Kata on Protest, Presence, and Writing Songs That Meet the Moment

It was the day after the senseless killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis that I found myself doom scrolling TikTok. I came across a young man with a guitar singing about the tragedy with so much conviction and clarity that he captured everything I was feeling in that moment. I immediately knew I had to speak with him and learn more about his life and his art. That young man is Josh Nkhata, known musically as Kata.

SNQLX: Folk music has always doubled as a quiet weapon and a public record. When you’re writing, do you think of your songs as protest tools, or do they become protest only once they’re released into the world?

KATA: I think my songs only become protest tools once they reach and resonate with a community.

For me, ‘protest’ involves the movement from collective feeling towards collective action.

When I write, while I certainly begin a process that might lead to protest, in the moment the music exists primarily as a raw expression of my feelings (i.e. I feel sad, I feel scared, I feel angry, etc.). When the song reaches someone, the music transforms into a medium for them to engage and amplify those feelings. The listener gets to say, “I feel sad too, I feel scared too, I feel angry too”. Once that connection is made, my hope is that the song can bring both the listener and me closer to action. Once we are acting, together, the song becomes a protest.

SNQLX: A lot of protest music today doesn’t shout, it observes. How do you personally define protest in your writing? Is it about resistance, documentation, or simply telling the truth plainly?

KATA: When I try to define protest for myself, I often end up turning towards Black history. In the face of systematic and overwhelming oppression, civil rights era protestors were constantly asking questions about how to live and to fight at the same time. Is rest protest? Is joy protest? Is it ok to close your eyes? What is a quiet protest? Is destruction of property or violence a necessity for social change? How much should one be willing to give for others? I think these questions are making a rapid return in the internet age, as all people, now with constant access to the realities of worldwide oppression, must grapple with them.

Ultimately, I think a protest must meet its moment. Some moments call for marches, some moments call for rest, some moments call for songs, some moments might even call for throwing bricks at windows or tea into the sea. The difficult part, I suppose, is finding a way to meet the moment, given your abilities and capacity. Sometimes I go to write a song, and I feel as though it falls short of its moment. For those times, all I can really do is write as honestly as possible and hope it inspires someone else to create their own form of moment-meeting.

SNQLX: Your songs often feel rooted in the present tense, like they’re documenting life as it’s unfolding. How important is it to you that your music captures the moment rather than reflects on it later?

KATA: I consider it a great privilege to be able to write and have the work be seen by so many people within that same day. For all their flaws, this is the privilege granted to me by algorithms like TikTok’s. I don’t think there is really all that much of a precedent for this kind of thing. The channels of music-making used to be so slow and filled with layers of producers, labels, and distributors to get through. I think this forced most of the produced music of the past, even political folk, to adopt a kind of “vagueness”. I get to write about something that happened this morning, and you will see it this evening, it’s really kind of insane. It allows me to be intentional, direct, and present.

SNQLX: When you’re writing in real time, reacting to the world as it is, do you worry about a song becoming dated, or do you see that timestamp as part of its value?

KATA: Honestly, it’s always a worry of mine. At times, I feel what I do on social media is a bit more akin to political commentary rather than music-making. I think it stems from this presumptive idea that a song should be meditated on in order to be expressed with the most tact and poise. These days, I try to worry about it a little bit less. Timelessness can make a song good, but not every good song has to be timeless. When I look back, especially at my TikToks, they feel kinda like diary entries from younger versions of me, and, in that sense, it is the culmination of the timestamps themselves that begin to lead to those poetic feelings of meditated beauty.

SNQLX: Oracle of Silicon suggests technology as something prophetic, maybe even controlling. What does “silicon” represent to you in the context of the song, and how does it intersect with humanity in your work?

KATA: I think it’s very human to grab shit from the ground and bow down to it. Moses came down from Mount Sinai to find a calf of gold, the Olympians turned marble, bronze, and ivory, into a 41-ft statue of Zeus, archaeologists find wooden Yoruba charms in the ground, and I find a plastic Jesus on my mother’s dashboard. These things aren’t gods themselves; instead, they are simulacra or representations of gods. An oracle is a bit different. An oracle is a sort of human mediator who will commune with the gods on your behalf. My fear with artificial intelligence is that we have created an idol, an oracle, and a god all in one (a trinity if you will!). We treat AI as a mediator between us and infinite knowledge, an oracle. Yet, we also pretend that the systems themselves are what is all-knowing and all-powerful, a god. Then, to cap it all off, we’ve given it the power to develop images and representations–it can craft its own idols. I’m worried about this combination. Worship to me (whether of a god, a lover, an idea) was always about projecting one’s humanity onto something greater. What does worship look like if it loses its humanity?

SNQLX: Across your catalog, there’s a strong sense of voice and narrative that feels closer to poetry than traditional songwriting. Do you see yourself primarily as a songwriter, a poet, or something in between?

KATA: I consider myself both a poet and a songwriter; however, strangely enough, not at the same time. While my poems and songs used to be very similar, when I went to college, where I majored in poetry, those two parts of my brain kind of split apart for me. My poetry turned towards being a lot more absurd and prioritized crafting complex images and narratives, while my songwriting stayed focused on wordplay and honest emotional expression. I still adore both mediums, and I’m sure one day they will merge back together, but right now I struggle to see my songs as poems and my poems as songs.

SNQLX: Listening across your discography, it’s hard not to imagine your writing translating into a larger narrative form, something like musical theatre or long-form storytelling. Is that a space you’ve thought about exploring, or does your work already feel theatrical to you?

KATA: I was a big theater kid growing up, and have always had the softest part of my heart reserved for musicals. I was also part of an improv group in college that was notorious for throwing together brand-new musicals in just a couple of weeks. Theater has always been an expression of community for me. So, while I think my work can at times lean theatrical, I think if I were to fully commit to writing a musical, I would have to have a group of people that was interested in building that story with me. As far as storytelling is concerned, I work with a number of storytelling groups across Chicago’s southside. We don’t do a ton of long-form in our circles, but I could imagine a more expanded project coming from that realm as well sometime in the future.

SNQLX: How do you balance vulnerability and intention when writing songs that engage with larger systems, technology, power, culture, without losing the personal core?

KATA: One trick I have learned is how to create a reference point for a viewer. In order to communicate my critique to you while keeping my vulnerability, I often need to create some kind of mutual language through which we can speak. This might be a shared cultural reference (like “there is no war in Ba Sing Se” or “if you give a mouse a cookie”), it might be a central metaphor or premise I establish, (“if we put seeds in bullets” or comparing the nation to a decaying house), or, and I find this is often my most effective reference point, I give you an image from my life and if it relates to an image from your life we can communicate through these memories and moments.

SNQLX: Looking ahead, what feels like the next chapter for you creatively? Is it a continuation of documenting the present, a shift in form, or something entirely new you’re moving toward?

KATA: Right now, I’m really working on figuring out how to translate my works created for social media, mass appeal platforms like TikTok and Instagram, into songs meant for streaming and continuous listening. I’m working on an EP right now that I hope to put out in the spring. Regardless of what I’m doing next, I will continue to document the present as I do now. With our country where it is, we need to stay present, we need to say names, and we need to stay awake. I believe I have a role to play in keeping myself and others awake.

These questions explore the philosophy behind Kata’s work—but to understand how that philosophy actually soundswhen he’s working through it in real time, you’ll want to watch our full video conversation. There, Josh talks about what triggers a song, the weight of documenting a world that won’t stop, and what happens when he finally disconnects.

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