I Was Scared of Mermaids
an interview with Yugen Blakrok
You should basically be ashamed of yourself for not knowing who Yugen Blakrok is. It took a Facebook post a few weeks ago to remind me that she made this deep hip-hop that made me feel like I was listening to Digital Underground, or Massive Attack, or Lovage even, but you know, on shrooms, a music that was effortless and expanding. And then I got to wondering, where the fuck is Yugen Blakrok now?
And so...
bios: Where are you right now?
Yugen: About two and a half hours south of Barcelona, in a small village between Barcelona and Valencia.
bios: Oh, have you looked across at Morocco?
Yugen: Yes. Isn’t that incredible? It’s fucking nuts. I never thought it was that close. We’ll be going in November. We’re playing at Visa For Music.
bios: Okay, listen, I’m gonna tell you now to plan a side trip to Tangier. You must visit the Burroughs house.
Yugen: That’s who I thought of. That’s the first person I thought of, William Burroughs and Tangier.
bios: He used to do these things called cut-ups. He’d cut up books, newspapers, whatever, and rearrange the pieces to create new writing. He was sampling language. Burroughs is hip-hop, man.
Yugen: We agree on that. You and I, we have this agreement. I like him for that also.
bios: The reason I discovered you, back when you put out Return of the Astro-Goth, was because you were on the same label as Hymphatic Thabs, one of the great underrated voices in South Africa.
Yugen: That’s true. He’s got the style that’s been most copied in hip-hop. He spawned this really original fucking style, and also with the accent, he has a thick Sotho accent, rolling the R’s and all of that, it’s just the most authentic. I think he showed a lot of South Africans how to be authentic in their expression of hip-hop, seeing as we relied so much on American stuff.
I remember that part of South African hip-hop where the discussion was on authenticity, and it also involved language. If you rapped in English you were sort of looked at as inauthentic, but I felt like Hymphatic represented all of it. Even though the rhymes were in English, it was a South African English with South African references. Hymphatic Thabs is one of the great voices when it comes to South African hip-hop, for sure.
bios: I bumped into Hymphatic Thabs at Kitcheners in 2014 or ’15 and couldn’t believe he was still alive because he’d just vanished. Then I went onto the label and discovered all this incredible music I hadn’t been aware of. What happens to Iapetus now that you’re with I.O.T.?
Yugen: The label still exists. The last project was maybe Zapsign Deebo, he’s dropped two projects with the label. And then with I.O.T. it was sort of like a partnership. The making of the albums... we’ve done two albums with I.O.T., Kanif the Jhatmaster and I, but the production side is still Iapetus.
From my side, how I got into it and my experience of it: it’s this big production house, really, because it’s run by artists. We were never in the system to begin with, completely independent... and everyone was kind of helping with each other’s releases. For example, Thabs is a brilliant editor, award-winning even, so with a lot of the videos there’s input from Thabs. There’s Tumi Moroka, who shot the majority of all of our videos. She’s a trained cinematographer, but she also released a book under Iapetus, Hurakan (and other short stories), which was the first book we dropped as a label. We’re more a production house than a label.
Zapsign Deebo’s first video, I remember we shot at the flat in Yeoville, at Iapetus headquarters, and we didn’t even have a smoke machine, so I was blowing weed into the frame, you know what I mean? That’s my thing, making the clouds happen.
And then there’s Kanif, who did the majority of the production. Everyone was playing multiple roles in Iapetus, in making and creating the music. We weren’t great at selling stuff, because we’re all artists, and the mentality was: really focused on making dope art, on having our voices included in this whole symphony that is South African hip-hop. That’s always just been the mission, just make the dope art, we’ll figure out the selling stuff later. We had such a guerrilla spirit. We didn’t give a fuck about doing free shows. We did so many damn free shows. And we were confident because we know we’ve got our CDs printed, and we understand the economy that we’re living in. We understand the majority of our fans don’t even have this cash.
That’s where we positioned ourselves: knowing who our market is, knowing that the industry itself tends to be very closed, very cliquey. So we said fuck all that. We’re going to go play these shows, we’re going to bring the music to the people. We were all very against the whole industry “you gotta pretend, you gotta fake it till you make it, fucking hire cars to make a video.” We did none of that shit.
bios: Fight the power, basically.
Yugen: I love Iapetus forever for pressing on even when the odds did seem against us. That people would really pull up and pull through and support each other. And there was none of that, I remember when I first came into the label as well, there were a lot of labels going out, unreleased records, and Pioneer Unit, and it was quite a lot of independent labels coming up.
bios: Yeah, Dplanet.
Yugen: And also, in hip-hop circles in general, whenever there’d be a woman coming into a crew there’d be this whole “first lady” bullshit. I never got any of that there, and I really loved that space in Yeoville, with all the books and mirrors and just constant conversations. You go support someone, maybe Robo the Technician’s playing a gig, or he’ll put me on, give me like 10 minutes of his set. Or if I wasn’t getting booked for Back to the City because of this or that issue, WitchCrAft would be playing there, give me 10 minutes of their set. Or Gin I Grimes got booked and he’s gonna put me on. That was love, man.
bios: You had some collaboration with Likwid Skillz, didn’t you?
Yugen: I had a little Sista Slash moment. Likwid Skillz, that’s my best friend. We just enjoyed rapping together. We never made a project or anything. We always just talked about it, because we’re both air signs and we can yap and yap and nothing comes of it. We just really enjoyed rapping together. And we still support each other till today. That’s really nice, man, to build a friendship.
bios: So now that you’re in Europe and you’re not in Yeoville, is there a distance? How do you feel about everyone being here and you being there?
Yugen: Dude, I am studying, you know. That’s how I look at it. I came here to see how this industry works.
Look, the folks that I came up with, we all had the same issues. We all saw the glass ceiling. We all saw how cliquey shit was. I mean people would go so far as to say, “Hey, you underground cats like to be inaccessible,” as a way to keep us out of certain gigs. And we weren’t trying to be inaccessible. Nobody... there’s no artist who’s gonna write, record, fucking press CDs, go all out and perform on stage in front of people, and then you want to accuse me of being inaccessible. You’re just covering for the fact that you want to put your homies on that you went to high school with. And the reason our industry is dying like this is because of that, small-minded folks who are more interested in getting power than helping the culture grow.
At some point when we dropped Return of the Astro-Goth we were shipping CDs everywhere, I’m talking Australia, US, and when it came to the SA side of things it wasn’t moving as much. Our stuff was up online. I remember Kanif and I going to see Musica to try and get the CD accessible in stores, and these folks would turn us down, or keep moving the finish line further. “Oh well no actually we need five different releases from the label first, before we can put your record in store.” So what, you want the Robo, you want the Thabs, you want everybody that came before me? Why not just put me on? I’m the one with the album out. Constantly moving it further.
It’s the infrastructure. It’s systemic. So I was like, no man. If we’re shipping the music out, outside of South Africa is where folks are appreciating the music for what it is. Let me go out there and see what it’s like.
That’s what inspired the move overseas. I played my first show overseas in Berlin in 2016. It marks 10 years now. And funny enough, the gig that I’m playing on Sunday is at the exact same spot. So I feel like this full-circle moment. The mission was: let me go out there, see what it’s like, meet these people who are buying my disc, who are enabling me to fucking have food on the table... outside of the “oh you’re dope, you’re dope,” because props don’t pay for the lights.
So I came out, I saw that, and I found a label to work with to do the things that we weren’t able to do. We could print the discs and we could make shows to raise the cash, but to have a team working with you is something that we’d never had. And we wanted to see what that looks like so we could emulate it, so we could bring that back in. This move did inspire a change in Iapetus, from when we started, how we rolled out even for Zapsign Deebo. I like talking about him because I feel like he looks the most like me in the crew. He’s my favourite.
bios: I.O.T. took on the difficult prospect of Dookoom for a while.
Yugen: And actually that’s how I think we met, even. We met Aymeric in 2016 as well, on that very first trip overseas. We were in Berlin, and then some guy from Marseille was doing a show, and then he said, “Hey, we hear that you’re in Europe, would you come and play a show in Marseille?” And we went to go play that show, and that’s where we met Aymeric. He gave us some Dookoom CDs and vinyls and stuff.
The first album, Anima Mysterium, Anne-Sophie was involved in, I ended up working with her on the cover. I thought it was going to be forever, but relationships change, groups change.
I thought, okay, if they’ve worked with Dookoom then they have some experience about not just working with international artists but with South African artists as well, because we’re going to need visas with our passports, we’re going to need all that type of stuff. And for me... you’re a musician, you need someone to do the admin.
bios: That’s what a label is for.
Yugen: And we wanted to learn what that entailed as well. Based in France had its own challenges, i.e. I didn’t speak a word of French when I went there. I learned it during Covid. I learned how to speak French, my man, and I’m all right with that now. I can have a decent conversation, but it’s still not good enough that I can handle a really detailed conversation, or even a legal one. There I’m still struggling, so I’ll ask to translate.
bios: What’s the most Eastern Cape, give me an Eastern Cape kind of concept that’s impossible to translate into French.
Yugen: A lot. It’s a lot. There’s too much. First of all we often say isiXhosa asitolikwa, isiXhosa is untranslatable. That’s a proverb, ironically. So I went in with that. But there were certain things I’d miss about home when I was there. And there was a time I was stuck there as well... we couldn’t go during the lockdowns and all of that. And I’d find myself personalising the French, you know what I mean. So they’ll say like oui, or ouais, and if I add an e to ouais it sounds exactly like ewe, yes in isiXhosa, no one would notice I’m just saying yes in isiXhosa. Like, whatever, a beer or whatever, e-ouais. Just squeeze it in there. Little things.
Here in Catalonia, where we have been, I find little things that are similar to how things are in isiXhosa. Folks here, I mean we’re in a pretty rural space, you hear someone say xec, or hec, at the end of a sentence, like que dius, hec, and it sounds just like het in isiXhosa. In isiXhosa you’d say het, uthini, the hec and the het are said the same way and do the same job in the sentence. I can’t explain it better than that, but they’re the same sound. So I’ll do that. I’ll say the Xhosa version instead. And it kind of makes me feel good inside, to see that there’s so many similarities.
And I’ll say the same sentence in isiXhosa and then I’ll show maybe my Catalan friends: this is how we would say it. And they can hear the melody or the rhythm of it is exactly the same. There’s so much similarity. It’s just that the words are different. I like finding things like that. I like finding proof that we are more similar than different.
bios: I don’t know if you’ve seen Sandulela Asanda’s Black Burns Fast. She’s from the Eastern Cape. It’s about two young Black girls falling in love at boarding school, and what I love about it is that there’s no misery, no angst. It’s actually fun.
Yugen: Oh, that’s beautiful. It’s enough, that view. We’ve seen enough of that misery. Let’s see the beauty of it, the humour of it, of just being.
bios: Did you see Kings of Jo’burg?
Yugen: No.
bios: So it’s like a gangster movie set in Joburg, but their secret power is that they’ve captured a mermaid from a lake.
Yugen: Dude. What? Okay.
bios: And it’s kind of like, okay, we’re going to take this deeply, I don’t want to even use the word spiritual, but this deep kind of thing, the mermaid.
Yugen: You can say mythical even. We could even say mythical at the very least, you know? Like with all the Limpopo dams with mermaids in them and all of the Mami Wata stuff.
bios: And you’re going to turn it into a gangster movie? Dude.
Yugen: The first time I heard of a friendly mermaid was that Disney slop, you know, little Ariel. Before then, I was scared of mermaids because like in our culture, you don’t mess around with those. They’re not pretty, trying to fall in love with a stupid prince. None of us. This is more closer to Pirates of the Caribbean, where they’re vicious, you know, hectic stuff.
Yeah, man. I love seeing all these South African films and series on these streaming sites as well. I get so happy, because for a long time I just felt like the world, outside of the apartheid, bloody past stuff, Nelson Mandela public-relations type thing, the world wasn’t really looking at us, all the way down there in the bottom. And once they decided to look this way, it was like, yeah, guys, we have so much going on. Once you look, I don’t think you can look away again.
bios: Often people need to see somebody else taking an artist seriously. The reason I thought to interview you was that somebody posted on Facebook, “Why are no South Africans paying attention to Yugen Blakrok?” I thought they were, and then I looked around and realised most of your interviews and coverage were international. I thought, oh, this thing again.
Yugen: Yes, it’s crazy, because the actual music lovers, the fans, they support. But the platforms, on the other hand... it looks like when I was there, working with my brethren and all of Iapetus, they made such an effort to ignore us, that after the whole Black Panther thing came out and the international players came, they couldn’t now start doing it, you know? They’re like, “I didn’t... I can’t now start doing it, after I’ve been ignoring this girl for years. I have to dig in, I have to double back.” Now, yeah, that’s honestly how I feel.
I remember, when I was still on Twitter, I’d go look at all the messages I’d send, hey, I’m doing this, I’ll be travelling to this place, maybe you would like to do a feature, maybe a little write-up? And nothing. And I look back, like, oh, okay, well, yeah, no problem. I’m not really a grudge person like that. Other people come around and they work. They come around in their own time. Maybe at that time, you didn’t have time for me. Now you’ve got time. I just keep it moving.
bios: What’s your favourite country song?
Yugen: My mom loved that song, Dolly Parton, Islands in the Stream with Kenny Rogers… a bit of Johnny Cash as well. I don’t have one favourite song, but I like to put a whole bunch of songs together when I’m thinking of my mom or missing her while doing chores. She’s a country girl. Actually, I’m thinking now I need to check on her since we heard the news about Dolly’s passing. I’m wondering how she’s taking that. I’m going to call her right after this.
bios: You were in Europe during the pandemic, right? There was this feeling that Covid might cause a shift in consciousness. Do you think that happened?
Yugen: Yes. A new level of consciousness was definitely unlocked during Covid. On the very obvious level: we had to spend time with ourselves. I think from then until now, the discussion around mental health has become stronger. It was a time of self-discovery.
There’s something, especially for me in that space, because I was learning a new language. I started really resonating with that... depending on somebody’s lips, doing a lot of lip reading to recognise these new words and sounds. We don’t have those sounds in isiXhosa, and I was very focused on language and learning because that’s the space I was in.
bios: People are scrolling all the time and there’s AI-generated music, but the one thing that can’t replace the live performance is that moment when people connect to music.
Yugen: Yes, it’s the same thing, reverting to what is real. Remember, TV, internet, videos, this is all new. There was a time where if you wanted to hear a song, someone needed to pick up an instrument or use their voice and you had to be in the same room for you to hear that.
bios: A hundred years ago if you wanted to hear a song, you bought sheet music.
Yugen: Yeah. Yeah. You know, so there is that. There will always be that live element and connection, because nobody in our history decided to make music to sing to themselves alone in a cave somewhere. It was always about community. Ubuntu, I am because you are.
I’m not scared of this AI stuff. It will never be able to replicate a human. Human beings crave connection, the human experience, and we will always want it. I didn’t see a reason or incentive to include AI in what I do because I value the human element of my artistry.
bios: A hammer is a tool. A typewriter is a tool. It’s the intention behind using the tool that matters.
Yugen: I’ve seen people use it in really creative ways without sacrificing the integrity of their artistry, and big up to that. And I’ve also heard people straight up refuse, and big up to that as well. It’s your choice.
bios: So let’s get back to where you are now. What you’re recording now, materially, where you wake up, where your studio is, how is it different from when you were doing Astro-Goth?
Yugen: I think I’ve come full circle. We’ve always recorded where we are, that’s the thing with Kanif, we’re very DIY. I haven’t recorded a single album in a big studio. All three that I’ve gotten so far are recorded in the space where I sleep and breathe and live, from Yeoville up until here. We always build a studio where we are, make the booth. I’ve gotten really good at making my little booth and isolation. I enjoy that DIY element of hip-hop because the art I make is a big reflection of me and I’m very grassroots.
When Kanif produces stuff for me, he enjoys having me there because we’re making something for me. With the music and writing, I live, I don’t write every day. Octavia Butler said something to the likes of not waiting for inspiration to write, but writing anyway. I tried that and I didn’t like it. I don’t like to write for writing’s sake because then I write crap. I like to feel inspired; it comes from an emotion. I know after this conversation I’m going to write something because I’ve had to say my thoughts out loud and look at my own beliefs.
I like to spend days living, having interactions, going home and thinking about why I said something or why I felt offended. I like to be fully involved in everything that I do.
bios: Sometimes someone will say something in a way that expresses exactly what I think, but I’ve never heard it said like that.
Yugen: Yes. The beauty of human connection. That’s what it is really. When someone verbalises or gives you the language to explain a feeling you haven’t been able to express. I love that about us. We’re all telepathic to some degree, catching the same thoughts as they flow past.
So I think the process is similar, in that I create from ownership. But how I think about things has changed from Astro-Goth. I speak like three more languages than I used to, so I know my brain thinks differently and is a bit more open.
bios: How much is the experience of learning new languages coming into the music?
Yugen: A lot. Learning French, Catalan, and Spanish has expanded my view on English. I can appreciate where its roots come from, like how much it samples other languages and cultures.
I’ll be on a call with my sisters, brother, or mother, and we speak strictly in isiXhosa. I’ll speak English at home, and then Catalan and French in the streets. Missing out on nuance and cultural references has taught me to appreciate the languages I grew up with. We lose a lot of words as we evolve, whereas slowing down and tracing the root of a word connects it back to an emotion. That’s the type of stuff that goes into the music now. I like exploring uncomfortable emotions and searching for that human connection element.
Before, I was writing just for myself. Now I’m very aware that myself is very big and includes a lot of other selves. Doing your part means really getting to know yourself as opposed to falling in line with trends. I am more convincing in my truth now versus the first album. I care even less about stupid stuff.
bios: So I hear you’re a fan of Enya. Did you know Die Antwoord did Sail Away?
Yugen: How did they do that?
bios: “Sail away, sail away, motherfucker.”
Yugen: Why did you have to tell me that?
bios: I’m sorry.
Yugen: But I get the idea of separating the artist from the art. People must do what they want. There’s always someone there to appreciate what you do. We don’t all have the same tastes, and we shouldn’t. But how you are as a human being counts. Don’t be a horrible fucking human being.
bios: Do you have a release plan for the new material?
Yugen: No, I am infamously slow when it comes to my work process. But we are in a creative space working on new material and songs. I’m going to start recording when we come back from this Berlin show. I like to write after a show when my voice sounds real nice from rehearsals.
bios: And when are you performing in South Africa again?
Yugen: I’m hoping in February. May was really nice. I’m a summer person and I miss South African summer. February, I’m trying to put something together with Cape Town as the priority, because the last time I performed there was in 2015. The last time I came home we were in Joburg and Eswatini, and all the homies from Cape Town asked why I wasn’t coming through. I realised people wanted to hear me there, so I’m going to make a proper effort to do a couple of shows there.
bios: The people appreciate you, even if Musica doesn’t.
Yugen: I won’t forget jumping through hoops for nothing. I felt betrayed because I’d considered them a South African platform putting South African music out, and I never realised how hard it was for independent artists until that moment. So, thank you, Musica, for that lesson: to always cheer for the underdog and the independent artist, because it ain’t fun and games. It’s not. And even if it looks nice on socials, there’s a lot of hard work and a lot of disappointment that’s going through there, especially for us in South Africa in particular, I want to say. And then we’ve got spirit. We’ve got spirit, you know. So, yeah. So see you in February if everything goes well. And I hope it does.