You will fuck up. It is ok, pick yourself up, strap your boots, and keep going.

THE BEGINNING

My story begins at birth, I would say because I was an only child when I was born. I am the eldest so I had a long period of time to go outside, I lived on a farm, experimented with things, played in my mind…you know when you are alone you start to create things in my imagination so I ended up creating a lot of things in my imagination and that is why I became a creative I think.

I started hearing songs in my mind, I started drawing pictures, I started doing things like these and then with time I took pen and paper and started to draw and I remember my grandma actually kept some of these photographs and pictures that I had drawn from the age of three and I was actually shocked that I was into expressing myself that young.

My childhood was extremely nomadic, I travelled a lot, I was born in Mombasa and then a year later I found myself in Nakuru, my father moved to the states and my mom went back to be with her parents for a while and then I found myself in Nyahururu with my grandparents when mom moved to the States and then a couple of years later I moved to the States. By the time I was flying to America I knew Kikuyu, I knew Kijaluo because those were the only to languages I knew, because Kikuyu was the local language in Nyahururu and Luo was my mother tongue and we travelled to the states and then I picked up an American accent so my childhood had a lot of travelling an meeting different cultures, understanding people in different ways and adapting to people’s ways. I was raised by the entire clan, my grandma was very strict and she instilled something that I am very grateful for to date, my grand mom instilled work ethic. Now when I say grandmother and work ethic people always look at me like what do you mean, but it was very simple, it does not matter whether you were a 2 year old, 3 year old,16 year old, you will wake up at 6.00 am. It does not matter how cold it is, and the slopes of Mt.Kenya are cold, you will get up and you will go milk the cows, you prepare the water for the cows, take the aramis for the adder and you milk the cows, then you make sure the milk is ready for the KCC man to pick up everyday.

Everyday without fail and I adapted to that thing where I cannot sit still and do nothing, I must be doing stuff, I must be working, I must be constantly doing things because that is what I saw and that is how I was raised.

I have a vivid memory of something that I did that I should not have done when I was 5. Because I used to tinker a lot with electronics, one day I messed up the TV, I put a hanger inside, I don’t know what the hell I was hoping but that scared the hell out of me but also I just became a person who liked tinkering with stuff and that is why up to date I will always be found in the studio environment, in an environment with stuff because I am one of those people who like

knowing how do stuff work. Because I travelled a lot and because I travelled to place like Chicago, Naivasha, Nyahururu and growing up there I met such a diverse group of people who have very different languages, very different ways of life and then I came back and grew up in Kajiado and then I ended up in Nairobi.

I understand Maasai, I understand Swahili, I understand kikuyu, I understand Kamba and that helped me in a sense because I can sit down and listen to a musician and the funny thing is I can hear what they need to become before they even know what they need to become, because of that movement that I had.

They say that to travel is to open up your mind, now imagine to travel as a small child, as a three year old child for years it really broadens your perspective of life to a point where you can sit down and listen to an American and you can tell where they are from just by their accent but a normal Kenyan will just say ”uyo in mlami jo..ametoka majuu”(that’s a white person from abroad).

I understand people and read people a lot because that is all I had. Consider, you are landing in America and you don’t understand the language so you have to read the situation and try and find out is this thing safe; am I just about to get hit because I was a black child and I would get beat up for being black by the white kids and then I would get beat up for being African by the black kids and they don’t like Africans, then I came back to Kenya and I have a thick American accent and I have to walk from St Michael’s which is in Jeri back to Buru and now I am a foreigner and everyone wants to bully me, so I am very good at reading situations before they unfold, which helped me in my career to read creatives before they become who they should be.

In the states for me the biggest challenge was learning English, as a child and having to learn English at the age of three. I had not interacted with English apart from hallo

I was in school when I was in Nyahururu but the learning was in kikuyu so going to the states and having to adapt to a whole new language, and then I wasn’t exposed to things as basic as soda so I am in the airplane and someone gives me something and I say I do not want tea cause I am thinking coke is tea.

In school because I could not understand the language I would watch people and try and to figure out what is being said and that is how I learnt, I learnt by watching people and looking at people, even the piano I learnt it just by watching people, that is how I have been able to adapt to my career.

I think young people are not allowed to tinker with things, people are not allowed to be expressive other than on social media, and when I say expressive on social media its just people abusing each other instead of even learning how to write a poem in Swahili. You tell a guy from Nairobi to write a shairi for one million shillings, they will go and Google it or you tell them can you compose a love song without any vulgar language…they can’t.

If you look at my hands, I have a lot of cuts because as a child I used to make tin cars especially during the safari rally month ,

nowadays the kids want to play PS and I am wondering what the hell are you playing PS for, go make your own damn PS. make your own fun, figure things out. That is how we create entrepreneurs and people who discover things; we cannot create innovators by giving them phones and play stations. Take you child out, let them go play with the goats they may become something.

I look back to my early childhood and feel like, these days; kids do not have a bond with their parents. Every Saturday morning without fail my dad would tell me jump into the car and we would go to the record store and I would look at all these Vinyls and he’d tell me “you choose yours and I’ll choose mine.” every every Saturday without fail.

Now One, that was a bonding time for us, do we in this new generation, even when we have kids, do we have time when it’s just me and my son or me and my daughter and say let me go bond, cause every one is busy with work when it gets to the weekend you just want to sleep and not talk to anyone and it is because you are overworked and you are really exhausted so the world is conditioning you not to raise your own child, not to bond with your own child, so you have a child whose only bond is the PlayStation.

We have seen some kids abusing people on social media and they are really young and you are wondering, ”Who hurt you?”…It is because they do not have those bonds, they do not have those connections; they have no grounding at all. I look at it and I say we are losing the creativity, we are losing the connections, we are losing the spirituality, and we are losing all these things because of people running for some sort lifestyle that doesn’t actually even make sense.

MUSIC AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES

There is one thing I always say...use what you have in your hand to get what you want. I started a bag company with a smartphone, my shop…my smartphone, my bank…my smartphone, my marketing…my smartphone, my advertising…my smartphone, you are in a generation that has been given EVERYTHING and you are still begging.

You are either a producer or a consumer, so I say this to Kenyans, we can consume all the Chinese nonsense that they bring down to the leather jackets, down to the fake Gucci and Prada, down to everything, we can consume them…no problem, we are just making jobs for the Chinese and giving them money or we can become producers and we can produce our own things.

Then I realized along the way that I am busy pumping money into artists but artists are using me as a stepping stone, a launch pad, so I have just become like Ford Foundation, I am just dishing money out for people to do their own things and I thought to myself the age I am at right now, I want to leave a legacy, I want to do something that makes money, that builds people, not one person but any people, that enables many people to put food on their table and music wasn’t that.

You do not get money from loyalties, there is no loyalty. So after the recording with Masauti, he started doing his thing, he decided he wanted to go back o Mombasa, he though t that my music was too intense for the kind of stuff that he wanted to do and the truth is, it was too intense for the stuff he wanted to do.

What he wanted to do and what I wanted to do were polar opposites; I didn’t want to do pop music, I am not about a hit now…I am about a song that people will still listen to 20 years from now. I recorded Atoti in 2000,this is 2020 and Atoti is not dead, people have died but atoti is still alive, I recorded Unbwogable in 2002 and it is still being played, I recorded Kisumu 100 in 1999 and it is still being played...why? Because I look at timeless and there are people who look at time bound and we can’t meet and be on the same page.

If I look at Tanznia there are a lot of successful women musicians for example Lady Jaydee, Thandi and a lot of others who are making it big and they continue rising.

When you listen to their audio and video quality it’s on par, when you go to south Africa, you had Hugh Masekela you had Miriam makeba as equals, in Nigeria there are people like Asa who are big internationally and she is a very successful lady. I think in Kenya we are just assholes for lack of a better word because the men feel like they they can put the women down and there is no need for that…the plat is big enough for everybody.

So if a big female pop artist comes and she is beautiful what’s gonna happen; the first thing that is going to happen to that musician is when I send her to radio with her single all the presenters will want to enter her pants and they will tell her that without sleeping with them her song will not be played on my station, that is way I said we are sort of assholes and the same thing applies for television.

So the men in power want to use the women in order to give those women the same opportunities that their counterparts have which is messed up. Talent is talent, when you see talent, lift it up and let it shine, don’t step on it…don’t misuse that talent and tell them you will go on my terms, that is rubbish; that’s in part why we are not seeing female musicians coming up.

I am not listening to any Kenyan musician currently. The audio quality is horrible; it has nothing to do with the music. The professional recordings are not being donewell, you need to have good sound engineers, and you need to have speakers. When I trained, the person who trained me was from new york institute of technology, he wasn’t just an engineer, he was the kind of guy who would go down to river road, buy spare parts and come make his own mixer and he trained me with that in mind.

I listen to fidelity, Fidelity is high quality sound recordings and that is what I always try to achieve in my recording and I have failed, many many times to a point where I do not even listen to my recordings because I hear the lack of good audio quality in those recordings, it has been for me the thing that I am trying to attain, its not a good song but a really crisp good recording and I don’t find that in Kenya.

There is a lot more opportunities for musicians now, there are a lot more radio stations, so you can call a friend and your music will be played on radio, when we started there was one radio station and you’d only get played on KBC general service and you’d only get

main feature ‹If you want it enough, it doesn’t matter what happens, things will be thrown your direction that sidetrack you very easily and if you are not discerning to know that it was brought to throw you off guard…you will go off guard.›

get played on KBC general service and you’d only get played one hour a week between 8.00 am and 9.00 am on Monday morning.

I left Kenya for the UK because I had decided to do something very stupid, I decided to become an advertising guru for politicians, a very bad idea because when you roll with the big dogs you have to learn how to piss on the big tree and I had not figured out that I was going to need to piss on big trees. I did an advert that really irritated the people in state house and all it took was for Mama Lucy to say, ”tell those people to stop interfering with our advertising?” that’s all and she said that on national television. A couple of people came to deliver the message and Kenya became not too palatable for a music producer so my small balls and me left the country.

However I came back because Home is home and politicians have a short term memory, I decided to come home for two reasons; I was leaving out of a suitcase which was very uncomfortable, I was in between Lagos, London and cape town, constantly training people in media, training people in production but not having roots, so I decided let me go home.

FAMILY

Regina was an angel. I have never known a person who is more caring, more loving and I am not just saying this, even the people who interacted her said there was something different about her and when she comes into your world, she changes it for the better. angelic voice and she had just suffered a out of pneumonia so she wasn’t really performing at her best but it sounded really tiptop and then after the music we sat down to talk, we started sharing ideas about fashion and stuff, we started realizing that we had so much more in common than just the music.

We started designing together, we started building SwaRnb together, she didn’t like the name but she never said it she just rolled with it and we then realized that we both wanted to have a family, to have children, so we intentionally conceived. When we conceived it was a tricky journey because chances of her losing the child were very high so we decided maybe we take a break from fashion and everything and we will revisit when the baby is here and the baby is ok.

When Jay came it was a handful, it was a lot of work we were trying to figure out how do we do that and when Jay was 3 months, jay’s mom passed away and two days before she passed I had just finished designing her logo for her brand because she was re-launching to he market and it was really rough but what she had done through that process was give me two babies, Jay Jay and the idea that I need to get my ass out of the music industry, out of the comfort zone, out of that place that I am used to and to a new space and that was the fashion space.

When I started Joka Jok it was continuing her legacy I tell people, I am a bridge from mama Jay Jay over to Jay Jay’s generation, so I hope to hand Jay Jay over her company and Regina’s most enduring quality is that she was never judgmental, never ever judgmental. It didn’t matter who you are or where you come from. There is one guy here at the workshop working with us till now and he was her personal tailor and when she died that guy cried as though it was his child who died.

At lunchtime she would go and cook for her own workers, she was just the kind of person who loved people and wanted to take care of people and everyone gravitated towards her

when they had problems. Sometimes I’d tell her “ you carry so much load” and that is just the way she was.

I knew she was the one at first sight the day I saw her walk toward me I knew, instantly I knew I am fucked. This one is coming to finish me; I am not going to be the same after this person.

Grief is an ongoing process that never ends. Sometimes you can deal with it, sometimes you can’t, when you lose someone you love its even hard to explain to people that loss changes the tapestry of your whole being from inside out, your soul, your spirit, everything changes; nothing stays the same at all. I have coped with it by embracing it, I decide that this is a painful experience but it is my experience, I am not going to burry it in the sand, if somebody comes into my life they are going to have to understand.

There are days when I crush and burn and I cannot deal with her loss, I am trying t o raise a girl by myself and there are days, I am just like it is what it is.

A father plays a huge role in their daughter’s lives because a father is like a pillar. The weaker the pillar, the less you can build on, so in the absence of that pillar, the build becomes very weak and it looks for options

to support itself and sometimes it looks for options that are not as supportive or robust so you find people who have self esteem issues because the pillar was not there, you find people who have trust issues because the pillar was not there, you find people who lack the confidence to achieve because the pillar was not there.

If I just take those three things, Self esteem, lack of confidence no drive, what have I described? I have described a person who will never succeed because of things happening inside them not thing happening outside. It is important for men to be in their children’s lives.

My message to my grandchildren. You will fuck up. It is ok, pick yourself up, strap your boots, and keep going.