El Padre gets ‘high’ with new mixtape
Kabelo Boranabi | Sunday August 20, 2023 06:00
The project titled ‘GOING AKKA’ is a follow-up to his maiden project, the ‘Thugs Need Love’ EP released last year. ‘GOING AKKA’ as El Padre describes it, is a slang phrase used mostly in Botswana and South Africa when one achieves a certain high from taking a substance or drug in most cases, cocaine.
“So I took that phrase and used it to describe how I achieve the same highness from making music and also to describe the feeling of going to the top and achieving one’s full potential. So in a nutshell, I would just say this is the feeling of achieving your dreams. The feeling of going to the top and the feeling of being obsessed with your work,” he said.
Birth named, Tinashe Mukube’s ‘GOING AKKA’ is a mixtape with 14 songs of which 13 are produced by another upcoming producer, Ocean Paak while one is an Illicit Guds’ production. El Padre has three features in the tape including Lyrical Bandit, Don Nate and Dintleonthetrack. The mixtape has a balanced Hip Hop infusion and its sub-genre, trap songs and could appeal to all the generations of the music genre enthusiasts.
El Padre also displays linguistic diversity as he raps in English, Setswana and Shona. “This mixtape was motivated by city life and the abrupt transition from adolescence to adulthood. I wanted to make a mixtape that could be played anywhere and it would not feel out of place and at the same time I wanted to make a mixtape you could play 10 years later and it would still sound fresh,” the 19-year-old rapper told Arts & Culture.
The rapper, who is still trying to find his feet in the local rap game, says he is motivated by the feedback he received from his debut mainstream EP. El Padre says since then his ‘pen game’ has improved while he has ventured into videography and graphic designing to improve his overall artistic portfolio.
The teenage rapper promises new music in the near future after ‘GOING AKKA’ settles in. “I just really hope that people can take their time to go through this tape and digest it and hopefully feel the same way or even better than I do about it. I hope it touches lives,” he said.