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Artist
Balo
12+ albums
about
Baloji (born 12 September 1978 in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and raised in Belgium is a rapper, MC, hip hop artist, poet and film director. As a teenager in 1996 (then known as MC Balo), he started his first rap collective, Starflam. In 2008, as Baloji, he released “Hotel Impala” an album conceived as a reply to a letter he received from his mother after a 25-year absence. Baloji is an artist in motion, a musician, poet, film director, a man of images and ideas. He’s in motion like the inhabitants of Avenue Kaniama in Lubumbashi. In motion like the synthetic afro beats he produces, the fruit of an unlikely alliance between rockrumba and futurist funk. In perpetual motion, like his limbs on stage as he fronts the Kaniama Show band, leading them in a sensual voodoo trance. In motion like the era captured by his pen, an era where the intimate and the political come together and clash. Early life His father, a Congolese businessman and political operator, grew ill during his mother’s pregnancy, was cured by a traditional healer, and in gratitude named his son Baloji, a name that was guaranteed to give him the status of an outsider even in his own society. Baloji means “man of science” in Swahili, but during the colonial period, that meaning shifted as a result of Christian evangelisation, to signify “man of the occult sciences” and then “sorcerer”. In order to avoid paying support to the boy’s mother, Baloji’s father first moved him to Ostend, Belgium, and t
