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. Bas explains in his 2023 NPR article, that this track was born out of raw emotion rather than any grand artistic strategy. Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed in a brutal 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, the country’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, anchoring an underacknowledged crisis in lived reality rather than apathetic abstraction. 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.
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