When I spoke with M.anifest for the first time this past April for an interview, he blew past the usual internet pleasantries. There was no fumbling with the mute button or complaining about time zones (the universal struggle of coordinating literally anything). He just beamed a megawatt grin from under his hat and launched into the music. “Come on, three-step and Highlife together? Who thought of that?” he asked before the formalities. He was buzzing about his latest feature with UK producer Hagan and new-school Kumasi crooner RCEE for the track “Mfantsefo Dance,” breaking down the South African three-step beat with Highlife guitar like a kid in a candy store. For someone who’s gone on a full-blown experimental supergroup bender with Damon Albarn and Flea on the 2012 Rocket Juice & the Moon album, he still gets giddy over a good instrumental.
“My grandfather lived till he was 97, and his last piece of work was released when he was 95. Until he passed, he would wake up early and always be in the study. So the idea of rigor, I saw it firsthand. You don’t become good at something because of a title or a degree. It’s because of the actual work you put into your practice.”
— M.anifest, on the best example of discipline he’s ever had
When he sits down with Khangi Khoza on The African Imaginary podcast, his unapologetic fandom for the art form is still on display. Khoza opens the episode with a game called Keep or Toss, asking him to blindly select facedown cards to reveal a word he must either defend or throw away. He tosses the “extrovert” card without a second thought. (He theorizes most performers aren’t natural extroverts and it’s just a switch they flip for survival.) “I can handle myself socially, but my battery drains quickly,” he adds. He applies the same zero-hesitation veto to the label “clubber.” “I don’t like belonging to clubs. I was never in the Boy Scouts,” he tells her. But he eagerly holds onto “risk taker.” He calls himself “intentionally foolish” for taking this career path, but I’d say his bets pay off.
“We are in this new world where, because of these devices we hold, when you’re upset, you turn on a video or your Twitter fingers. Discretion has become a forgotten art. But discretion is beautiful. It makes you create the life that you want.”
— M.anifest, on why the gentleman of hip hop keeps his business offline
For someone so comfortable taking risks, M.anifest would like to make one thing clear before anyone calls him a technophobe: he loves a gadget. His career got its start on secondhand recording gear bought off Craigslist, he credits laptops with turning kids in his old Madina neighborhood into self-taught producers, and he uses Perplexity so much he’ll tell you about it unprompted. (He’s not a Luddite, just a man with standards.) Where he draws the line is music made from a prompt, which, to his ears, is the difference between synthetic flowers and the kind you can smell. “You didn’t create a song,” he tells Khoza. “The machine created a song from all the songs that we’ve created.” And for every artist currently doom-scrolling about being replaced by a chatbot, he has a little tough love: “Do not fear. Do not despair, unless you are average.”
Continue reading on The African Imaginary’s Substack and listen to the full episode on The African Imaginary, now streaming on Youtube and Spotify.
Written by: Valerie Amoaku, Editor-in-Chief of BLACKSTAR Haus
