Interview: Introducing Lemzi (@lemziartist)

I am Hip Hop Magazine’s Lana Bell catches up with East Lon­don based soul­ful rap artist Lemzi to talk beats, rhymes and life!

When did you get into hip hop and what attrac­ted you to it?

From the age of 9 I was addicted to Eminem — Lose Your­self. Eminem was such a pre­val­ent fea­ture on music chan­nels, radio and through­out the media, so he was my intro­duc­tion into hiphop & rap music, closely fol­lowed by 50cent and any­one else asso­ci­ated with Aftermath/Shady. Aside from them you had rap­pers like Jay‑Z, Nas & Ja Rule who’d all suc­cess­fully broken the main­stream bar­ri­er and before I even knew their dis­co­graph­ies and char­ac­ters I was into some of their songs. Later in life I did a lot of study­ing and have listened to artists from MF Doom to Ghetts to Queen Latifah.The flows, the pas­sion and/or aggres­sion, beats and hon­esty (from most) was what really got me into the genre.

What do you tend to rep­res­ent and com­mu­nic­ate in your music?

Whatever I feel like. It has to be some­thing I feel, not neces­sar­ily some­thing that has happened to me or I’ve per­son­ally exper­i­enced. I try and uplift people and get into people’s minds with ideas of prosper­ity and push­ing for­ward whenev­er I can, I’ve come from a good back­ground so it’s only right that I pro­lif­er­ate the same vibe. When fail­ing that I at least try and accen­tu­ate per­son­al or soci­ety’s issues in the hope what I’m say­ing resonates.

In your track in ‘Fire In The Streets’ video, what was the inspir­a­tion behind the story you lyricise ?

This was com­pletely fic­ti­tious, for me. But I KNOW there’s enough people suf­fer­ing from Domest­ic Viol­ence or people that at least care enough to feel some­thing when the notion is presen­ted to them. I cre­ated a 3 part story called World­li­ness that reflec­ted a few dif­fer­ent issues, such as bul­ly­ing, domest­ic abuse and aut­ism on my mix­tape, “Lemzi­Free­Bies Vol: IV — A Few Words (All For Won)” designed to present situ­ations that’d affect people emo­tion­ally and think about top­ics they may not ever have to, des­pite them being factors in every­day life for oth­er people. The track I per­formed in the ‘Fire in The Streets’ video was “No Place Like Home” which has it’s own video on my you­tube chan­nel. Aside from the beat by Blazo, I was inspired to write this by some of the things I heard in the world at the time.

What do you think about the hip hop scene in Lon­don and where it is going?

We’ve got such a heavy pres­ence in Lon­don let alone the whole UK, some of the most tal­en­ted artists do hiphop music, but we haven’t been able to estab­lish a lane along­side oth­er pop­u­lar urb­an music like grime, trap even drill music here is argu­ably big­ger! So in terms of tal­ent, there’s no short­age, hiphop (in the sense I’m think­ing of; atmospheric/mellow, con­cep­tu­al, storytelling & intric­ate lyr­ics) just needs to flour­ish like its rel­at­ive genres. I always feel there’s a void in our scene, Grime, UK Rap, Trap­frobeats, UK Drill & Con­scious rap all have prom­in­ent fig­ures and have made sig­ni­fic­ant strides, the inbetween sound I typ­ic­ally do just needs to catch up.

In your recent EP, Autum­nal Aura, how was the pro­cess of mak­ing this EP for you and what do you hope your audi­ence will take from this EP?

It was actu­ally pretty spon­tan­eous. I looked at my sound­cloud and was­n’t too happy because it was dis­or­gan­ised and I barely used it. So there was a week or two I had a lot of time to listen to music and explore sound­cloud. I came across all the beats (except the bonus track prod. By Adim pro­duc­tions) on sound­cloud and lit­er­ally just vibed. Without sound­ing too artsy fartsy, they all spoke to me in a dif­fer­ent way, the beat for “Word Vomit” just said RAP, I barely wrote any­thing for Import­ance, I knew Tells was a per­fect fit to fea­ture on Strivers etc.I hope people get an idea of the type of artist I am and how much I love music, par­tic­u­larly this style of hiphop. I touched on a vari­ety of top­ics and everything about this EP was close to home (no pun inten­ded). Police bru­tal­ity is an issue — let’s talk about it. Love & rela­tion­ships are real — let’s talk about it. Self aware­ness, per­son­al and extern­al per­spect­ives affect people dif­fer­ently — let’s talk about it all.

Music­ally, what can we expect from Lemzi in the near future?

I’m just doing as much as I can, push­ing my ideas and range of con­cepts, son­ic­ally and ret­ro­spect­ively. I’m col­lab­or­at­ing with a lot of good artists, such as Inferno, Boy Nash, Kemi Sulola and more, so I recom­mend every­one pay close atten­tion and just wait and see what we all produce.

Check out our review of the Autum­nal Aura Ep Here.