Anatii lied. He’s not always “in a bando” on a Thursday as the chorus of his hit song, The Saga, featuring AKA, proclaims. On a chilly Thursday last month, the 22-year-old slashy (he’s a producer/singer/songwriter/rapper) invited the media and friends to his home – the opposite of a bando (abandoned trap house) – in the northern suburbs of Joburg. The point? To help him choose his next single by jotting down their vote on sheets of paper.
“The most honest way to put it is: I really wanted to get a sense of how people felt about the music,” he tells me later in a room so decadently musical I felt like Quincy Jones was going to pop up from behind the grand piano.
“I didn’t want to drop a song that was similar to The Saga. At the same time, often when you’re in the studio, you’re around the same 10 people, the same comments of ‘we love that’. Everyone’s like a yes-man, you know? So having a process like this helps me figure out what people really feel about a song.”
Before he played the four songs that will definitely appear on his upcoming debut album which may or may not be titled Electronic Bushman, we walked into the gated community house and were met with a sneakers-on-canvas art piece on a wall up the stairs. Around the corner, most people were gathered around finger foods and a fridge as big as my bedroom. He walked in, a pair of Yeezy 750 Boost on his feet. He didn’t have a box of Ultra Mel in his hand, but he still skhot’ so hard. After Anatii played us The Saga video on a huge TV, flanked by a mic and other recording paraphernalia, he got comfortable at his computer where three of the songs he played were turn-up joints, heavy with auto-tune and complete with hyperbolic braggadocio that we’ve come to expect from someone who had a hand in making songs like Yaya (by DJ Dimplez and Dreamteam).
But one called Walk Away is stadium-status ready. About being willing to change his debaucherous ways for a woman lyrically, the song is sonically a trip of 808s & Heartbreak Kanye meets Watch the Throne Kanye and a beat change punctuated by Anatii’s signature “bep-bep-bep” ad libs. He tells me this song was made in 2013 with a songwriting group called Unscripted – who’ve worked on Skrillex and Diplo’s Where are u Now. “They work on a whole lot of projects,” said Anatii, “and while I was working on my album, we had a session and they just had this vocal of the chick just singing something in Creole. They really wanted me to do something with that vocal so I flipped it, produced it and the chick, Britney (Laborde) in the group, sang some back-up vocals on the song too.”
Anatii’s next single is also a collaboration of sorts. Asked when he plans to announce the single, he says: “As soon as The Saga gets a million views, we’re dropping the next single.” At the time of going to print, The Saga video had just under 85 600 views.