South African rapper, producer and illustrator King Lutendo imbues his music with African folklore, tribal elements and a cinematic touch. His experimental edge is deeply rooted in his Venda heritage, and both reverberate through his album, MAVU. Across nine songs and 28 minutes, he broaches notions of identity, rebirth and love over eccentric melodies, traditional rhythms and emotive percussion.
“The album is based around the concept of self-discovery and getting to the point of knowing and accepting the person I am,” he shares with Apple Music. “In Tshivenda, Mavu refers to soil or land but is also used to describe nobility. It's me acknowledging that I'm royal and trying to realise my maximum potential. In a nutshell, it's the state of mind I'm in right now.” Thematically, MAVU is a contemporary meditation on what it means to be a “son of the soil” as he bravely moulds seemingly incompatible styles together into a satisfying whole. We scratch beneath the surface as Lutendo shares the processes, symbols and inspiration for his debut offering.
“Thoho Khulu, Pt. 1”
“On ‘Thoho Khulu, Pt. 1’, I was basically looking at it like a movie’s opening scene: an introduction. The phrase ‘Thoho Khulu’ literally means big head—which I got called a lot when I was younger. Kids can be mean—but they’re also prophetic ‘cause Thoho Khulu can also mean a leader or person of authority. I use the phrase to express how I'm at the centre of a lot of the cultural shift in Venda. It's a declaration that I'm in an influential position… so the vibe is pretty intense! I'd actually just watched a Tarantino film and you can tell—it’s very in your face. Usually I like to make the kind of music where you decide whether you want to pay attention, but in this case it was like, ‘Put it as out there as [much as] you possibly can.’ The beat is actually one of the more simple beats I made on the whole project, mostly because the samples I used had so much emotion: those big trumpets just say, ‘A giant just walked out here.’ As soon as I heard those I was like, ‘Damn! I'm literally just gonna add drums to this.’”
“GONI”
“Goni means Eagle—and I view them as a real-life version of the Phoenix. When eagles reach a certain age they go into isolation and lose all their feathers. It's as if they're about to die but they get a second wind complete with new feathers, claws and beaks. I look at myself that way given that my come up—and the opportunity to drop the debut album—was kind of delayed. I feel I'm much stronger than when I thought it would’ve [happened]. I'm also following in the footsteps of a whole lineage of African royalty. I find that linking myself to that era of Africanism gives me greater confidence and I'd rather use that as a template for myself than only basing my identity off of slavery or apartheid. So the Eagle analogy is very apt ‘cause even just reading up on these civilisations kind of re-birthed me.”
“Her Needs”
“ ‘Her Needs’ is a love song I wrote about what we need from an emotional viewpoint—versus what we think we want. I speak about a girl and how her friends influence her to say some things to me via text. That's symbolic of how what we want is based on what we're told or what's on TV—but we're never really looking at our needs. I also reference how a lot of stuff starts off perfectly but ends badly when our masks are pulled off. It’s almost like we're tryna have relationships using a template, when each one should be as unique as the situation demands. That's why I called it that—it’s needs versus wants as far as our emotions go.”
“Sustain”
“This one's based on the whole idea behind ‘Her Needs’ but from my perspective. I'm laughing at the fact that I thought I needed somebody else to provide my happiness. That's why the hook goes, ‘I thought the love that you gave me would sustain me.’ It's a moment of realisation like, ‘Oh okay I see what my mistake at that point in time was.’ ‘Sustain’ is actually one of my favourites as far as flow and vocal experimentation go. I like to build the beat by adding individual elements to it. I literally hummed little sections of it ‘till I pretty much built a complete flow.”
“Fhedza Vhothe”
“‘Fhedza Vhothe’ means ‘to end them all’. It's from a very militant approach, in a Thanos-take-everybody-out type of way. I have cipher and battle-rap roots and that still comes out in the stuff I do. I'm also a very big fan of contrast, so there's Japanese Zen garden guitars going on in the back along with the aggressive 808s on there. The video for this was based on the siren on the song and giving that a visual representation. There's a sense of a state of emergency, like in the ‘70s underwater sci-fi movies. It’s, like, whenever a submarine is about to sink, the lights go off and then it's just the red, beeping emergency lights.”
“RUN2ME”
“A lot of people end relationships because they become overwhelmed by their own flaws—comparing them to those of their partners, or the next person—and they run from that. ‘RUN2ME’ is about being accepted for who you are. That’s the reason I mention seasons in the song—it’s like finding a place or someone you belong to regardless of the current state of your life. It's a set of arms you can run into: a constant, unshakeable force of love that stands still regardless of all that rotates around it.”
“Self Acceptance”
“ ‘Self Acceptance’ is kinda self-explanatory. It's one of the few songs on here where the title just gives away what the whole thing's about. It's not from a place of arrogance though. That's why even with all the flexing—all the ‘I'm feeling myself’—it’s still based around self-acceptance.”
“Thoho Khulu, Pt. 2”
“‘Thoho Khulu, Pt. 2’ was also, crazy enough, a Tarantino inspiration. It's inspired by how Kill Bill is really one movie but split in two. I wanted ‘Thoho Khulu’ to be a miniseries within this bigger picture. It's like in The Simpsons, how they're watching a TV show even though we're watching them on a cartoon show.”
“Black Soul”
“This carries so much melanin pride. Like, ‘Where’s the place for the Nubian prince in today's context?’ I look at it as an evolution from where ‘GONI’ left off. ‘GONI’ is more about the state of mind—like [Steve] Biko's Black Consciousness—whereas ‘Black Soul’ addresses the reality of being black in South Africa today. It's more like a live report that moves between what being black feels like, then imagines what being black should be like. That's why the first verse addresses the lack of jobs and opportunities and how we've lost trust in government. Like people in Venda who've pretty much been living in bad conditions prior to Mandela, through the Mandela era and even after him. Those are black souls. But yeah, the reference to Nubians is ‘cause I'm a big believer that people are stronger when they have a greater understanding of their roots. A lot of the knowledge that a lot of black people have is kind of just slavery and no further back than that. We forget that there was a whole African civilisation before that—those are black souls too.”