Kimi Katiti is paving her own path with music, art and skateboarding

Growing up in Uganda, Kimi Katiti was en route to a shining future as a fine artist, but when her first explorations in music saw her topping radio charts in East Africa a last minute decision took her to California to pursue a career in audio production. She now lives, skates, and creates in Los Angeles and has just released her latest single “Pain.”

We jumped on Zoom with Kimi while she was at home in North Hollywood to talk about her creative processes, how representation of other womxn and BIPOC creators and skaters allowed her to follow her dreams, letting go of creative control, skateboarding in Uganda, and more.

I read that your first and second singles topped radio charts in Africa in 2012. Did you expect to see so much success at the very beginning of your music career?

I did not expect any success at all. The very first song that I released was actually a final project for my brother’s college course called “Bread of Life,” which he needed a vocalist for. I had never recorded anything before with my voice; I had just written poetry in my bedroom and went to creative writing classes when I was in high school. But I decided to help him out and provide some vocals for the song. Later, we released a track called “Say I” and in South Africa everyone was saying it was really good and it spread by word of mouth. People were saying, Quincy and his sister collaborated on something, check it out and pass it on. And with the rise of Twitter at the time — this was in 2012 — things kind of just kept spiralling from there.

About six months later “Say I” topped the Kenya radio charts. So word kept spreading and then I released my sophomore single “Battle Cry.” That was the second song I worked on with a feature artist who was a bit bigger and had more of an audience. His name was Ruyonga. We collaborated on “Battle Cry” and that went to number one within a couple of months.

I was very surprised that my entrance into music and the industry had such a bed of reception. But I also think that I was very in tune with what people were listening to and wanted to listen to, which was a lot of dancehall and hip hop. It just kind of flowed very well and smoothly. But yeah, I would say I’m pretty surprised that happened back home. But then college had to happen so that was put on pause.

You were studying fine art, right?

I was meant to study fine art. I was going to go to university and get a BFA and do painting but I decided to change courses last minute.

Is that when you went into audio production? What was that like?

I don’t know what I was thinking. I just really wanted to learn how to write a song in its entirety. Just after high school when I started releasing music and then right before college, that was the gap when I released those two songs and they started doing very well. So within that gap I guess I sensed a lot of insecurity with working with producers. Like, here I am having to depend on producers to like my song and want to work on it, and once it’s in their hands the communication kind of breaks down because I’m not able to tell them the musical ideas for the lyrics that I’ve written. And they always have their ways that they produce set in stone and take it in their direction. So I wanted to learn more about how to create a whole package with words and music together.

Also, in 2011, my favorite artist of all time, Kimbra, released her debut album and apparently a lot of the songs she had written, she co-produced as well. That made me realize that girls can actually produce and release songs and it’s going to be perceived well. It opened my eyes and gave me some inspiration.

Then when I came here in 2013 I had already made the decision that I wasn’t going to study painting or fine arts. I just felt like that was going to take me down a path of more conservatory stuff, a more traditional route, and I wanted to be more modern facing and more in tune with the times, so I decided to change course last minute.

What inspired the big move from Uganda to Los Angeles?

Mostly my parents. They were pretty set on me getting a better education than what I would have got in Uganda or in South Africa. Even though they have great institutions there they just wanted me to take the leap since I had the opportunity to and they were willing to support me in that.

I will say that it was a bit of a disappointment for my dad that I switched courses from fine art which is something I had been doing since I was very young and had gotten really intense with when I was in high school. I was doing really realistic stuff and there was kind of a future there. But then I decided I wanted to learn something from scratch right at the entrance to college. He wanted me to get those grants and scholarships and get some acclaim in the visual art world but it was once I came here that I was like, ok, now I’m going to do what I want.

Did you start skateboarding when you moved to LA?

I started skateboarding when I was 9 back in Tanzania. I grew up in Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa in equal parts. In middle school is when my family lived in Tanzania and we had one of those boards that just existed in the background and I was bored and just started rolling on it. It was a Ventura — I don’t know if that’s a brand that still exists anymore but it was a Ventura skateboard. I would just roll around and I watched the X Games, which was the only extreme sport you could watch in East Africa. When it was on I was like, stop everything, we’re watching the X Games! It was fascinating, I was like, what is this sport? It influenced me and I skated a lot from the ages of 9 to 12. I actually really wanted to be a skateboarder but I was the only one doing it — not even between boys and girls, but one of the only ones skating, period. It wasn’t until I was about 12 or 13 that I first went to a skate park in Uganda, which is in the middle of a slum called Kitintale. There’s a place called Uganda Skateboard Union that is one of the very few skate parks in East Africa. But once I started focusing on high school I didn’t skate a lot.

Then in 2019 once I saw, not a resurgence, but a surge of skateboarding, I kind of started paying attention to that. It reignited something in me and I wanted to really get back into skateboarding. A lot of muscle memory was still there from when I was 9 or 10 years old so I was very pleased that I didn’t feel like I was going to die on a skateboard and I could actually get back into it.

In 2019 you were in LA, so what was it like getting back into skateboarding in such a skate mecca after growing up skating in East Africa?

It was dramatic. In South Africa I was afraid of skateboarding just because I was Black. You would never catch me at a skatepark because I was scared of being called names. My brother had gone to high school in South Africa and I remember asking him, what would happen if I went to a skatepark? Like, are they going to call me names? He was like, I honestly don’t know but I don’t think you should do it at all. He told me, if you’re concerned then most likely something is going to go down. This was maybe around 2007 or 2008 so the scene was still very masculine and very much white male dominated. Fast forward to 2019 and seeing all these Brown and Black women, girl and queer skaters, the fear factor definitely went down a lot. It was way more embracing and for me personally it was very empowering because all the things I thought I couldn’t do as a kid, now there’s this sort of license and freedom to do it without fear of being attacked or harassed and called names. So yeah, that was one of the major differences.

Do you have a favorite skate spot in LA where you usually go?

Ooh yes! There is a school called Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts…

How appropriate!

Yeah, right!? [Laughs] It’s like it was meant for me! It is such a great spot. It’s in Downtown LA and it’s just so central to everyone else. There’s lots of flatground and a bit of a curb so you can do slappies and practice ollieing up a curb, which is kind of the level I’m on. So yeah, I love it!

Coming back to your art, do you still do a lot of that now? Or do you have plans for it in the future, alongside your music?

Yes, I am trying my very best to paint as much as I can. I got back into painting in 2018 which is fairly recent considering it was my whole life when I was in high school. But I didn’t really paint before; I was more into fine art drawing and that sort of thing. Now I’m allowing myself to be more free with the subject matter but also more intentional about the subject matter, which is depicting my reality of skateboarders that I skate with and my friends, and interpreting that in my own way. I kind of take a modern art approach these days as opposed to being very traditional where you focus on realism and hyper-realism. In the future I want to do bigger pieces and more thematic pieces. Maybe an exhibition with a more focused series. But finding that, and being that inspired and dedicated, is something I’m trying to work on right now. I’m not there yet but I’m going to get there.

Do you have a preferred medium that you like to work in?

I’m very routine with just straight up canvas and acrylic paints. I really should experiment more but that’s literally it. Those 5 paint tubes back there — that’s it! Sometimes when I want more detail I’ll do illustrations with an ink pen and watercolor for smaller sizes. But if I want more color I go to canvas and acrylic paints.

You did some artwork for your new single “Pain” as well, right?

Yes I did. I’m very inspired by musicians who are able to have such deep lyrics that are based in reality — for example, Sufjan Stevens and Fiona Apple — and who, at the same time, take command of the cover artwork. Even though it doesn’t always look like the most amazing thing, they want to have their finger print on the cover artwork. So I channeled some inspiration from those two and added a little bit of spice into my cover artwork to, you know, be like my heroes.

And speaking of “Pain,” is this the first single you didn’t produce yourself?

Yeah it was produced by somebody else. That’s actually a very interesting question because now that I think about it… Yeah! You’re right! Since I came to LA, all the other tracks I have either produced or co-produced. But this one has been entirely produced by Alex Ross. It was very interesting letting go of the reigns of everything.

How did you find that experience vs. doing it yourself, especially now that you have the knowledge and all of the skills to handle the whole process? What was it like to collaborate with somebody else?

It was interesting to witness Alex’s process because he had a very different process from what I had done in the past. Like, I wouldn’t reference things very particularly. I would just be like, I want this here and that there. But he is very analytical and will be like, well in order to have this effect like that producer created, we need to do A, B and C in this orderly strategic way. Whereas I’m very loose and free and just splatter it everywhere. So he’s very meticulous and it was an honor to witness his attention to detail, in an auditory sense, and hear the final outcome and be like, so that’s how you do it as a professional producer — you take your time, you plan it out and you have an end sound in mind. The final product was great! He pretty much had the reigns all the way to the end, all the way to mastering, and interpreted it very differently from the demo as well. I put up the demo on Spotify and it’s very hip hop focused, but he blended in a lot of his alternative rock style into it and I was very impressed. I was like, this is really dope. But yeah, that was all him.

Do you feel like that experience has opened up new doors or new possibilities with your music that you want to explore?

Totally! Absolutely! I’m definitely giving up more reign, musically — that’s something I came to realize recently. I want to hone in on being more lyrical focussed. It was great getting an understanding of music as a whole and having an overview of what production is like throughout college, but I’m very impressed with the possibilities that come about when you hand over things to people and say, hey, do what you want and I’m not going to get in your way. The thing that inspired me to get into production was that I didn’t like that — I was very stubborn and was like, I don’t want you to have the entire canvas to work with. But now I’m kind of coming full circle back to the beginning.

Any future plans in the works for your music?

I’m working on a few collaborations at the moment, which is something that I want to do more of as well, sort of in the stream of letting go of having total control over the music and letting more voices collaborate and mix in with mine. I have another project in the works with Alex who produced “Pain” so hopefully that will come out very soon.

If you could pick anyone in the world to collaborate with, who would it be?

That’s a really hard question! I would say Kendrick Lamar, lyrically. And musically, Kimbra. Hands down.

I hope we get to hear those collabs in the future! Thanks for taking the time to chat, Kimi!

You can find more of Kimi’s music and art on her website and be sure to follow her on Spotify.

Interview: Sarah Huston