Femi Fadugba Talks Netflix Grabbing His Debut Novel, Writing And Meeting Black Boys Where They Are5/25/2022  There’s a new sci-fi book series that’s taking the young adult genre by storm—the first book, The Upper World, written by Femi Fadugba has already caught the eye of studio executives, and “Netflix has acquired the film rights…[and] Queen & Slim’s Daniel Kaluuya [is] attached to produce and star.”
Fadugba’s debut novel was also recently “shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize…in the Older Readers category” in addition to being “longlisted for the 2022 Branford Boase Award which is given annually to the author of an outstanding debut novel for children.” One review attributed the novel’s “unusual credibility” to the fact that Fadugba is a real-life physicist and “has based his ideas about time travel on real science, including Einstein’s theories…(even if you don’t grasp it at all).” Fadugba wrote the novel after many conversations about with people who would ask him to explain quantum physics. “They’d always be super fascinated and wanted me to recommend a book, but I couldn’t find one that I could put my hand on my heart and say: ‘You’ll dig this,’” he told The Guardian. Fadugba, 35, who splits time between the UK and the US, sat down with ESSENCE to discuss his inspiration for writing the book, his career path and meteoric rise to fame, as well as his upcoming projects. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. ESSENCE: What inspired you to write The Upper World? It’s a complicated one because it has a few different angles. I went to university, and I ended up doing quantum physics, quantum computing, specifically and I thought I was going to be an academic physicist at that point. I published an article at PRL, which is the same publication that Einstein published a lot of his stuff in, so that was kind of like the peak of my career. I was looking for what’s next, but the academic route just felt a little bit abstract.
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 When you think of the Dallas music scene and you combine that with R&B, Neo-Soul, and Hip- Hop, you instantly think of The Erykah Badu, often called the “Queen of Neo-Soul”. And if you’re from Dallas or even reside in Dallas, it’s a joy to know that this amazing soul lives amongst us. Erykah is an integral part of our Black history as well as our Dallas History. How many times have you heard someone say,” You know she lives here right?” Don’t tell Tyrone though.
Born in the Triple D, Erykah essentially started awakening her talents at the age of four, singing and dancing at the Dallas Theater Center and The Black Academy of Arts and Letters under the guidance of her godmother, Gwen Hargrove. She later graduated from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and later chose to study theater at Grambling University. Though Theater Arts was something that she always loved, she decided to focus more on her musical talents. It was a 19-song demo called Country Cousins, created while working and touring with her cousin, Robert “Free” Bradford that landed the attention of record producer Kedar Massenburg. We can go On&On about what happened in between, but this moment in time led to a duet called Your Precious Love with singer D’Angelo and she eventually signed with Universal Records.  On April 20, I walked into the African American Museum to meet with Dr. Harry Robinson and request the use of the museum auditorium to give a lecture on May 5, Cinco de Mayo. While it may seem strange to some that I, an African American, would give a lecture on Cinco de Mayo, my work has been the culmination of years of research on the origin of the holiday and its relationship to people of African descent in what was earlier New Spain, later Mexico and its relationship to Juneteenth.
Robinson referred me to Robert Edison, the museum’s director of education. As I waited to speak with him in the rotunda of the museum, I look over my head and there to my surprise were the words “YANGA” with a figure of an African man in broken chains. I could barely contain myself as I rushed up the winding stairs to see what my eyes had beheld. I entered the gallery, there before my eyes the story I had been researching for so many years. There in the African American Museum was an exhibition presenting the journey of African people from slavery to freedom. While the story of Africans journey from slavery to freedom is not new, what is new is the journey through what is today Mexico. During my early studies of Cinco de Mayo, I became aware that it was a one-day victory of the Mexican army and indigenous “rag tagged” farmers over the well-armed Napoleon III French army. A defeat that would soon be overshadowed by the later French army victory. But why was this victory so important? Why did people celebrate it? And why is it celebrated so widely in America among Latin citizens? As I sought to understand the history of Cinco de Mayo, I came across the name Yanga. As an African American historian, I never heard the name. The name never appeared in any history books I had studied on African American freedom. It would be through use of social media that I would find a lost story of the first liberated and independent town in the Americas, led by Yanga, an African Maroon.  Hitmaker Kal Banx is fusing Dallas sounds with West Coast hip-hop.
Kal Banx spent his 30th birthday in his hometown last October. The date coincided with rapper Isaiah Rashad’s tour stop at the South Side Ballroom in Dallas. Banx handled production for nearly every song on Rashad’s critically acclaimed 2021 album, The House Is Burning, and the two bonded during the collaboration process. “My best friend Kal Banx is from Dallas,” Rashad yelled into the microphone before presenting Banx with a birthday cake that the beatmaker eventually heaved into the rowdy crowd. Banx lives in Los Angeles, where he has made a name for himself as one of hip-hop’s most sought-after producers. He split his childhood between Duncanville and Oak Cliff. And five years after being pulled away from Texas by the West Coast rap label Top Dawg Entertainment (often referred to as TDE), which is famously home to Kendrick Lamar, he realized he had begun to miss his home state. “I just feel like being out here I lost a lot of time with my people, friends and family,” Banx says. “And now Dallas is growing and blossoming. There’s a lot more cool stuff that I’m into that’s out there.” But for all the nostalgia and excitement Dallas offers, Banx is likely to stay in Los Angeles for the near future. With a Grammy nomination and a number of star collaborations already under his belt, he’s got talent and momentum on his side, and he’s not finished bringing his Dallas-influenced sound to the West Coast. A Dallas soundWhen Banx was at Duncanville High School and later at the University of North Texas, a cultural movement called “Boogie” or “Dallas Boogie” was centered on hip-hop music in North Texas. Overlapping with New Orleans Bounce music and Houston’s Chopped-N-Screwed music and car culture, and symbiotically inspired by Atlanta hip-hop production, Dallas Boogie became nationally known thanks to a few Dallas rappers’ repetitive but catchy songs such as “My Dougie” by Lil’ Wil (2007) and Dorrough’s “Ice Cream Paint Job” (2009). Complete with its own dance moves and a fairly extensive lexicon, it evolved into a sort of local parlance. Fluency meant Dallas credibility. “That still influences my music now,” Banx says. SOURCE- Dallas Morning News |
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November 2022
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