London, UK
Interview & Photos by Matt Sonzala
London has always been an important city for music in general and I know hip hop has always been a part of it but was maybe overlooked on an international scene. A city this big, I compare it to Toronto where Drake broke out finally but that was after 30 years of incredible MC’s, producers and DJ’s making dope music in such a big place. Can you tell me what it was like when you first started rapping in London?
That’s a fair comparison actually, with Toronto. I think it’s kind of worth noting that the time that I came into rapping and really got engulfed by hip hop culture, there wasn’t necessarily a kind of structured version of a scene. Do you know what I mean? There had been incarnations of that up until that point but at that point, it wasn’t a tangible thing in my head, that you could be a British rapper. I kind of found out later down the line that there were things happening in and around the city and in and around the UK but they just hadn’t reached me at that time. It was just being aware that you were following in the footsteps of things that were happening in other places and had a prominence in other places. I think at a certain level at that time, at least in my circles, it was about respecting and honoring that as opposed to feeling like I was attached to a London sound and trying to continue that. Like I say, unless you were in specific pockets or circles it just wasn’t a wide spread thing, at the time I’m a teenager and getting into writing rhymes, Garage music is popping off in London. By the time I got to a point where I felt like I’m a rapper now and had some kind of sense of what I was trying to do and what I wanted to say, I had seen enough scope of hip hop artists to think that “Oh I can fit in here,” Grime music pops off. One of the guys that I have rhymed a lot with in my teenage years and one of the MC’s that helped me develop as an MC was a big Garage MC as well. He loved his rap, a guy called Pase or Dead Pase he used to go by from time to time and he was very much part of the first Grime wave. So I remember going to like under-18 Grime raves where it was Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, just before this thing is about to explode, and a lot of this stuff was really happening in North and East London. I’m from South London, so going and getting an insight into how powerful that movement was and what was about to happen, yeah, I guess was another thing that made being a hip hop MC seem like it wasn’t at the forefront of what was happening in the streets.
Well I have always paid attention to different types of music and when I first heard Grime I wondered why is there such a separation between UK Hip Hop and Grime? Because you could say the same thing for Texas or Memphis hip hop, it was a foreign language to New York. We were totally different from what people were used to hearing, so were lot’s of regions in the US alone. So here, people were rapping over beats even though they weren’t like straight up typical hip hop beats, why was it separate? Grime sounds like the hip hop of London to me.
I think it’s a great question and depending on who you ask, there’s lot’s of different versions of an explanation for that. But I think the most straight forward way to look at it was I guess it kind of comes back to what I was saying about where I was at when I started my journey as an MC, where it’s like for that sound at that time, I’m studying the best MC’s. I’m listening to Nas, I’m listening to Big L, Ras Kass, so there’s an approach and a sound and a timbre and a vibe that comes with all of that. Which meant a lot of hip hop purists here at the time rapped with an American accent or had an American twang. A lot of my early stuff there is a strong American twang, which I slowly became more aware of. The way that the music has changed we became more confident to use a British voice. I think that’s a point about why things were that way. You weren’t confident rapping in a British accent, so I think what happened with Grime and Garage was that there was a level of ownership to it. The benchmark, the documents and the precedent, statement, tunes and artists that came along, they kind of stamped that very British authority of what the vocal tone sounded like, and the music. And I think that level of ownership is probably a big part of the disconnect.
But if you listen to both hip hop and grime, both came out of Jamaican music.
That’s it, and yes actually doesn’t all of this belong to that and is it an appropriation? I think there is another way to look at it which is that claim, but like when So Solid Crew was signed, Asher D was a couple years above me in school, these were real legit people that were in your life and it just kind of started the ball rolling into the industry and industry involvement. And I think at the time what UK Hip Hop, because it was still attached to the foundational elements of hip hop culture, which is about documenting the world and speaking up for the oppressed and kind of untangling some of the mysteries of politics and the things that happen within society for an audience that maybe felt like they didn’t have the education to understand politics or didn’t have this kind of institutional back ground to under stand the world around them. And then you’ve got these CD’s and tapes that are coming into your yard that legitimately kind of educate you and remove the veneer of these large concepts and what they mean and you couldn’t possibly wrap your head around it. I think there is something slightly more dangerous about a movement that is preoccupied by things of that nature. Whereas I wouldn’t say that was necessarily a preoccupation of Garage and Grime. At the time it was party music, essential for Garage and the Grime music became a representation of the street voice, the road voice at that time and it was an outlet for their anger that was really bubbling youth culture at the time. I think that’s why it spread so quickly, because you could jump on this sound, use your voice and there was no parameter that you had to fit in or around. I don’t think it was the scenes or the music listener or the artists that pushed specifically for that, but you know there was a time when UK Hip Hop was doing its thing in the Skinnyman golden era, Low Life era, Jehst, Rodney P, Klashnekoff and the like. And there was this moment when surely one of these guys is gonna get signed to a slightly bigger situation that’s gonna open up the door and it just didn’t really manifest at the time. Whereas it did later down the line, between So Solid and Dizzee Rascal, you know something shifted.
I mean some of the artists you just mentioned in the UK Hip Hop realm they were existing in the times of the early 2000’s where in the US hip hop got so commodified and became so commercial, it split things up completely. So coming over here the UK Hip Hop always seemed to have some real purists, I mean even in Netherlands or Germany, wherever you went there was still that political or conscious side to it, but in America you had to really really look. I mean I remember when Funkmaster Flex and Time Westwood started playing so much Atlanta music, it changed a lot.
I feel like at that time, hip hop from the States, that aspirational energy that people were trying to capture here at the time or a feeling of hip hop that then became referred to as Conscious Rap and Backpack Rap and that fed into what people called UK Hip Hop here and that became a version of Backpack/Conscious rap that was almost a derogatory term for some people.
In some people but thank God for those scenes around the world, because that is how the so called Backpack rappers survived. They were touring the world and going to places that bigger rappers didn’t go to because they had a real scene that really cared about real hip hop.
The arrival of Mos Def was quite a big moment for me. I loved the Black Star record and I loved the whole vibe of Rawkus and I think what was happening at that time, even if you think of like Rawkus Records, nine times out of ten, brings up this connotation of Backpack/Conscious rap but then you look at the roster and you see Kool G Rap, Big L, Pharoahe Monch, it was hip hop and it was real. Mos Def came through and I saw him perform at Shepherds Bush when I was about 15 years old and it just kind of changed the way I viewed everything and how I might be able to fit into this world. That little moment there, instead of becoming something that just encompassed hip hop, then everything started getting categorized with different names like Backpack rap. Then later down the line you get a Kanye West who was initially kind of presented as Backpack/Conscious but then goes on to become one of the most famous people in the world.
It’s a testament to the grind and to the work. The longevity of the artists who were considered Backpack, there’s people putting out vinyl from them in 2024. There are toys, like there are MF Doom action figures. There’s so many things out there that coming up in hip hop culture we didn’t even fathom back then. I didn’t expect it to become what it became and I love to see my peers still out there on the road and doing things. The Rolling Stones are in their 80’s and there used to be a prejudice against rappers as they got older, but I think it had to go through some of the many phases to mature into what it has become. It had to go so low that people had to start looking for the highs again.
I feel you. Bringing up MF Doom in the point you are making, that was another significant moment. Discovering MF Doom’s music, I feel like what happened with the commercial side of things is they turned being a rapper or an MC into something also associated with youth. There was a shift at some point where it was like the hottest rapper is the youngest guy, the newest, and then you go back through it and you think about what level of insight you can gain as a 30 year old man from a 19 year olds perspective and MF Doom kind of created this possibility to age gracefully in hip hop and to possibly get better. That was kind of a thing that was pushed to support this picture of the mainstream in rap, that you don’t get better. Your first album is a classic album and the older you get and the more kind of scope you get in your subject matter, I think that that is important. That’s what Doom did for hip hop, he kind of said here’s a guy who got better and better and better.
I think the problem with a lot of this is that rappers didn’t get better because they felt they needed to go in a different direction than what they originally came with to try and hit the numbers that they were hoping to hit and you can see it now. Our legends realized that they got the audience that they were supposed to get doing what they were doing and they went back to it. A lot of artists came out with some really bullshit commercial music for a minute and then came back to who they are. But you specifically I wonder in a city as huge as London is, I know you are deep within the scene in South London, Peckham specifically, if things were happening in Peckham would East London know about it? Was there a separation in the scenes by area here?
Yeah I was born and raised in Peckham. And yeah there was a separation but I think the separation was about the mediums as much as anything else. Because we are talking about a time where if you didn’t have the tape or someone hasn’t burned you that particular CD, where would you access this music? And it became something very local even down to spaces and venues where things would happen. So yeah I think there was definitely a disconnect at that time on that level which changed as well once social media came around or even file sharing like Bluetooth, that changed a lot of shit. Just the fact that you could send music to someone from phone to phone, you would be sitting on the bus sometimes and you would get a little alert that someone is sending out a mixtape. I remember getting a Giggs mixtape just on a bus going through Peckham.
The UK was ahead of us with the SMS and the mobile phone stuff for sure.
It’s a big thing here, it’s a big cultural thing here.
In the beginning of Grime I was trying so hard to hear things and people told me that the early Grime was mostly traded on tapes.
Yeah that was the medium man and also its just a whole other art form attached to that in terms of putting a set together and all of these things that have kind of been lost in the playlist era. Somebody guiding you through the music on this level, it was like if somebody gave you a tape it was a life long gift. And we would get dubs of American hip hop because there was so much out there you couldn’t cover it all, you might have your little world of artists that you are into and then someone shows you something else and suddenly now you are onto a whole other scene. Open mics were a big thing as well. And that was a big thing for me. There was an open mic night at a spot called Deal Real, this was a record shop at the time which was on Carnaby Street and had previously been in another location which it kind of spawned like Harry Love, the producer and Maestro and Rodney P, and some other people and then they moved and another group of MC’s started coming out. That would be on a Friday night and it kind of traveled and you would meet MC’s from all over this city and all over the country. Traveling American rappers would pass through. We had Mos Def there, Kanye, Supernatural did a crazy freestyle, just legendary shit. So that became a real hub and breeding ground for skills as well man. A lot of established UK MC’s and artists passed through and came out of there. Amy Winehouse was another person who used to pass through, just because it was some real shit going on. There was a real feeling that something was about to happen, that may or may not have gone where we thought.
Those scenes and those collectives are super important. Compared to the kids who don’t leave their bedrooms today, there is a huge difference. Maybe the music did go where it was supposed to go. I mean, not everyone is reading great literature all day. Y’all definitely had a cool scene and a real underground. I used to hear about the pirate radio stations here back in the day, with you coming from the south and so much Grime came from the east and the north, did those stations reach the whole city or were those neighborhood stations?
It would depend, I’m not really an expert on that side of things man, but again it was the tape. Getting the tapes. One of my best friends used to spin on Deja Vu pirate radio, the dude who DJed for me first, Supreme and yeah man it still had the calling card of hip hop where the DJ is very important and the kind of figurehead of the operation as opposed to the kind of MC version of hip hop that we have in most cases today. Or what people associate with the roles within it. It was a very real way of hearing the music.
I wish I could have heard all of it, I would have been obsessed.
I hope somebody somewhere has a huge archive of tapes and sets. It’s a deep thing man because the deeper you look into it, the level of risk involved in running a set up like that and then the kind of you know, level of organization, you have to pay homage to it man.
What I am most excited to see happening in the UK right now is the come up of young people in Jazz. You had Shabaka on the record you did with Kwake and the crossover and potential crossover of that is so incredible and it feels to me like London is very much leading the way of a very new wave of not just Jazz but “Urban” music. The sounds that have been coming out are just incredible. So many people got so far away from that organic way of making music, at least among the youth and nowadays we are seeing a lot of young people forging a path with instruments etc. I’d like to know how you feel that relates to hip hop and the scene right now.
There’s a number of things you can dig into and maybe the first thing is like the relationship between hip hop and jazz. And how their journeys through the history of music and social perception and the idea that right now there is definitely something that has happened in the past five or ten years that has really invigorated the perception or taken the perception of jazz a few steps ahead. Some might imagine it as Kenny G or kind of elevator, white, middle class, suburban music to enjoy with a glass of wine. But the further back you go this was regarded as the Devil’s music and had a very negative slant and a lot of the first black jazz musicians were vilified. There is a symbiosis that exists between jazz and hip hop that is recognizable, there is something about both worlds at their heart looking at each other like “yeah, I know the struggle.” I think the whole vibe here in London and in some respects I’m speaking specifically about South London, there is a socially, the way that the city is put together, you have this mixture of poverty and affluence and that goes very much throughout the whole city. But when you’ve got people living one type of lifestyle and dealing with this version of reality who are a stones throw away from people who live in a totally different version of said reality but still having to kind of function and operate in the same spaces. I feel like there is something within what has happened with jazz, there’s been an overlap, if you look at the Venn Diagrams where the circles overlap each other, because of this proximity, all of these things have fed into a kind of new group of young people who have grown up with a slightly different outlook, particularly when it comes to music.
What do you have going on right now? I know you recently released an album this year, and the Con and Kwake album wasn’t so long ago. This new album is a collaboration as well, isn’t it?
Yeah, I put a record out in February of this year called Stop Signs, produced by a guy called Pitch 92
who is Manchester based and came up producing for a group called The Mouse Outfit. They were a live act, a mix of genres like Hip Hop, Garage, Dub Step in places. He’s gone on to become quite a prominent figure in Hip Hop and works with lots of different labels. We put that out with HHV Records in February and the next thing that’s about to drop imminently for me is a record produced by a dude called Bastien Keb who is a multi-instrumentalist composer/beat maker who is genuinely genre defying in his sound.
In closing I find it really interesting that you incorporate hip hop into your work in education. Can you tell me what you do on the day to day with the youth and how you incorporate the culture?
You know it has evolved in a lot of ways over the years but do you know what it was is my Mom was a primary school teacher and became a head teacher of a primary school as well before she retired so education has always been a thing in my world. My moms a teacher and my dads a musician so it’s always gonna be some offshoot of these things. When I was 18 I was interested in the idea of like essentially just conveying to young people how passionate I was about this art form and what it had done for my life. And like becoming an MC and having an intentional focus as an MC also pushed me into academia. That’s how I regarded myself because of the amount of time I spent in my rhyme books and the amount of focus and dedication I had put into language and my passion for words is how this all started. So I felt that if I could get somebody to feel this way, or I can at least express that I feel this way about this thing, it’s gonna produce some interesting results. There was an incredible group of kids that I worked with in the first set of workshops that I did, there were kids who had a close connection to something really bad that had happened in the area I was working in, and my mom asked if I thought there was anything I could do to help and work with these kids. I went to the same school, and I went to school with some of the kids brothers and sisters and later down the line I went to school with some of the kids parents, I’ve worked with children for the last 20 years. Some of the things, if I could share them with people, if I could convey this energy to the average person it would change our outlook on the world and it would change your outlook on the future. I found a way through hip hop music to just tap into a frequency with these kids. A lot of the time it would be getting into a space and using everything I’ve learned from making music and from hip hop and being a creative where there’s this element of reasoning and talking about the world and you start to open up frequencies and you set an intention and we are trying to do something here and it’s progressing to where we got together in this space to do something progressive and sometimes that alone is enough for the magic to spark. You sit down and you start talking to the kid and you start offering them a voice. Very early I introduced a system to where you don’t put your hand up to speak, you don’t need permission to speak. We navigate this dialogue organically and nobody is ever in fear that they will not be heard and there is something like really hip hop about that for me. That is what hip hop does for people the world over.
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