Get to Know Rapper Kane Keid On His Journey to Self-Discovery
Born Lonwabo Nkhoesa and bred in Tembisa, South African rapper Kane Keid has, over the past several years, put his hand up when it comes to pushing the frontiers of the new wave in Mzansi hip-hop with his incisive storytelling and his penchant for introspective lyricism with the pen. With over 300 000 listeners on Spotify and an EP, titled Not Famous, already well on the way, and a handful of singles to herald the drop of the body of work, Keid epitomises steady growth and the art of gradually filling out one’s shape without biting too much than one can down in a single gulp.
The fast life and the busyness of an artist’s life can get disorienting, particularly between the hours lost travelling from one show to the next and finding one’s voice in the sea of public opinions and the roar of fans begging for more. In a way, the higher the fame, the more the artists seemingly belongs to the public more than to themselves. Kane Keid spoke about maintaining a healthy balance between his music career and still reserving all the rights to his life, ingeniously creating an inextricable link between his music and his life by keeping the two connected.
“When it comes to music, I try my best to incorporate it into my life. You know? I’m not trying to keep the two separated because that makes everything difficult to manage. So in everything that I do and however I move, I incorporate music as much as I can. What helps me the most is to remember that I’m living so that I can make music. I talk about every lived experience of my life in the music, and that in itself makes me excited to live. Because as much as I love making music, I also love putting my life in it,” Keid said.
Kane Keid | SUPPLIED
Keid confronted the pressures of having to evolve in the industry while staying authentic to his core and not losing the essence of who he is and what he is all about on his latest single “Trouble Again” alongside his Durban contemporary Usimamane. Reinvention, in its truest form, often invites one to turn away from familiarity and it is a call that beckons one to question their own satisfaction with where they were currently standing in life. The rapper, however, expressed how he felt about who he was and who he was aspiring to be.
“I am grateful for and satisfied about the version of myself that I currently am right now, more especially because the person I am today is not who I was two to three years ago. But even with that said, there’s still another version of me that I’m still working towards,” he said.
Keid spoke about his future with cautious optimism, focusing his vision on obtaining an idyllic ending that will allow him the luxury to step away and enjoy the fruits of his labour.
“When I think about how I’d like life to turn out a decade from now, I think about things in terms of the end goal. I mean, ten to twenty years from now, I’d like to take a step back and see how everything has turned out, to see if I have made it as far as I wanted to or not. I know that I will, of course. But I would like to reach that stage in my life where everything has worked out and I’m just sitting back, relaxing, and watching everything unfold,” he said.
Kane Keid | SUPPLIED
Echoing the sentiment of seizing every moment of his life and braiding it into his craft, Kane Keid highlighted the importance of loving one’s own life as a token of wisdom to his followers.
“If I was to share a word or two with my followers, I would tell them, ‘Live your life.’ I think that it’s easy to get caught up a lot in life that we forget to just stop and breathe just to see what’s going on and what’s gone wrong. We struggle with accepting certain situations because of this and we get stuck in lies. Because the truth is that you have to love your life, and there’s no life another person’s living that is better than yours,” he said.