Kasa Backwards

Midnight, a car, Kumasi. A drill beat is playing and Jay Bahd is rapping over it. The DJ and producer Rabby Jones, riding with a group of artists in the capital of Ghana's Ashanti region, told the BBC what happened next: "We put on a drill beat, and Jay Bahd was the one rapping at that time. I just yelled out: Asakaa."

The word is a trick. In Twi, kasa means talk. Say it backwards and you get asakaa, the name a whole scene now answers to. A sound named after talking, flipped so that only insiders catch the meaning. The young artists of Kumasi care a great deal about that name, and they reject the one the West keeps handing them.

The car story has a rival. Adomonline, republishing a Complex report, says Rabby Jones came up with the name along with Kwaku DMC and Sean Lifer, the three who also manage the rappers and source production. The BBC credits Rabby Jones alone. Both accounts put the name in the same small circle of Kumasi makers. The NATIVE described Sean Lifer, co-founder of Life Living Records, as the man "largely credited as the defacto godfather of Asakaa."

Even the flip has a name: Saka. The NATIVE calls it a slang "used by a lot of young boys in Kumasi" that works by inverting the syllables in a word. The Complex report, via Adomonline, calls it "a pig Latin-like language" that shifts the first consonant or cluster of each Twi word to the end. Yaw Tog, the rapper behind the 2020 single Sore, kept it simpler when he spoke to Rolling Stone: "When the music came over we called it Asakaa because it's a language here."

That language does a job inside the songs. The BBC reports that the reversal of words "is peppered throughout asakaa, as a code language for people from Kumasi to understand the true meaning of the lyrics," as the artist Kofi Jamar explains. A listener in London gets the beat. A listener in Kumasi gets the joke, the threat, the boast. Rabby Jones put the formula in one line to Complex: "Asakaa is just Twi expression on a drill beat."

Kofi Jamar went further with the BBC. "Asakaa is the way we live, it's a music, it's a movement, it's culture, it's a lifestyle."

The lifestyle has a map. Young people in the city call it Kumerica, which Rolling Stone describes as "an amalgam of the words Kumasi and America." Neighbourhoods were renamed online after American places: in Rolling Stone's telling, Manhyia became Washington DC, Kejetia became New York and Abrepo became "Giorgia," spelled that way. Teen Vogue gives a different DC, naming Dichemso. The two reports disagree, which tells you something about a map drawn by many hands at once. It even has a flag; Teen Vogue reports that Braa Benk designed the Kumerican one.

Where the America in Kumerica comes from is still argued. Rolling Stone reports a theory that it goes back to the 1980s, when Ashanti men travelled to America for work and brought the culture home. The Complex report describes a fashion and lifestyle in which young people dress like Black Americans of the early 2000s. Sean Lifer told Complex the crew grew up on hip-hop and refuse to be boxed in: "Africa isn't just drums and forests! We are proud of our culture, but we also see what goes on around the world." Yaw Tog told the Guardian he acknowledges the American influence, "but at the same time it's our own."

Own is the operative word. The Guardian visited a "trap house" studio on a hill above Kumasi, where O'Kenneth said: "This is where we make everything, it's all in-house." The Complex report says the Life Living studio in Santasi "quickly became a safe haven for young creatives." Teen Vogue reports the artists taught themselves from YouTube how-to videos to mix and record songs, shoot music videos and design cover art. Abdul Karim Abdullah, founder of Afrochella, told the magazine: "They were able to hone in on their own sound, produce and create content without outside support." In August 2020, by the Complex account, the Life Living crew also organised a clean-up in Manhyia, the royal neighbourhood where the Asante king lives. The same month, the BBC says, O'Kenneth started getting noticed online for his hooks on the collaborative mixtape Straight Outta Kumerica.

Doing it from home was the point. O'Kenneth told the Guardian that artists used to have to go to Accra to make it, and that they are showing it can be done from Kumasi. Drill artists have since appeared in Accra too, the Guardian reports, though those in Kumasi "seem mildly scornful of them."

Not everyone at home cheered at first. The BBC reports that the city's conservative nature meant some in the community did not embrace the sound at first. Rolling Stone, for its part, found that the violence alluded to in the songs "feels more connected to metaphor than any specific or active gangs."

Then there is the label. In the West, the BBC notes, the genre is known as Ghana drill, and that is a label the young artists and producers of Kumasi push back on. They point to how the sound has developed since 2020 and to its mix of Twi and English. "They don't really have a lot of understanding about what we do," O'Kenneth told the BBC. The audience is out there anyway: Spotify data cited by the BBC in March 2022 put 46% of all asakaa streams in the UK, the US and Germany.

O'Kenneth has an answer for that split, and it fits in one sentence. "Ghana is our home, but the world is our market."

The world can stream it. The name is still the word for talk turned around, a code built for the city's own ears. Kumasi hears it plain.

“Asakaa is the way we live, it's a music, it's a movement, it's culture, it's a lifestyle.”

1. BBC: Asakaa: How drill music found a new home in Ghana
2. MyJoyOnline: Asakaa: How drill music found a new home in Ghana (BBC syndication)
3. Adomonline: Going Global: Inside Ghana's burgeoning 'Kumerica' drill scene (from Complex)
4. The Guardian: 'It has our energy, our story': asakaa, Ghana's vibrant drill rap scene
5. The NATIVE: Sounds From This Side: Asakaa Drill
6. The NATIVE: Where Is Asaaka Today?
7. Rolling Stone: Meet Yaw Tog and The 'Asakaa' Boys
8. Teen Vogue: Ghana's Asakaa Boys Talk Influence of Pop Smoke and Drill Music