With his forthcoming album VICTOR on the way, Vic Mensa shares his latest single “LVLN UP.”
“I wrote this one in Ghana, actually. I was using samples of an African music legend from Ghana, called Ebo Taylor, who was a contemporary of my Uncle as well as Shalewa Kuti,” Mensa said to Zane Lowe about the track. “I was sampling his music on a long road trip in Ghana. And just in that trip, so much was happening. I was meeting the president of Ghana, just building clean water facilities for hundreds of people in large communities and turning the ideas of me in the popular zeitgeist completely on their head, and just transforming a moment in a time period of a lot of controversy and criticism for myself and others. And just dark cloud, synthesizing that, molding that cloud into something powerful and something beautiful. That was the real intent of the song and I’m just happy that I got to make a record like that on African music samples. That’s what really excites me about it, because that’s something that’s such a big part of my story.”
