Michael Kiwanuka - Black Man in a White World

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. Thanks to Quince for their support of Song Exploder. There was a survey done recently that found that over 50% of sweaters found in my closet come from Quince. That's because there are so many good ones on their site, and I want all of them.

For me, their cashmere sweaters fit in the exact sweet spot between casual and dressy and between effortless and put together. So I just got a new one, the Mongolian Kashmir Fisherman Sweater. I wore it to a show last night. But that's just one tiny slice of the things that they offer over at Quince. You can also find shirts and pants and accessories and home goods and outerwear, all kinds of great clothes, all at really reasonable prices.

So refresh your wardrobe at Quince. Go to quince.com slash song exploder for free shipping and 365-day returns, now available in Canada too. go to qince.com slash song exploder for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash song exploder. This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by Booking.com. And I'm gonna go on there right now because I've got a bunch of tour dates coming up between April and June. So I'm putting in the dates.

For the first city on my tour, Austin, Texas, and there are over 300 options. There's a huge variety from hotels to vacation rentals. I'm going to narrow it down to hotels and filter the results based on my budget and my tastes. And okay, there we go. There's still over 20 options for me to choose from. I'm gonna look at the ones that are closest to the menu where I'm playing. And then I'm gonna check out all the reviews and pick the one that feels most like me.

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This week, with protests against police brutality happening all across the world, there's an urgency. There's a life and death urgency, in fact, in the discourse that's taking place right now. It seems unbelievable in 2020 that something as simple and true as the idea that Black Lives Matter has to be asserted over and over again. But here we are. It still does.

I was thinking of letting Song Exploder be silent this week. It's hard to feel like a show about the creative process is necessary in a moment where everyone's attention should be focused on trying to carve justice out of an unjust world.

But music can accomplish things that other forms of expression can't, and it can make you feel things with a power that can't be replicated. And that is important. And I thought of this episode from twenty seventeen with Michael Kuanuka and his song Black Man in a White World.

I love this song, and there are things that Michael said about it that I really wanted to hear again. Before the episode plays, I want to mention that Michael also put out a new record in 2019 called Kunuka, and it's also great, and you should definitely go listen to it.

And if you want to get involved in the fight for basic human rights and equality, please do it in whatever way you can. Donate, listen, learn about the realities of racial injustice, call your government representatives, and demand that things change. If you do want to donate, there's some links in the episode description. I'll be back with a new episode of Song Exploder soon, but that'll be for another time. Okay, here we go.

Michael Kuanuka is a singer-songwriter from London. His second album, Love and Hate, came out in 2016 and was named one of the best albums of the year from the BBC, NME, The Guardian, GQ, and more. One of the songs on the album was used as the theme for the hit HBO series Big Little Lies. And in this episode, Michael breaks down the song Black Man in a White World. He talks about how the song began, where it came from, and what the title means to him.

My name's Michael Kuanuka and I'm a singer-songwriter from London. The song started in the studio around November time 2014. I've only done two albums. This is on the second album that's come out, Love and Hate. I'd done the first album and I was struggling to make the second album. I'd written all these songs

made what I thought was an album, listened to it back, and decided it wasn't good enough. It was missing that excitement that you want to hear off an album. So I was really dejected and stopped. making music really. I just thought maybe the first album was just luck. It was the first few songs I wrote and they worked, but now it's come down to it. I just don't have the ability. Everything doesn't sound good. I kept sending things in to the label. They were like

Yeah, it's all right, but it's not really happening. And uh and I knew it deep down. And I was just kind of sitting around so my manager was like, Why don't you work with Inflow? And I was like, Who's Inflow? It's like, She's good and I hadn't collaborated very much with other producers or co written really that much. So I said, Well, I'm not doing anything and nothing's happening and

It's not like I've got any options. So we met in central London and we just talked for like a couple of hours and I was thought this guy's really cool and seemed like a nice person, so let's go in the studio. But I was really, really

down and I would sometimes flow would call and be like, Let's go to the studio and I just wouldn't turn up. I just couldn't face being in in a studio and listening to music that wasn't good enough all the time. It's like this is just depressing'cause it was like I haven't written a good song in years. It feels like years and but then on like the fourth day of being in the studio every day, I just had my acoustic and I started playing some chords, like country style bluesy chords and just

And Flo was in the other room and he was like, what's that? Sounds pretty cool. I knew straight away that there was something to it. When I got signed and started making music professionally, is the first time people say, Well, you're this, or well, you're that, you should be doing this kind of Every time I send a demo in or like a track in, an AR guy would be like, you know, you're not gonna sing a country song. You're black.

So that used to really rilm me up'cause I felt like being black was like stopped me from being a successful artist'cause I thought, well, if I was white, you know, I'd be able to do country music because It would fit, it would be like, Oh yeah, he looks like that. It fit. So I had this feeling of like, you don't fit. So I thought, well, let's get rid of the acoustic guitar country lick. I said to Flo,

I've been listening recently to Sun House, the early blues music and there's this one Sun House song, Don't Mind People Grinning in Your Face, and he's just singing and clapping. The whole song is just singing and clapping. Any of these who brought bad who is in mind, a true friend is hard to find. I'm Miren. So we just started clapping and I just started singing, I'm a black man in a white world. We had no chords and I just started singing the verse. I've been

And then we listened to it back and it just sounded good just like that. We thought, wow, this is exciting. And we stacked up the choruses for I'm a black man and doubled it and I did some harmonies on it. And um Flo went into the live room and played a bass drum, just three beats. I've been here. We've gone as far as we can without any chords or anything. So I just picked up an electric guitar and plugged it straight into the desk.

We had no amps, so like we just plugged into the desk. And I was thinking of like Curtis Mayfield tunes or the way people played on those like 70s records. I was just obsessed with that still. The guitar is so cool and exciting, but it's smooth as well and clean. I wanted something like that so I picked up the guitar and then just found the key and then just played a G and a A in like as funky a rhythm as I could do. Yeah this Kind of broken base that was in the studio.

So I'll just plug that straight into the desk as well and just follow the guitar. And then that's all we had. That was like a space of half an hour, 45 minutes. I felt validated, you know. I felt some affirmation just in within myself and my emotion'cause I was like, I haven't been this excited about something I'm creating for so long, you know. So it was a really big moment, like, maybe I can do it, you know.

But what was holding me back was the lyric. I'm a black man in a white world. But I can't sing that. I can't sing I'm a black man in a white world. Most of the people that come to my gigs, there's not really that many black people that come to the shows. So what what would they think if if if I put this out on an album or released it as a song? Would people think I just hate white people, you know? So all this fear kind of came in and I tried to change the words.

I'm a black man and I feel down or I'm a black man in a in the wrong world or anything, you know, I was just trying to just shoehorn, you know, I could just say something else. around what I mean, but just soften it a bit, you know, and that way no one will get upset.'Cause I was like, you know, no one's gonna listen to this. I sound like some like

racist, you know, that hates white people. I just thought which it isn't, but I thought people misunderstand because it was just this repetitive like mantra, I'm a black man in the white world. But I wanna sing it because it felt so true to me Like incredibly shrewd. Nothing had felt that clear as a lyric up until that point in terms of what I felt like at the time.

For me being a black artist, doing the music that I do, it's not it doesn't really always connect with modern black culture as such. Growing up, I was always listening to Nirvana, I was listening to Green Day in my early teens. I was going to like punk festivals, watching Pennywise and it would be like none of these bands have

Black guys in it. Because of where I grew up, Muswell Hill, there was no real black family. So my all with my environment, all my influences were from kind of middle class. a white backgrounds, but my family uh Ugandans and everyone had two cars, we didn't have any cars. We had like different foods. When friends came round to stay, it would be like, Oh, we don't find my place strange, you know, we don't we we eat like Ugandan food, so You know, all these things.

So I I was always like, I don't fit. And on top of that, the music industry and the struggles of just like people trying to put you in a box. So back to the lyric. The feeling was like half acceptance to myself and two just declaring like, Well this is it then. That's what you see me. I'm a black man in a white world.

So that's it, that's what I'm supposed to be. Cool. Sometimes it annoys me, sometimes I get down about it, but at the same time, good, you know, you said that, I'm gonna say it too.

But then after that we just had this demo for like a year and we couldn't finish the song because every time we tried things it just ruined the excitement that we had at the beginning. We tried to re record it with the proper band but we just couldn't get what we were wanted. We couldn't replicate that excitement. And we realized at the time the reason why we were losing the energy of it was that we were trying to fix all the mistakes like the out-of-tune base.

And the tempo just goes up and down. It's not to a click. It's just so all over the place. Then Flo and I realised when we were back in London, it was like, well, maybe we just play it to the demo.

and extend that'cause that's got the excitement. I'll have to get a drummer to just play through the weird tempo changes that happened. And so I called my friend Graham up, who's a drummer. We said, We've got this track. Can you play drums on it? So he came to a studio in London We just kept paying the track. It's like his second beat he came up with just fitted the song and kept the excitement there but elevated it.

The beat that he had was like this fella cootie style beat, afro beat feel. And so Flo and I looked at each other like, wow, this sounds very And um he also brought congas along. So we put a Congo part down, put some percussion in it. Some other sounds that we hadn't heard before. I mean Graham went for it. Graham just started playing shakers. He played everything under the sun that you had in this percussion box. And then we need to do some back and vocals.

Those were done in London by three great singers. They come from like church backgrounds, so they can sing, like really, really sing. I just had the idea to have this sound that goes boom. Just to shock people in the verse. So I sing before that, I'm in love. And so I just said, sing love straight away after that. I'm in love. But I'm still sad. Like a bullet to shock someone. And then knights as well. Knights. Later on in one of the verses, there are these R's that they do too.

So there's like a crunch to it. I love that stuff. And then there was this engineer that assistant engineer that was at the studio and uh he's got this really low voice. He just starts talking and he's like, Man, your voice is low. And Flo had the idea, he turned round and was like, I wonder what it would sound like if after the breakdown the assistant sings Underneath My Harmonies.

I'm a black man in the white world to give an extra lift because he's got this really low voice that we couldn't get down to with a real strong character. So he asked him and he was like, Well, I'm not a singer, I'm not a musician. You want me to sing on this track? And he was like, Yeah. And it sounded amazing. I'm a black man in the white world And then we wanted to put some like string quartets and soulful string parts on a lot of the songs, which is the fun part near the end of a record.

But I decided not to put strings on Batman and the White World. I thought it's not really that kind of lush, kind of mid tempo soul song. This is more exciting, so I don't want to take away from that to have like this really pretty string sound on top of it. Flo knows this lady called Rosie Danvers who does streams for a lot of artists like Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Adele, stuff like that. So she's like the go to. So Rosie's in the studio, we we play her all the tracks on the album.

But I leave out black man in the white world. But she hears it'cause she's the end of the day. She's like, What's this? you know. I was like, it's a song Black Man and White World. But I don't really want strings on it. So he was like, well, let me just try something. So I said, cool, you know, we can just try it. And if you don't like it, you can just take it out. And they play these really nice, long notes over the

I thought that's pretty, that's cool, but that's what I expected. But then the drop came. These disco seventies strings like the Sando's like What this sounds incredible. And this was one of my favourite parts of the song. It was like the icing, the cherry on the cake. And at that point it was like the song's done.

I used to be just really upset with just not fitting in. I wanted just to be in a group that would look like someone that looked like me and I just was desperate to fit in. When we would go to Uganda it would be like There's this word in Uganda which is Mizungu, but it basically means foreigner or white person. So they'll call me and my brother a Mizungu'cause we were like chubby than everyone, like didn't speak Uganda, we had different kinds of clothes.

And it'd be like Mzungu, Mzungu. And I was like, don't call me that, man. I'm like, I'm English, but I'm not white, you know. And then, but then when I would be in England, it would be like, Well, you're black, you know. So I was just in the middle of nowhere. And and I hated it. And I wanted to sing about that, and it came out, and it's song.

So, Black Man and White Worlds. I'm glad that's the lyric. I realize how much of a a blessing it is to not fit in. You can relate to different things that people don't really understand. And then I'd listen to my favourite artists and I realised they all kind of had that in some way. So for me, this song represents all of that eureka moment of like, oh right.

Okay, this is like actually incredible that I get to be a bit different and I'm so lucky that I grew up in Marswell Hill in North London, in the middle class area. I like rock music. I'm so lucky that my parents are Ugandan, I'm so lucky that I'm black.

And now here's Black Man in a White World by Michael Kuanuka in its entirety. I've been lost. I've been I've got no I've got nothing But I'm still Visit Songexploder.net for a link to buy this track and to learn more about Michael Kuanuoka, and to watch the award-winning music video for Black Man in a White World.

I have a new album of my own coming out on April twenty-fourth. It's been about fifteen years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Herway. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade I've gotten and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. is the product of all of that.

including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Fenn Lilly and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm gonna be on tour playing in cities across the US starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm Will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott.

Simeen Nosrat, Jason Manzukis, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all gonna be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can and get tickets for the shows on my website. Or just Songexploder.net slash live. That's songuexploder.net slash live. Thanks.

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So head to Wayfair.com from April 25th through April 27th to shop Wayday. That's W-A-Y-F A-I-R dot com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Kuhnz. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts made possible by listeners like you. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.

You can find Song Exploder on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at SongExploder, and you can find all the past and future episodes of the show at Songexploder.net or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rishike Shirwe. Thanks for listening.