10 Facts About ‘Levels’ #AKALevelsX

As AKA’s 2014 classic album ‘Levels’ turns 10, here are 10 facts about the album that you may not know: 

1. ‘Levels’ was released on iTunes a week before its official release date in physical stores. Music stores have become obsolete over the last decade. 

2. ‘Levels’ was inspired by JR’s 2012 album ‘Kool Forever’, which incorporated dance music and made use of recognisable samples. As a result, JR was a co-writer on some songs on ‘Levels’ such as ‘Congratulate’ and ‘All Eyes On Me’.  

3. Around the time ‘All Eyes On Me’ dropped, AKA, Da L.E.S, and Burna Boy had formed a supergroup called the A-Team. 

4. ‘Levels’ gave Tweezy his break. His career took off after producing ‘Sim Dope’, ‘All Eyes On Me’ and ‘Run Jozi (Godly)’ on ‘Levels’, hence his slogan “Hits Since 2014”.

5. Yanga Chief’s hook on ‘Run Jozi (Godly)’ was originally a 32-bar verse but got cut down to the lines used in the hook, an interpolation of TKZee’s ‘Sikelela’. 

Read: 50 Facts About South African Hip-Hop

6. Simphiwe Gumede aka Sim Dope, the title of the second track on ‘Levels’, has been friends with AKA since they were 11 years old. 

7. K.O’s infamous push-ups on top of a Siyaya were not meant to be on the video. “It was just [me and AKA] tryna out-goof each other and the camera happened to be on,” K.O said.

8. ‘Levels’ is one of the very few (if not the only) South African Hip-Hop albums released locally in the 2010s to be released on vinyl. Only 300 copies were released in 2015. There’s a new 10th-anniversary edition of the ‘Levels’ vinyl out now. 

9. ‘All Eyes On Me’ is the most streamed AKA song on Spotify with 13M+ streams to date. 

It’s followed closely by ‘Lemons ( Lemonade)’ which has 12,8M streams. 

10. Yanga Chief directed the music video for ‘Run Jozi’ under his company Young Legend Films.