Hailing from the shady lands of North Samora and the hills of Bindura, RayKaz is a straight edge living, lyrical wordsmith from the horror capital that is Harare. Last year he planted a seed in the concrete jungle of Harare’s hip hop scene and has been watering his sprouting fanbase with new collaborative releases in 2021.
Regardless of the newer offerings, it is the bloody self-portraiture he painted last year that ennobled the self-harming lacerations of his social anxiety which grips me still to this day.
Oddly, it’s not just RayKaz’s masterful multisyllabic pen strokes that tattoo his calligraphic musings on to your hana (Hebrew and Shona for consciousness and heart respectively). His flow has this indescribable quality that hooks the listener in this sense of hypnotic inertia, the kind of attention seizing an Ayatollah can invoke over his audience. His quietly meek, yet subtly arrogant voice can weave spells that’ll leave you wishing for more. Listen to the ‘Due Date’ snippet.
The deep cuts from his debut tape ‘Anxious Confidence EP’ present him surprisingly as a human-like you…yourself. The two verses he bled out on Not Real, which is a masterfully crafted ballerina ballroom lo-fi trap beat by KKKash — one of my early favourites from his four beats contributions — contains what Ray calls ‘easily the realest sh*t’ he has ever written. Which is no cap, facts only!
His producer homie KKKash – who wishes to remain anonymous (for un-obvious reasons) – built the sonic cushion for Ray’s introspective soliloquy in a way that evokes artistic ballroom music to the mind. Listen with your imagination as KKKash draws you in with this stuttering loop of piano keys that subtly play up the anticipation of a ballerina’s adagio which is capably carried by Ray’s allegro-esque flow. Despite this being only track number 7, Ray then proceeds to pincushion the whole beat with poignant needle strikes aided by his spectacular ad-libs.
“I’m not really cool with the fam like I was back when I was a child
Kinda just feel like a burden, the vibe just be different when I’m on that side of the town
Ain’t no condition to love as a toddler
But when you grown, the conditions will pile up
Now I’m a man and they think I’m a problem
Ain’t no more dad, you address him as father
I promise I know defeat, we kinda homies
Inside of me broken pieces, kinda lonely
I kinda been overeating just to cope with it
Easy to see the flowers when it’s sunny
But harder to keep on smiling when its muddy
And part of me screaming out for someone’s help
And my arteries leaking out, but no one cares
And they calling me once a month and it just showed me that”
Aside from the lyrical miracles that stand as the glaring burden of proof to RayKaz’s skill-set, there is more to the EP which, before I forget to mention, has the sonic cohesion of a well-rolled high grade joint being smoked during the mixing and mastering sessions of The Chronic 2001.
Hear me out, before you hip-hop heads throw a fit, I’d ask - and bias is optional here - that you judge the AC EP based on these simple metrics; production techniques, tempo, and the general theme.
Are you done thinking about it? Having done so, what would you say is the common threading that holds this ambitious storytelling of RayKaz’s ‘unorganized progression’ from choking anxiety to total confidence? Yes, it is Munya Murapa’s empowering ‘truth serum’ that deprecates society’s ideological constructs. Better yet is the way it is sombrely delivered in that tone that just jolts you into wokeness, every time he shows on the tape injecting his poem into your hana, like a vaccine for society induced depression.
I, however, argue that it’s RayKaz’s vocal style that really does the job of keeping you engaged in a deeply personal tape that has songs like Reaper that serve a critical role in the album’s conceptual identity and track listing but can be a bit of a dampener – tempo-wise and sequentially. With his style largely influenced by the technical greats in the game, Eminem, Ab-Soul and Kendrick Lamar obviously, he risks sounding like a J. Cole imitator on a surface-level reading of his Genius lyrics. This would ultimately restrict him to the “conscious rapper” label that fans lazily ascribe to ‘rappers with deep English bars’. This, however, is a good thing, as I feel Ray showed he can have a lot of change in terms of dynamics, speed, instrumentation, lyrical content to get a good cohesive sound that isn’t repetitive.
“Em was the one who made me fall in love with hip hop and the technical complexities of SPITTING. Then J. Cole’s ‘Born Sinner’ made me fall in love with ni**as having something to say, and then GKMC. Then Earl Sweatshirt’s ‘Doris’ made me appreciate being fucking different. Then haaaaaa I fell in love with everything,” RayKaz.
It’s difficult to tell the story of the unwanted, of the problem child, despite how hip-hop would have you believe that her voice is for everyone to speak through. Eight years and thirty-two months of social anxiety and being ‘down in the dumps’ choked RayKaz as he went through a mental health decline that inevitably strained his sociability and led to him becoming very reclusive. His only outlet being the sound he crafted for himself during his musical sage hermit days, before losing his End Of Daze freestyle on SoundCloud as his statement of intent.
Reminiscent of Jay Electronica and his near-mythical debut album that ranks highly during the 2020’s offerings, AC EP and the unreleased material I have been made privy to, show me that we have more world-beater talent in this melting teapot country of ours. RayKaz shows the conflicting dualities of being a Zimbabwean with a dream, with a pen game I don’t hesitate to compare to Jay’s. Electronica, not Mr Carter of course, though this is not to say Ray is incapable of reaching Jigga’s masterful songwriting ability, he very much is capable, provided he can get some visuals and a calculated content creation plan for his social media platforms.
Oh, by the way, Ray is a baller like for real for real. Scope the talent in this badman! Music only wouldn’t work out for him because he would have chosen football, his first love. From the looks of this compilation, at least we would blast Easy vuvuzela remix in the rafters, as Ray Kazembe dribbles down the wing wearing the national 7 on his back with pride. I pray this mandem never plays for Arsenal though, he’s too good for them. LMFAO!
