Obaa Sima

"I bought this on the street from a guy selling tapes displayed on one of those big, vertical wooden racks in Cape Coast, Ghana,” read a blog post authored by a man named Brian Shimkovitz, timestamped 5:43 AM, 2006. An album with the words “ATA KAK,” stacked in tones of lemon and satsuma above a photo of a man shouting in sunglasses, would become a tape that would launch an empire. The ecstatic, Twi jabbering, “frenetic leftfield rap madness” would come out on Shimkovitz’s label nine years later, would instigate a worldwide fascination with Ghanaian music across diasporic-leaning record collectors, and would allow Kak to tour worldwide. Shimkovitz ended the same early-morning post in 2006 with a portent he wouldn’t allow to come true: “You may never hear anything like this elsewhere."

It was with a post about the track “Moma Yendodo” that Brian Shimkovitz inaugurated his blog Awesome Tapes from Africa back in 2006. It’s no wonder: Ata Kak’s mysterious tape, originally recorded in 1994, was quite unlike anything else, with its pitched up vocals, part rapped part screeched Twi lyrics, frenetic drum machine rhythms and insistent synth stabs. The record has since been reissued by ATFA, which in the meantime has become a successful record label, and although it remains utterly unique and unclassifiable, it’s safe to say that Obaa Sima was a weird precursor to hiplife, the enormously popular Ghanaian blend of hip hop and highlife.