‘I wanted a story that wasn’t just about glamour, but that captured the challenges for young immigrants as well’, says Ghanaian-born, NYC-forged rapper, producer, and thinker Blitz the Ambassador of his latest album, Afropolitan Dreams. With a vision that embraces his personal West African past and a revolutionary future of Afropolitan cross-pollination, the young MC meshes African popular sounds, American vintage soul, and hard-hitting beats and lyrics with the help of an international cast of collaborators, including Angelique Kidjo, Seun Kuti and Nneka. But as always with Blitz, the album is about far more than the music. It’s about the immigrants who made America, who shaped and moulded it. Each person, each generation, each bearer of culture arriving on a boat or airplane has made an impression. Immigration is the chain that links the past to the present, the near to the seemingly far.

Afropolitan Dreams tells a story of disruption and connection that Blitz the Ambassador knows very well. He’s lived it. ‘I told some of the story on my last album, Native Sun,’ he explains. ‘That was the journey to America in search of a dream. This is a sort of continuation, but with more detail about what it’s like to start at the bottom and work up. Afropolitan Dreams was inspired by meeting peers in different disciplines. What we had in common was that we were all immigrants.

Blitz himself arrived in the US in 2001, fresh from Ghana, where he’d grown up listening to American soul, the highlife of his homeland, the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti, and the old-school hip-hop of Public Enemy, Rakim, and KRS-One. He was ready to make his own dream real.

On Blitz’s tracks, everything is culled from and shaped by intense experience. The constant throughout is Blitz’s rapping. Innovative, personal, and hugely creative, it’s the soundtrack of Blitz the Ambassador making his Afropolitan Dreams a global reality.