Welcome to Xennials, the podcast about the last analog generation and the legacy of the 1990s. Have you ever heard about neural nostalgia? Well, according to Californian therapist, Nikki Roy, researchers are finding that the music we listen to as teenagers binds to our brains differently than anything we'll hear as adults. And I concur because my memories of the 1990s are very much linked to what I used to listen to. So for this episode of Xennials, I'm really happy and very excited actually to welcome journalist, editor, serial entrepreneur and music buff, Claude Grunitzky, founder of Global Media Brand TRACE.

Claude, welcome.

Hi, Charlotte. It's great to be with you.

So a few words about your background and experience To start with, you were born in Togo, raised in Paris, you studied in the UK, you live in the US. Your multicultural background has deeply influenced your work and your career. You are best known for founding Trace, the magazine, but also Trace tv. And your work extends beyond media. You are an influential voice, especially for Africa in the realms of art, of fashion, of technology, and you hold degrees from both MIT and London University. The reason why I'm very excited to have you on this podcast is because like you, I'm a massive fan of music, so to start with, tell us how important is music in your life?

Well, thank you first for having me on this podcast. The real thing with me is that it's not that music is important to my life, it's that music ended up shaping my entire life. And the reason for that is I decided to start a music magazine when I was in my early twenties, and that ended up affecting so many of the choice points that I dealt with as I got older and matured into adult life. So music has been everything to me. And to really summarize what I listened to is if you'd asked me this question maybe 25 years ago, I would've said, I listened to hip hop and R&B. But if you asked me that question now, I'll say I listen to more African music. I've been listening to a lot of Toumani Diabaté and Ali Farka Touré, a lot of the core and guitar sounds that come from Mali.

And Claude. There was an encounter in your twenties that became paramount to your life. Is that with Jefferson Hack who founded Dazed and Confused? Can you tell us about how your friendship shaped your professional life and your choices?

Well, when I was studying in London, I started writing for the Big Issue, which is a magazine that was created to help the homeless, help the homeless such as me. And if you don't, I'll get no tea. That's what the homeless were saying. As they sold the big issue in London, I was writing a column for the Homeless magazine, the Big Issue, and that column was called On the Edge. And so I as a student really wanted to become a journalist. And so I started reviewing hip hop records for The Guardian, and I started reading a lot of the style magazines that were really big in the UK at the time. ID was big, The Face was big, but the real up and comer was Dazed and Confused, because I'd read every issue of Dazed since I moved to London at age 20, I just walked up to 56 Brewer Street in the Soho neighborhood of London, which is where the Dazed and Confused Office was at the time and Jefferson Hack was in the office, it was on the second floor. And I just told him that I wanted to work with him as an intern and literally worked for him for free, that he didn't have to pay me. And that what I brought to the table was a real understanding of hip hop culture and where hip hop was going. So we immediately just got on and we got on with it, and I started working as Jefferson's unpaid intern at Dazed and Confused when I was 23 years old.

Tell us more about your vision at the time you enjoyed writing, storytelling, but what was the driving force behind all of this?

Well, the real shape that my thinking took at that time was that I wanted to be part of youth culture as a reporter, as a journalist, as somebody who could be a bit of a mediator, a storyteller, bringing people together through what I call my transcultural understanding of the world. You said multicultural earlier, but I ended up writing a lot about transcultural, which is people who have hybrid identities and end up transcending various cultures. So when I came to London, I had come from Paris where I'd been studying political science at Sciences Po, and I just wanted to be in London because it was such a cosmopolitan, transcultural city that I realized I could really align myself with people and cultures that were very different from mine, Jefferson being very British, me being Togolese, being French, having been in London, I just wanted to see how all these different cultures could influence each other.

And I wanted to be a person who could really bring an objective point of view to reporting about youth culture, starting with music. So at that time, there was a revolution going on, which was how the subculture of hip hop was actually going mainstream. But London was a really interesting center of gravity because unlike New York, London was very experimental with a lot of the early forms of hip hop and how hip hop ended up being fused with other art forms coming from the UK and from other parts of the world. And that really was encapsulated in the music of Massive Attack. And the reality is the main reason I moved to London is because I heard the very first massive attack album called Blue Lines when I was 20 years old, and I said, I want to move to London. I know they're from Bristol, but I want to move to London because I want to be part of this culture, because this culture is taking hip hop as a drumbeat, as an art form, but really fusing it with other cultures. And that really corresponded with my own aspirations as a budding journalist who was just a student at the time.

Claude, I can totally relate to what you're telling us because that's also what attracted me to the UK, this fusion of cultures. And you've mentioned Massive Attack and blue lines, that seminal album of the nineties. And in fact, we've talked about it in previous podcasts because it was such an important album because it mixed genres. And to me that's a defining feature of the 1990s. You've just alluded to it, the fact that you've got this hybridization of cultures, what we call now urban culture, I guess, digital and analog and the nineties is almost a culmination of all those influences. So I'd like you to maybe tell us how what you think are the key factors that influenced the music scene in the 1990s. I've talked about digitalization, for instance, and sampling. Sampling was big in Trip Hop in the Massive Attack albums, for instance.

Well, the reality for me is that Nina Cherry had already been a pretty big influence when her album Raw Like Sushi came out in 1988. At that time I was 17 years old, but right after I turned 20, blue Lines came out, that was in August of 1991. And literally that album changed my life because I was so inspired by the way they were able to bring in so many different kinds of samples and instruments into a record that was produced around the promise of hip hop and the Boom Bap original rap, but also rhyming in a very British way and adding some really, really good singers like Sharon Nelson. And also kind of diving into some of the political themes that were just emerging at the time, dealing with racism, dealing with classism, and dealing with climate change way before anyone was talking about climate change.

So the hymn of The Big Wheel is a song that really delved into those topics. When I heard that, I said, really, I want to be close to these people. And literally that album came out in August of 1991, and I moved to London in September of 1991. I dropped out of Sciences Po and enrolled as a student at London University because I wanted to be in London just because I could feel that the energy was kind of flowing through London at the time. I could feel that the Jamaican Caribbean influence, the African influence, the American influence and the European influence were all creating something really new and different. And when I started kind of understanding what Tricky was up to when I started understanding what Portishead was up to when I started meeting the musicians around drum and bass that we then called Jungle.

And when I met Goldie, the musician, all kinds of people who were experimenting so deeply with fusion of art forms, I really felt like I was at the right place at the right time. And honestly, being in the east end of London at that time, dazing confused and moved to Old Street in Shoreditch, which was then Terranova. And we were no longer in soho, but now we were in Shoreditch. I really felt like I was in the middle of the greatest artistic experiment of its time because the music was really informed by the fashion, it was informed by the film, it was informed by the artists, the visual artists who were also in that neighborhood. And I feel like that culture of experimentation that came out of Shoreditch, that was very linked to the style magazines that I aligned myself to, I felt like that ended up shaping so many different artistic creations around the world. And it really felt to me that at the age of 20, 21, 22, 23, I really felt like I was at the right place at the right time. And the music that came out of London at that time will never be replicated to me. I've never seen anything like that.

It really resonates with me because the names you've cited Tricky, Goldie jungle, trip Hop, etc, the music scene was really thriving at the time. And you're right, London was the place to be. It attracted youth from all over the world. And there was this experimentation, let's face this, Tricky is fairly experimental. I mean, you can't exactly call it pop, and somehow maybe it stopped. So let's talk about where you think the action is happening now. You've mentioned that you listened to a lot of African music, for instance, because we've talked about the UK musical scene here quite a lot, but there was obviously the development of rap and hip-hop and r&b, of course in the 1990s that was also taking off, but I think it was taking a slightly different direction. So that dynamism referring to where is it found today in the US in Africa, where?

I think that dynamism you described is found everywhere, but I want to go back to London and then take it to New York before I take it to Africa, because what happened in the nineties, as you said Charlotte, was that there was so much experimentation and all these great bands that were a little bit alternative because they were difficult to categorize, they couldn't really fit into hip hop, they really couldn't fit into pop, they couldn't fit into rock, and they couldn't fit into Northern Soul even. And the bands that became really, really big were, I'm not talking about the Spice Girls were just purely Pop. But the bands that were really important at the time in terms of shaping how the UK was perceived around the world were Oasis and Blur. Remember the whole Oasis and Blur, kind of confrontation, we'll call it, it was all about who was going to be Top Dog.

Was it going to be Noel Gallagher or was it going to be Damon Albarn, and that is what a lot of the world saw the UK as being, which is Britpop, which is still very informed by British culture. I gravitated towards people who were fusing all kinds of cultures, as I said earlier. And then when Britpop started becoming the big thing, I decided to move to New York because by then I had been so consumed with the evolution of New York hip hop that I felt like New York, the birthplace of hip hop was who I needed to be. And then I really went full on into hip hop and r and b and that cycle, that golden age in New York of Jay-Z and Nas, a Tribe called Quest, and all these incredible New York rappers who really ended up changing the face of hip hop, notorious BIG. Of course, these were people who I reported on with Trace Magazine, which I had launched as a US edition by then.

And that wave that then led to a new generation of R&B singers, whether it was Alicia Keys all the way to Rihanna, was an important wave for me as hip hop went pop and went mainstream. But lately, I have discovered some of the ancestral music that came out of various parts of Africa, including West Africa where I was born, and I've started listening to those types of music as well. I find that they're even more timeless than the hip hop and r&b that I was listening to in New York, which is why I wasn't so surprised when about a decade ago, Damon Albarn actually ended up living in Mali and creating these Mali sounds, these recordings that were collaborations with Malian artists, including Toumani Diabaté and Ali Farka Touré. So it was interesting to me that it all went full circle, that the music went back to Africa and that people started appreciating the really sophisticated instrumentation that came out of traditional African music centuries ago, but then was able to become exportable in a sense outside of Africa, thanks to a lot of this cross pollination that came via artists like Damon Albarn, and Peter Gabriel really originally with his record label.

And I found that to be extremely interesting how David Byrne, from the Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Damon Albarn, these white musicians from the UK just ended up embracing African music and making it more accessible to Western audiences and non-African audiences.

And you can add to the list, the British double act Disclosure, the house DJs, they produced an album in Africa from what I can remember recently mixing local music, African music with modern beats. And in fact, afrobeats right now is going through, it's taking off, isn't it, here in the West in particular. And I also remember a few years back traveling to Angola to report on the Rise of Kuduro...

Well, I am glad you mentioned Afrobeats. That's where I was going. I was trying not to be too long-winded in my answer, but obviously I noticed, and you've noticed that Afrobeats is becoming the music of the moment. And the moment I noticed that is when I was in Kyoto in Japan last year, and the taxi driver who took me from the train station in Kyoto to my hotel who obviously couldn't speak a word of English, was listening to Afrobeats, but was kind of rhyming along to some of the Afrobeats songs from Burna Boy and Whisk that were coming out of his radio. And so I thought that was really interesting to have a playlist from Nigeria in Kyoto, Japan, not even Tokyo, which is obviously much more cosmopolitan as the world's largest city, but Kyoto, which is a little bit more provincial, even though it's the second town in Japan, having these Japanese embrace Afrobeats in the way that a previous generation of young Japanese had embraced hip hop when I was coming up. So I found that to be really interesting, and I saw the same thing when I went to Sao Paolo in Brazil a few months later. So Afrobeats has gone global, and that is to thanks to the intense collaboration that has come really between Afrobeats artists like WizKid and his collaboration with Drake, really, because that song one Dance, which was a collaboration between Drake and WizKid to me, is the beginning of the global expansion of Afrobeats as a musical form that the world would come to embrace.

Interesting indeed. And since you are mentioning Asia, the musical scene there is also thriving. I'm thinking of Korea for instance, and they've got, well-known exports like Peggy Gou for instance, the dj. She's doing really well at the moment. Do you see Asia as another continent where different music genres could take off? Are you keeping an eye on developments there?

I have been keeping an eye on developments there because I've been going mostly to Japan, but also to Hong Kong and Beijing and other parts of Asia, really, Philippines for more than 25 years. I've been reporting from there because when I was running Trace, one of our differentiating aspects were the fact that we reported on black culture and hip hop culture from around the world. So we were the first to really go deep into reporting about how hip hop came to Japan, how hip hop was becoming big in the Philippines, and obviously Korea is becoming the most palatable musical art form coming out of Asia right now. But what's interesting about Peggy Gou that you mentioned is that this new generation of Korean DJs and K-pop artists, they're very good at kind of positioning themselves at the nexus of music and fashion. So they're all kind of fashion icons and they have these collaborations with these big fashion brands, which is interesting. But to me it's still a little bit too marketed. I was much more drawn to the musicians in Tokyo, in Manila, in Hong Kong, who were very much about refusing to endorse the system and who were much more underground in the way that they approached their art form. So there's something about the very commercial nature of this k-pop that doesn't sit well with me with respect to thinking of longevity for these artists.

Claude, we've talked about sampling, we've talked about the impact of digital technologies on music. What about AI? How do you think AI will impact the development of music going forward and what does it mean for human creativity? I mean, there are obviously copyright issues, for instance, et cetera, but how do you see it impacting music?

I feel like AI is going to have a huge impact on music in the way that AI is already having a huge impact on design, is having a huge impact on fashion styling, fashion creation, creative direction coming in the fashion world and various other parts of the creative industries. What's interesting about AI is that the culture of sampling is obviously accelerated by ai. You had musicians of the cubase back in the day when I was living in London, who would just take samples and create incredible new sounds just from actually doing what AI is doing now in just a few seconds. And so from the moment you're able to record high fidelity versions of really, really good singers voices and kind of mix and match that and sample that into new songs that were entirely crafted via ai, then we're in trouble because pretty soon it's going to be very, very, very difficult to distinguish between what's generated via AI and what's generated via a real artist sitting in a studio and creating something new.

So everybody is scared of ai. I actually welcome the changes in AI because I feel like it's going to push musicians and creators to be a little bit more inventive in the way they craft their tunes. Some of the artists who are really big now, whether it is, I dunno, Taylor Swift being the biggest one, and I can mention Drake being obviously the most successful rapper of the last decade, sometimes even as a fan, I notice that they have an approach that might be called Rinse and Repeat. They kind of do the same thing over and over again and force us to listen to what they think we want, so they give us what they think we want, and then we ended up hearing a lot of the same old, same old. I believe that AI in the end is going to force musicians to reinvent themselves constantly in the way that the Beatles reinvent themselves constantly, in the way that Bob Marley reinvented himself constantly in the way that Stevie Wonder reinvented himself constantly. And I feel that these musicians who are kind of living in their comfort zone by doing the same thing over and over again, I feel like AI is going to be a real, real test for them in terms of doing something new because the AI could actually replace them in the original rinse and repeat app approach, which is all about commercial gain and making money really fast.

That's a very interesting take. So you think it's going to help us unleash even more creativity, which is great. Now Claude, before we move on to the Xennial's quiz, I wanted to ask you one more question about the impact of technology and AI not just on music, but since you are an entrepreneur and you are a businessman as well, and you've spent a lot of time thinking of ways to empower Africa economically, how do you think emerging tech will help unlock potential across the continent?

That's such a fantastic question, Charlotte. I have to tell you that I've been thinking about what you just asked me nonstop for the past 15 years because after I sold my previous company Trace back in 2010, I started spending more and more time in Africa and not just in my own home country, Togo, but all over at this point I've been to almost three quarters of 55 African countries. And what I've noticed is that the young Africans that I deal with are so astute in the way that they're embracing the tech tools, but sometimes they have only access to the most basic tech tools. They only have access to maybe 10% of what my New York friends are, young entrepreneurs, young creators, young inventors, have access to. I'm not even going to talk about the difference between the MIT community in which I'm highly engaged and some of the people in metropolitan cities in Africa that I deal with, and I find that they make the most with this 10% that they have access to.

And they're really, really strong in the way that they're able to craft solutions that I call local solutions to local problems, African solutions to African problems, whether it's dealing with issues related to agricultural productivity, whether it's related to creator economies and how they can actually make music with very little, how they're able to take these old kind of cameras and these rickety equipment and create incredible films coming out of Nollywood in Nigeria. I find that to be extremely interesting and that untapped potential that comes with the youth of Africa. Let's not forget that 60% of Africans are under the age of 25. So I'm a big believer in the ability that that youth has to create new solutions using technology, but it doesn't always have to be the very sophisticated technology. When you go to Africa, you notice that most people have these kind of cheap Chinese Android smartphones, right?

These phones cost 50 or $60 and we have iPhones that cost a thousand dollars. Then if you look at what they're able to do with these cheap phones, how they're able to repurpose these phones for so many different uses that we haven't even thought about. I just really am so hopeful as to how inventive Africans can be with technology. And I think a lot of startups are going to come out of Africa. They don't necessarily have to be unicorns like the Googles of this world, but they will deal with real solutions in Africa, and I think that's going to be a huge opportunity for the next age of investing.

Thank you so much. That was fascinating indeed. Alright, Claude, let's move on to the Xennials quiz.

Okay, let's get started. So Claude, your favorite album of the 1990s. You've mentioned Blue Lines by Massive Attack. Is it the one, do you have another one to suggest?

II would have to say Blue Lines, and then I'll also say Illmatic by Nas. That record came out three, actually four years, no, three years after Blue Lines came out. Blue Lines came out in 1991 and Illmatic came out in 1994. That was NA's first record and that would be my favorite record alongside Blue Lines. Why? Because Nas was this young rapper coming out of Queensbridge, the projects in New York City, and just talking about his life and his aspirations and his community and what hip hop could do for the world. And that record spoke to me so deeply that it's still to this day my number one favorite hip hop record. And I put blue lines in the different category. It's not straight hip hop. Some people would categorize as trip hop, which was the expression that was used at the time. And so those would be my two records, massive Attack, blue Lines and Illmatic by Nas.

You've made a very valid point here. You've talked about the role of hip hop and music generally as a tool for empowerment, and I think that's very important and that's something I definitely wanted to discuss during this podcast. Can I just ask you, since we are talking about Blue Lines, and it's also one of my favorite albums of the 1990s, what your favorite track is?

My favorite track on Blue lines, I mentioned it earlier, it would have to be the last track on the album. It's the hymn of the Big wheel and the way that they describe the big wheel that keeps on spinning. There's so many different philosophical kind of metaphors that we can extract from those stories that are told on him of the big wheel, the repetition of life, the loneliness that some people experience, and the need for community, the need for belonging in a community that shares your values, the importance of sticking together and understanding climate change and how the world is changing before your eyes. It's so deep, it's so multilayered, that song Hymn of the Big Wheel that I'll never forget that song because when I was hearing that album for the first time, again, I was just turning 20 and I was a real hip hop head.

I thought, okay, song number one is good, some number two is good, but I didn't expect the last song to be such an absolute masterpiece. And after I heard Hymn of the Big Wheel, I said, this song, this song is really the embodiment of a record that will never, ever be created again. It's just to me, absolute perfection. And what was also really interesting to me at the time was the activism that came from these musicians. The album was released in its original version under the band name Massive Attack. But because of the first Gold War that was going on and the fact that they were anti-war and they were activists against any sort of gun violence, they ended up re-releasing the album under the band name Massive. And I just loved that so much because that to me was such a strong statement. That massive attack actually became massive, and after the war, they went back to being massive attack. So that is the kind of thinking that kind of shaped my own sensibilities as I was entering adulthood.

There again, interesting because that song to me could somehow sum up how people felt in the 1990s, this era of big change, of acceleration of change with rapid digitalization and globalization. So yeah, very good choice here. Claude, although my favorite track Anxiety, unfinished. Yeah, anxiety. Anxiety mixed with excitement, I guess. But yes, my favorite one was Unfinished Sympathy. A bit cliche, I know, but what a fabulous song anyway.

That was the best video, that Unfinished Sympathy was the best video where she's kind of just walking down the block and it's just an incredible video. So I hear you. That would've been my number two.

Good taste. Now, your favorite film of the 1990s?

That's a really difficult question to answer, but I would have to say Heat by Michael Mann. You had Robert De Niro, you had Al Pacino, you had Val Kilmer, you had these incredible actors and actresses in this heist movie that is taking place in Los Angeles, a city that I had not yet discovered. And it came out in the mid nineties, and I thought, wow, what an incredible film. So I don't know if you've ever seen that film Heat by Michael Mann, but that to me is my favorite film of the entire 1990s. I like it more than Titanic, which also came out a couple years later.

Yes. Well, that's not hard to do. Favorite book of the 1990s?

My favorite book of the 1990s is actually a book of essays that came out in the uk, and it was published right around the time that I was moving from Paris to London, and it's a book called Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie. Now at that time in the early nineties, a lot of people were talking about Salman Rushdie because of the Fatwa that came after he published the Satanic verses. But shortly after, the Fatwa became such a big topic in the world of literature and actually in the world of just creation period, he published Imaginary Homelands, which is a series of essays that just explore what it means to be an outsider fitting into new cultures, what it means to be an immigrant in a new society, what it means to be non-white in western countries. And Salman Rushdie kind of delves into his own experience as an Indian who moved to the UK in his teens and ended up living in the uk. And I felt that these stories really informed the way that I saw myself as what I would later describe as a transcultural maven, somebody who was always an outsider looking in, always was a foreigner, always the other in every culture, and how we could bring our own experiences as the other to help to enrich these new cultures and the societies in which we were living as immigrants.

I hear some feeling of sadness, alienation, but also wealth out of being transcultural Claude. But to finish with, I wanted to maybe ask you to come up with one word to describe the 1990s.

I would have to say two words if, is it okay if I cheat and mention two words?

That's right. You can get away with it. Yes.

I would have to say two words would be radical change. And the reason I would say radical change was that I feel like the nineties changed so much with respect to our political viewpoints that are prevalent now. And I feel like the youth culture that emerged in the 1990s ended up having so many ripple effects everywhere. And it's really the first time that I got to see so many subcultures from around the world congregating around major movements that I would call change forces that end up shaping the way that young people think and shaping mindsets and shaping our attitude to activism and taking a stand as opposed to just being victims or followers, which is kind of what I saw the 1980s to be. And the dawn of the new millennium that came with the nineties was to me a period of radical change because we had to reinvent everything and think of the new millennium as starting over. And that to me was extremely exciting, and it felt that this radical change that came in the nineties was us preparing ourselves for this new dawn.

Well, Claude, what a pleasure talking to you today. It's been absolutely fantastic to well plunge into the 1990s and this exciting time of change like you've mentioned, and rich time of hybridization, of cultures, of course, this mix of digital analog music, technology, et cetera. So Claude, there again, thank you so much and wishing you the very best for your numerous endeavors and enterprises.

Thank you, Charlotte. The interesting thing about this conversation we just had is I thought it would make me feel old because as somebody who's Xennial, when I talk about things that were happening in the nineties, that was such a long time ago, but in the end, it actually made me feel young and alive in a different way because that optimism that came with a radical change is something that I will always carry with me. So thank you so much for this conversation, Charlotte.

Well, Claude, I'm very glad you should say that because I have a confession to make. In fact, I probably made it on a different podcast, but Xennials is a midlife crisis project. It was a way for me to reconnect with how I felt in the 1990s. I think it's best described for me anyway, as excitement. So many thanks.