Grammy winner Fuse ODG credits youth club for viral hit as he launches kids learning app

Fuse ODG, a Grammy-winning three-time MOBO winner, credits his early summer youth club members with helping him create one of his biggest hits as he introduces a new educational app for kids.

Fuse, who is actually Nana Richard Abiona, has performed anthems with Ed Sheeran, Damien Marley, and Wyclef John, as well as former prime minister David Cameron, who danced to his viral song Azonto. He has now revealed that he started as a teenager and that the song, which has received millions of plays, was “made by the young people in the music workshops.”

The youth scheme, Escape Youth Project operated over the summer holidays in 2007 working with children aged 11 to 15 in Mitcham, Southwest London, with around 70 young people participating in music, dance and drama workshops. The young people who were in the music workshops created my songs Azonto and Antenna, Nana said. The youth project was the first step in this endeavor.

” I went to Ghana and that’s when I saw people doing Azonto]dance] and I thought this is sick. I need to write a song about this.

When I returned to London, I told the children that the youth project was being run, “We’re actually going to make Afrobeats,” and many of them didn’t understand it. “I’m going to teach you guys and we’re going to make Azonto music.”

These young people are so talented that they “just caught it right away,” and they actually created the framework for the song during the music workshop.

Nana claims to have taken that framework and transported it to a studio where he built it before handing it to a producer who wrote the song’s final song.

He said:” I was like, ‘ wait, I know that it’s all fun and jokes but this sounds crazy. This might be going somewhere. ‘

The final product of what I’d done in the studio was something I wanted to play for them the entire night because I was there the entire night. Everyone was crazy when I played it to them. Then I connected with a producer in Ghana, and I showed him the song, which he had already written.

Nana claims that “pouring his heart into the community” is what contributed to his success.

The father-of-one said, “This is all just coming together as a community, and I’m always interested in building for the community because I believe that by pouring my heart into the community, I am given back the blessings of the work.”

With a history and finance app called School of New Africa (SONA), co-founder Andre Hackett, the Ghanaian-British star who has a new album in the works and also has a line of “Black Barbie dolls” after failing to find any Black dolls for his niece, says he’s on a mission to help educate children and create future leaders.

Nana claims that as a child, children in London would laugh whenever Africa was mentioned in class, which inspired him to use his app to alter how people perceive the continent.

Through an innovative in-game rewards system, SONA is an educational gaming platform designed to teach African history and languages while promoting financial literacy.

He continued, “I think we’re going to build some leaders through the SONA app.”

We created some incredible producers, photographers, and business owners with the youth project. We’re going to inspire the next generation to be self-assured leaders and do so through the SONA app.

Nana added that “children need a place they can feel” at home because “things have gone backwards” and that “they need to be shut down youth clubs.”

He said, “A lot of the community centers have been closed down, so we need to take it in our hands at this point to educate our kids,” which is why the app is such a crucial tool for parents to be able to teach their kids.

Every child is currently using the app, which teaches them about life, history, financial literacy, and self-assurance in order to deal with the outside world.

When asked about the length of a month’s worth of Black history instruction, Nana responded:

We must stand up for ourselves and provide the solution to our issues at some point as a society. We can’t expect the government to solve our problems. We know it’s wrong, but we need to do something about this, so I gave up my complaining and instead chose to start doing. Through SONA, we are now experiencing Black history every day.

Source: Mirror