U-N-I

ACT I: The Riot Started Here
In November 2010, YANIICK "THUZRDAY" KOFFI was in the studio with producer and frequent collaborator, RO BLVD. As one half of Los Angeles' critically lauded subcommercial rap duo U-N-I, along with rhyme partner YONAS "Y-O" MICHAEL, Thurzday had created well-received full-length projects such as A LOVE SUPREME where he furnished Blvd's sonic schemas with rhymes of full of thought, fashion and fun. The chemistry between rapper and producer is evident: Ro's tracks are multifaceted, wide-ranging and confidently adventurous, speaking at times to jazzy musicality, at others to grooving industrial mechanism or video game bounciness; Thurzday, for his part, is an ambitious rapper, breaking his bars into fractions with novel rhyme feng shui and original metaphors that span sneaker pimp theory, quotidian travels, gender games and personal identity with aplomb and substance. The ethic between the two has been one of musical respect and cyclical upliftment—feeding off one another, each artist regularly takes the other to new levels of craft and creativity. So when Ro played Thurz a track built around jazzy horn riff, the fact that he was impressed was nothing new.
What was new was the opportunities the music opened within Thurzday. The beat—wide open and sparse, anthemic and definitive, groundbreaking yet accessible–was a rapper's dream: the type of music that demands a statement. He loved it upon first listen. "This could be your 'Exhibit C'," said Ro, alluding to ascendant rap superstar Jay Electronica's Just Blaze-produced lyrical magnum opus.
But Thurzday had other ideas. Though his biological father was from Abidjan on Africa's Ivory Coast, his mother and stepfather were Belizean. And, despite the nation's Central American location, Belize strongly identifies as a Caribbean nation. As a child, Thurzday's uncles were DJ's who constantly filled the house with the rhythms of soca, reggae and dancehall. At four years old, one of these uncle introduced him to DE LA SOUL's seminal 3 FEET HIGH AND RISING—a funny, eclectic and challenging album that would change his life. Given his varied musical heritage, Thurzday knew what music could be and what it could do–how it could unite people, expand borders and say something.
Up until this point in his musical career, Thurzday's output had favored that of his earliest hip-hop influences; in addition to 3 Feet High and Rising, there was REDMAN's MUDDY WATERS, which he rencountered in the seventh grade—both albums influenced him to be funny, hard smart and complex. But something about Ro Blvd's jazz-driven track pushed him further than he had been before. "I need to do something more than just dropping bars," he thought to himself. He decided to give homage to his hometown of Los Angeles. But not just the the narrow, flattened versions served up by pop culture. In order to go beyond the good times, palm tress and the gangsta tropes, he had his fellow Los Angelenos call into his voicemail and leave one sentence definitions of the city. He wound up receiving over 100 messages of civic pride and observation—poetic, straight-forward, sentimental, braggadocios, complex, simple—that would anchor the song in place of hooks. He laid his rhymes as a skilled latticework of street bravado, ghetto art, sports franchises, and social commentary with the individual vocal drops of nearly twenty proud Los Angelenos articulating its borders and Ro's track allowing the space and contrast for it all to be seen and heard. He called the song, simply, "LOS ANGELES." A movement had begun.



ACT II: Rodney King
Within U-N-I, Thurzday—whose rap name nods to this week day of birth as a counterpart to his last name ("Koffi" actually means "born on a Friday" in Ghana's native language, Akan)—was used to the the pros and cons of working with a partner. "I conceptualized most of the songs for U-N-I," he says. "But, being in a group, you're kinda just throwing an alley-oop and waiting for somebody to finish that situation. Sometimes it would go not where I think a song should go—you have to compromise. With the solo album, I'm responsible for the full content, so I can make sure it's my full vision."
The added responsibility meant that his mind was forced to work in new ways. Before U-N-I racked up up over 1 million views on Youtube and was rained with accolades—being named "Best Breakout LA Artist" at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards, featured in URB Magazine's "NEXT 1000," XXL Magazine's "New Kids in Town," Billboard Magazine's "Acts to Watch," The Source Magazine's "Unsigned Hype," ending up on the "SoundBoard" of The Los Angeles Times and serving as the inaugural artists for Scheme Magazine's Schemer series—the duo was part of a larger foursome named RAPTURE KAMP. Though he had to make concessions as far as ideas were concerned, there was less mental lifting on his part. Even random his solo numbers were isolated efforts—but now his brain was working on creating a full-length discourse. As opposed to moving on from what "Los Angeles" had begun or being re-directed by rap collaborators, he continued to hang out in the psychological milieu he had constructed.
While hanging out with his visual director, THOMAS WHITMORE, who was conducting research for a project on the 20-year anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, Thurzday found the definition and inspiration for his solo album. The L.A. Riots were the perfect metaphor for the direction his music was moving into: mature and confident yet reactionary and emotional; the response to decades of things unspoken and undone. As someone who had identified with Los Angeles his whole life, it was natural that his artistic manifesto chronicle the most defining moment in the city's modern history. He would call his album LA RIOT.
Thurzday realized it would be a daunting endeavor—in order to properly pay tribute to the events on 1992, he would have to move conversation beyond the surface and the easy anger the title L.A. RIOT would convey. "I knew I had to capture certain elements," he says. "I wanted to capture the looting, the shooting, the madness, the opportunists, the struggle between storeowners and the people, the crazy time in L.A. history."
That "crazy time" were the six violent days in 1992 from April 29th to May 4th which saw the second most populous city in the U.S. serve as the home to rampant and widespread unrest, including looting, arson, assault and murder. The death toll from the riots was officially tallied at 48 men and 5 women cross racial and ethnic lines—35 fell from gunfire (eight at the hands of law enforcement and the National Guard who had been called in to bring stability); others were beaten, stabbed, strangled, victims of arson, hit and runs, car accidents. Thousands more were injured. Property damages totaled over $1 billion.
The roots of such madness could be traced back to the social and inequity woven unto the fabric of the United States, further back into the slavery of Africans by Europeans, or to the very advent of organized government itself. But, by and large, the ground zero for the events is accepted as beginning a year prior on March 3, 1991when RODNEY KING was arrested and beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department after a high speed chase. The events were caught on videotape and it was the acquittal of the four (white) officers accused of beating the (black) King by a California jury (despite the widely broadcasted evidence) that finally caused the social powder keg to blow. And it's the events of that night which make "RODNEY KING" one of L.A. RIOT's most compelling songs.
Released this past March 3, twenty years to the day of the beating (along with a gripping video clip which transformed the rapper into the image of the beaten motorist via makeup and computer effects) , "Rodney King" is a first-person perspective detailing King's night with acuteness—from the the statistics of the basketball game he was watching, the drinks he threw back, the marijuana he smoked, the make and model of car he was driving; the chase through highways and residential areas through Lake View Terrace interspersed with King's parole worries; the relentless brutality captured on video by a plumber named GEORGE HOLLIDAY. The song is full of sentiment and anger, music and motion, ominously rising from the mundane and deepening into dark anger and ending as a beginning: "Beware: This stormy black Monday will morph its way into a black plague of agony: broken glass, burning buildings coughing up black smoke. My pain will be a molotov cocktail of hope for all those who sit silent, listening, contemplating violence, awaiting their turn to play their part in the uprising we call Rodney King Riots."