Blitz the Ambassador

It’s going to take more than verbal missiles for Hip-Hop to stay in power. Now more than ever, we need diplomats to forge lasting creative alliances, finesse fence-sitters and bridge the gap between warring factions. Blitz the Ambassador has been ready for that job. And with his debut genre-bending album, Stereotype, he proves it. “I went for broke with this album,” says the Ghana-born MC and producer who counts Fela Kuti, Bjork, Miles Davis, Nina Simone and Rakim among his influences. “I set out to change the way hip-hop approaches live instrumentation, to create synergy between all of the sounds on my personal playlist.”
To get the job done, Blitz and longtime co-producer Optiks enlisted a diverse cast of musicians including Chicago’s Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, emerging soul singer Rob Murat and indie rock sensation Kate Mattison. Lest the hip-hop get lost in the musical mash-up, there’s Blitz’s bombastic flow and stadium-size stage presence. In the tradition of KRS-One and Chuck D, Blitz can move any crowd, small or large. ”Red, Gold, Green, Black Star authentic”
Growing up in Accra City where electricity and running water weren’t promised, Blitz found solace in creativity, drawing award-winning pictures, playing the djembe drum, and soaking up the urgent horns and multilayered percussion of the local High Life music. In the early ‘90s when his older brother brought home Public Enemy’s ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’, Blitz found his calling. “These guys felt the way I felt and they could speak honestly about it,” the Brooklyn transplant explains. “At that time, Ghana was just recovering form a brutal military government— try to make a political statement and you’d be gone. Hip-hop allowed me to hear people who looked like me speaking out.” By blending the slang of his community with the cadences of American rappers, Blitz went on to win local MC battles, make radio appearances, and play venues and festivals from Arusha Tanzania, to Berlin, Germany and of course he opened for any artist who came to town, including Talib Kweli, The Roots and De La Soul.
Now, more than a decade into the hip-hop game, Blitz still brings the undiluted passion of a new artist. Even the provocative cover of Stereotype—a man with a boom-box for a head blows out his brains—symbolizes of his love for the culture. “Hip-hop music is our lifeline,” the MC says of the image he designed as a response to the fuselage of ringtone-y singles and studio gangersterism on the market. “We can’t buy into stereotypes of young Black men and stay involved in our music’s destruction and think we’re going to survive ourselves.” With Stereotype, we can all be rest assured that Blitz the Ambassador is doing his part to help repair what’s wrong in Hip-Hop—and to celebrate what’s so very right.