Rapper Anik Khan’s SoundCloud page features a telling line above his contact email. “Curry chicken meets collard greens,” it reads, a neat nod to his two identities. When Khan was four he moved from the relative wealth of Bangladesh (three-storey apartment, driver) to Queens, the largest of New York’s five boroughs, and – along with his parents and three sisters – shared a one-bedroom apartment in a low-income housing block. His father – a poet and political speaker – had shlepped his family halfway across the world to give his kids a better education (“The definition of unconditional love,” Khan says), while taking a job as a cab driver.
If this sounds like the plot to an Oscar-bait tear-jerker, the key scene takes place 17 years later, when Khan visited Bangladesh as an adult. “That was a shattering of the glass,” he says on the phone from Queens. “I wasn’t proud of who I was, growing up. When I went back, I realised I came from a very rich culture that should be celebrated.”
The culture he’d settled into in Queens was saturated in hip-hop. “From a young age it was what I related to. [Rappers] had faces that looked similar to mine and they were talking about coming from the same financial class as me.” The turning point for Khan came when his aunt caught him rapping along to Jay-Z. “I saw her and got super-embarrassed and she was like: ‘No, you’re good.’ It evolved from there.”
At the age of 14, his family uprooted again to the comfortable suburbs of Virginia (“I was like: ‘Oh we have stairs inside our house!’”). Khan felt displaced, however, eventually selling all his stuff and moving back to New York. “I was making music in Virginia but coming back I had to start over. It’s not like I had a base, so I sold everything; I had $50 in my pocket and started grinding again.” The 2015 EP I Don’t Know Yet cemented his commitment to music, but it was his father who needed convincing.
“It was like: ‘Really, of all the fucking jobs, that’s the one you chose?’” he laughs. But live shows at the likes of Webster Hall, and this year’s genre-splicing, lyrically dense – “I’m absolutely telling the immigrant story because that’s important” – Craig David-interpolating (“He’s the OG!”) Kites EP, have changed all that. “Now he shows all his friends my stuff on YouTube, it’s cute.”
Brought up with the mentality of “‘Oh, you made it to tomorrow; awesome, go eat’”, Khan finds it hard to think too far ahead, despite the current buzz. “In two years, I want to make sure my family’s taken care of,” he says. “I don’t want them to worry about their finances.” And for him? “I want to meet Craig David.”
Kites is out now
