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Kyle Bursaw // Curb Magazine

Message in the Music
Sona's samples aim to initiate change



Sona Lionel flips on the keyboard in his Milwaukee apartment and sifts through previously saved beats and songs, searching for the match to lyrics scrawled on the yellow steno pad he clutches in his left hand. The living room is simple, modest and mostly undecorated – unless you count various other notepads and loose pages of thoughts and lyrics scattered about the floor and bookshelves.

Eyes locked on his notes, he bobs his head and rocks in his chair to his thumping, synthesized hip-hop composition while unleashing a torrent of rhymes and lyrics with intonation and cadence eerily similar to the late Tupac Shakur’s. Wiry thin and unimposing in stature, the physical and emotional intensity of his performance belies his causal Saturday attire – clad in a gray tank and ripped blue jeans – and absence of a crowd.

And like the switch of a light, he ceases the recital. Beaming good-naturedly and emitting a warm, familiar tone he explains the thrill of telling a story through art and his desire to make socially relevant music. “I don’t just sing because I want to sing, but I sing because I want to initiate change.”

As he pores over his latest music video, the trance resumes. The passion and desire of a musician captivated by his work is evident, but for a rapper/filmmaker relatively unknown outside of Milwaukee, his uninhibited desire to change the world through his music remains untempered by the improbable odds of ascending the music industry’s lofty plateaus.

His indomitable confidence and passion stem from a sense of destiny he cultivated as a prince in his homeland of Cameroon and the ardent belief that dreams can be actualized.

In Cameroon, royalty does not come with prestige, wealth or privilege. In a nation stricken simultaneously by poverty and corruption, Sona’s birth into his tribe's royal family never meant dollars. It meant obligation. He was vested with a higher standard of citizenship, adopting a kingly burden of improving the lot of those around him.

“I wasn’t from a rich family or nothing, but my [granddad] was a chief of a village,” he says. “What that did to me, I don’t know, but there’s always been something different with me. … I’ve always had a heart that’s been totally different from other people’s hearts.”

When he came to America, he brought that same sense of obligation, and he is trying to change the world with his impassioned hip-hop vocals and film production, starting with Milwaukee.

Early life in developing country

It is hard to imagine jump-starting a hip-hop career, much less combating or even considering perpetual world problems, in a home country he calls the “armpit of Africa.” Like many African nations, Cameroon’s struggles with violence, poverty and corruption present enough crippling domestic challenges without even glancing at other global concerns.

“Life in Cameroon is about who you know,” Sona says. “It’s a really corrupt society.”



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