I can only pull from the places I’ve walked. I can only speak of the people I’ve loved and learned from. I can only write what I feel. Sometimes those feelings are joyful and nostalgic. Sometimes they are painful and pushing. But always — they are human. Unapologetically human. It is my honour to share my second album with you: KANI: A Bantama Story My only request is simple — listen from top to bottom, with all your heart. Stream now: rainlabs.lnk.to/KANI!cp PS: This story could have been told by Kwadwo Aji, Kofi Kyei or Azorlɛɛ but it was left to me. I owe it to them. #KANI #ABantamaStory #Vol2

Anyone claiming to have the blueprint for success in today’s music business is selling snake oil. Doesn’t matter if it’s an “expert” with a blue check and a course or an A&R at a major trying to sign an artist. Everyone’s just trying things and figuring it out in real time.

These are the stories I never told. Episode 3 - Don’t Stop, Talk About It! When I started recording radio-ready songs (back then we called those “masters” — the not-so-radio-ready ones were “demos”), the first place I recorded was a small room at FNF hostels. A Nigerian guy named Okechukwu — who called himself Drillmeister — had a setup where he recorded, mixed, and mastered for cheap. My brothers MacFancy, Kuul D, and K-Wu took me there the first time, and it quickly became home. I met a lot of characters in that room — including a hard rapper called Dennis Buck, who would later take over the internet as Archipalago, and a young man calling himself Rap Jeneral Jay, who ended up switching lanes to video directing and shooting my first three music videos. That room also introduced me to Nigerian rap. Specifically, @MI_Abaga . Jeneral had done a remix to his track Safe, and it inspired me to do my own remix called J Dash Baby. I even left one day with a bootleg copy of M.I’s album Talk About It. That album was a classic, but it was Money that had me deep in my feels. I spent almost a year trying to remake songs off that project. Forever became Desire. Blaze became HeadNod. I was obsessed with Jude. Fast forward to 2023. I’m sitting at a @LyricalWarsGh event, asking myself why I was the one from that FNF room who got to sit next to M.I as a judge for a rap battle — after already working on a song with him and spending most of the day in his hotel room talking about rap, life, and spirituality. The only answer I could come up with? I didn’t stop. A lot of people were more talented. Some worked harder. Some had more resources. But I just didn’t stop. If 19-year-old me from Oke’s room could see me now, I wonder if he’d be proud… or just ask why I didn’t record J Dash Baby 2 with M. 🤣 The moral of the story is: you never know where you’ll get to if you just keep going.