KHARTOUM BY BAS FT. ADEKUNLE GOLD
Paris-born and Queens-raised, Sudanese-American rapper Bas turns his gaze toward Sudan’s crisis in a stirring collaboration with Nigerian Afrobeats artist Adekunle Gold. The track is wistful and nostalgic, born, as Bas has described it, out of raw emotion rather than any grand artistic strategy. Since April 2023, the country has been engulfed in a brutal civil war which has killed an estimated 150,000 people, displaced around 14 million, and triggered what is now considered the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
Bas visited Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, just months before the fighting broke out, and named the track after it. The music video weaves together intimate footage he shot with his family there, a portrait of ordinary life that humanizes an underacknowledged crisis and reminds the world that these are not just stories or statistics. The Dreamville signee refuses the silence that has surrounded Sudan in Western media, pairing his personal grief with Adekunle Gold’s soaring melody to make space for a people the world has been too slow to support.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BAS, READ THIS NPR ARTICLE, HERE.
For more recs like this one, check out the rest of vol. 006:
