutality. “We’re saying, we need you to fix up, and they’re saying, we’re here. It’s not something you can ignore and just tweet about for a week and then go back to normal anymore - now people are being held accountable.”
“It’s not something you can ignore and just tweet about for a week and then go back to normal anymore - now people are being held accountable.”
There’s a group within the black community that is most in need of allies, stresses Kah-Lo; “They’ve been killing black trans women for a long time and nobody’s ever been held accountable.” She has donated to charities for black trans women, desperate for them not to be forgotten in the movement. “On the totem pole of like lives that matter - even in black lives, they’re like at the very bottom,” she says. “So it’s like - someone has to fight for them.”
And as for her experience as a black woman on the house music scene? “Oof. Um. Well it’s kind of weird because I didn’t really know much about it before I came in - I knew like the big tracks, the David Guettas, but I didn’t know the deep, deep core of it,” she says. It was English DJ Riton who originally convinced her to put her voice to a House beat for the Grammy-nominated dance banger ‘Rinse & Repeat’, which became the first single of their collaborative album ‘Foreign Ororo’ - but Kah-Lo says she doesn’t work with Riton anymore, and draws a very hard line under the subject, so we move on.
It’s understandable that people seek music they can naturally connect to, says Kah-Lo, but she admits it can be isolating as a black woman in a predominantly white male genre. It’s exciting seeing black people in the crowd at most of the venues, she says, as it’s only ever a handful out of thousands; “I’m on stage I’m like hey! It would be nice if there were other people that look like me in those spaces, and I don’t have to feel tucked away when I’m there.”
She has noticed her presence bringing in a different crowd to the usual suspects though; “The people who listen to me, the people who connect with my music, most of them are either from the LGBTQ community, or they’re women - especially if I’m the one headlining, it would be mainly the girls and the gays!”
So what change would Kah-Lo like to see for black artists in the industry? Well, white artists can play a part - “There’s a gif that goes around where it’s just women lifting women up, of different colours and different races,” she says fondly - but the real change she wants to see is in the boardroom. “The people pulling the strings, the people putting all these people in the forefront, the people making those decisions and crafting the marketing budget are the white males.” Hiring more black people - especially women - would prevent the experience of black artists being overlooked, says Kah-Lo.
Kah-Lo grew up in Nigeria but the bulk of her musical career has played out in New York, with a brief spell in London. She says the culture clash can be challenging; “Nigerians would say ‘oh I make white people music’ but house music actually came from black people. In all my songs, like ‘Awa Ni’ with The Knocks, my language is in there.”
Kah-Lo points out that she has felt more at home within the American music scene, as the UK, in particular, has a blatant lack of black women in the industry. “Then there’s also the whole thing of colourism because, even in pop music the only dark-skinned black women that I can think of, off the top of my head is Normani… Bree Runway… the fact that I even have to think this long, is not cool!”
The change will have to come with intent and not just to fill a quota, says Kah-Lo. Raising the issue of male-dominated festival lineups - “even when they {include} women, how many of those women are black women? When the black girls that come up to me at shows and they tell me it’s so great seeing me, it’s like - they shouldn’t have to wait all day in the sun to see one black person headline, or like one black person be on the stage.”
Kah-Lo also wants to see artists getting paid properly: “There’s a huge thing of not really paying people what they’re owed, or taking advantage of younger artists,” which she says leads to artists leaving the industry when they don’t feel valued. It’s especially hard for up-and-coming artists right now with lockdown, she says, pointing out that livestream events can be great for exposure, but “exposure doesn’t keep the lights on” and she misses the connection with people.
Kah-Lo has an EP inching through the pipeline, but with lockdown tensions running high she’s determined not to put too much pressure on those around her. “People are dealing with a lot of stuff right now,” she said, “I’m just going with the pace of whoever I’m working with because you know, it takes a whole team of people for all of these things to come together.” The two-track EP will feature two or three remixes by people with their own niche genres and audiences, says Kah-Lo and she is determined not to be boxed into one sound. “One is very afro-houseish, and then the other one is very pop - it’s as pop as pop gets - all on the same EP.”
She sees a future for herself in pop, and its apparent exemption from the white male monopoly that currently consumes other genres. “From what I know pop is very female-dominated, so that’s where we have the upper hand,” she says, “I think that’s one of the reasons why I identify much more with pop music - you can be vulnerable in it, you can be very powerful, you can be whatever you wanna be.”
Moving forward, Kah-Lo is excited to be filling in the time she would’ve spent on tour with some online gigs, including a virtual Minecraft festival, but is mostly looking forward to kicking back with her family when she returns to Nigeria; “When you’re all about work, work, work, you tend to forget that there’s other people who need you and your time. Time is money, but time is also very valuable and we don’t have a lot of it.”