The post Lynn Forbes Delivers Heart-Wrenching Verdict On AKA’s Unreleased Music: “If It Were Up to Me, It Would Never Happen” appeared first on SA Hip Hop Mag.
Lynn Forbes Delivers Heart-Wrenching Verdict On AKA’s Unreleased Music: “If It Were Up to Me, It Would Never Happen.” In one of the most emotionally raw exchanges since Kiernan “AKA” Forbes was gunned down in Durban in February 2023, the slain rapper’s mother, Lynn Forbes, has spoken openly about the mountain of unreleased music her son left behind – and delivered a deeply personal warning to fans still craving new material.
The moment came during an interview with fellow South African hip-hop heavyweight L-Tido, who looked Lynn in the eye and asked the question every AKA fan has been whispering for three years: “Can the fans expect AKA’s new from Kiernan?”
Lynn’s answer, delivered with the quiet authority of a mother who knows her child better than anyone, was neither a flat refusal nor the green light the culture has been praying for. It was something far more complex – and far more human.
“I’m gonna be honest, we’re having an open conversation,” she began. “I can’t say never. I cannot say yes it will happen at this point, and I will tell you why.”
She revealed that the family and estate have already sifted through “loads” of unreleased music. The sheer volume is staggering. Yet volume alone is not the issue.
“Here’s the thing,” Lynn continued, her voice steady but laced with the weight only a grieving parent can carry, “and this could just be me feeling this way… Because I’m not working by myself. There’s an estate, we need to look at what can be done and what cannot be done. But we can also not just do things for the sake of the fans want music.”
For the first time publicly, Lynn laid bare the central tension tearing at the heart of the decision: the sacred line between honouring her son’s legacy and exploiting it.
“For me, it’s always been, would Kiernan have released this music?” she said. “So I think we’re going to go forward, looking at it saying, on the one hand, we could probably release all the music. There’s so much. If we want to do it, we can. But do we wanna do it? How would he have felt about us?”
Then came the sentence that will echo through every AKA fan’s timeline:
“If it’s up to me personally, I’m gonna be honest – if I have to make the final decision, it will not happen. That’s how I feel about it.”
She paused, acknowledging the conflict every parent of a deceased artist must face. “But you see again, this is the thing where I’m saying to you, there’s the mother and then there’s something different.”
Lynn made it clear she is not making unilateral calls. The estate, collaborators, and industry experts are all part of the conversation. Yet she returned, again and again, to the one standard that matters most to her: Kiernan’s own impossibly high bar.
“I’m just saying to you as a mother and knowing my son. His work ethic, how he was very meticulous; he was about perfection and excellence and all of that. Can we actually do that with his music? Are we capable of doing that with his music? To the point that he would’ve done?”
The question hung in the air like an unfinished verse.
L-Tido’s simple query had opened a window into a private grief that millions of South Africans – and global fans – have tried to respect while quietly hoping for more music. What Lynn Forbes offered instead was something rarer: radical honesty.
She is not opposed to the idea in principle. But she is fiercely protective of her son’s name and the standard he set. Releasing unfinished or unperfected work simply because the fans are starving for it is, in her eyes, not an act of love – it’s a betrayal of the very excellence AKA lived and died by.
For now, the vaults remain sealed.
Whether they ever open will not be decided by fan demand, streaming numbers, or industry pressure. It will be decided by one question that only those who truly knew Kiernan can answer:
Would he have wanted this music to see the light of day?
And right now, the person who knew him best is leaning hard toward “no”.
The post Lynn Forbes Delivers Heart-Wrenching Verdict On AKA’s Unreleased Music: “If It Were Up to Me, It Would Never Happen” appeared first on SA Hip Hop Mag.
The post Lynn Forbes Delivers Heart-Wrenching Verdict On AKA’s Unreleased Music: “If It Were Up to Me, It Would Never Happen” appeared first on SA Hip Hop Mag.
Lynn Forbes Delivers Heart-Wrenching Verdict On AKA’s Unreleased Music: “If It Were Up to Me, It Would Never Happen.” In one of the most emotionally raw exchanges since Kiernan “AKA” Forbes was gunned down in Durban in February 2023, the slain rapper’s mother, Lynn Forbes, has spoken openly about the mountain of unreleased music her …
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