Grammy award nominee; Afrobeat singer and instrumentalist Made Kuti is the cover star for TheWill Downtown Magazine’s January 23 – 29 edition.
Made talks about growing up in the Afrika shrine, his journey – owning his craft not as Fela’s grandson or Femi Kuti’s son; but as the multi-talented Grammy nominee.
Excerpts from the interview:
On the moment he found out that his debut album was nominated for the Grammys
I went mad. We were on tour, on break in a tour bus in Belgium, we had two off-days. And I had been checking because I knew that the nominations were being announced that day so I was watching live. I was expecting that my dad would get a nod, but he put out a solo project, Stop The Hate, at the same time we released Legacy+, so I wasn’t sure which of the albums they would nominate. The nominations for Best Global Music Performance was announced first and it featured Pà Pá Pà, a song by my dad and I went mad. I was just happy that he was nominated because it is like they don’t want to recognize the effort and amount of musicianship that he puts in. Then the Global Music Album category came around and I had already thought that because they nominated my dad in the previous category, they wouldn’t nominate him in this one. I actually ran around the bus when Legacy+ was announced. Because the album didn’t get commercial success, it was nice to see that musicians respect it.
Read full interview here.
