8 hours ago
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On Father, the first single to be taken from Jim Legxacy’s third mixtape, the listener is offered a vivid image from the author’s past. The teenage James Olaloye, as he was then, is on the streets of Lewisham, the south-east London borough where he grew up. He is “rolling up a blunt, scheming for the funds … trying to come up off the roads on my own two / I never had a father”. Inevitably, this means he’s up to no good: “Making money off a phone … a key’s what they want.”
It’s a familiar scenario in the world of UK rap, a genre in which you seldom want for bleak descriptions of the life its stars have left behind on often deprived council estates. But in the case of Father, it comes with a small, but striking detail. “On the block,” he attests, “I was listening to Mitski.”
The self-examining sad-girl alt-pop of Mitski is an intriguing accompaniment for the lifestyle he’s describing. But in Jim Legxacy’s case, it makes sense. His rise has been a deeply unorthodox one, buoyed up by music that suggests he is almost entirely uninterested in the way things are usually done. You would broadly have described his 2021 mixtape Citadel as UK rap, but it sounded like UK rap that was fraying at the edges: the backing tracks frequently unravelling; his aggressive flow occasionally dropping out of the mix entirely, or suddenly scrambled until unintelligible. His contemptuous boasts were abruptly disrupted by guitar-driven tracks on which the mask slipped and he sang, in a sweet, plaintive voice, lyrics expressing a strikingly raw vulnerability that seemed to have more to do with emo than hip-hop. In 2023, Homeless N*gga Pop Music leaned even further into the latter mode. Featuring more singing than rapping, it pitched grumbling electric guitars against chattering Afrobeats-inspired rhythms and Miley Cyrus samples, the overall mood heartbroken and despairing. It really didn’t sound like anything else, including Sprinter, the huge hit single Legxacy co-wrote and co-produced for Central Cee and Dave the same year.
You might expect his debut mixtape for an actual label to be even more heartsore and introspective, not least because the first track, Context, details what has happened to Legxacy since Homeless N*gga Pop Music’s release: his sister died, his mother suffered two strokes, his track Candy Reign (!) was removed from streaming services after a copyright dispute. These events clearly have an impact on the record. But the adversity seems to have spurred him on. Black British Music is brighter, poppier, bolder in its stylistic leaps, lurching without warning from idiosyncratic pop R&B – laced with sped-up vocal samples that inevitably evoke Kanye West’s early “chipmunk soul” productions – to the alt-rock of ’06 Wayne Rooney. The song New David Bowie tempers a series of head-scrambling musical jump cuts with a succession of nagging hooks.
It feels like the work of someone who has grown up with the all-you-can-eat buffet of streaming as standard, hurling contrasting ideas and inspirations at you in a way that recalls someone continually pressing fast-forward in a state of excitement. There are booming, distorted beats worthy of the Chemical Brothers, a hint of Frank Ocean about Legxacy’s vocals, staccato strings on SOS, bedroom pop on Dexters Phone Call, the latter a collaboration with singer-songwriter Dexter in the Newsagent. It’s a risky approach. That it doesn’t result in an annoying mess comes down to Legxacy’s skills as a producer, which allow him to weave it all into something coherent, and to his songwriting. He turns out to be far more adept at nagging melodies than you might have thought given the hazier approach of his previous mixtapes. There’s often something unplaceable and confounding about the results: the cascade of keyboards, vintage soul samples, restless beats and panicked-sounding rapping on the amazingly titled I Just Banged a Snus in Canada Water contrives to be thrillingly intense and euphorically poppy at the same time.
A voiceover regularly booms out between and even during tracks, telling you how wonderful the music you’re listening to is: “Somebody tell that bastard to turn that mediocre bullshit off – we’re listening to Jim Legxacy now.” It’s surplus to requirements: a unique world constructed out of an array of musical fragments, the mixtape doesn’t need cheerleading. But perhaps Legxacy does. “I’ve always been scared of being myself,” he sings over the acoustic guitars and scraping strings of Issues of Trust. Without wishing to minimise the difficulties he’s overcome – or indeed what he has to say about Black masculinity, a regular theme in his work – you hear that line amid Black British Music’s giddy rush of sound and think: you could have fooled me.
This week Alexis listened to
Jessie Murph – Heroin
An orchestrated ballad that starts out stately, as if Lana Del Rey relocated to the deep south, but then takes off into raw-throated catharsis, to stunning effect.
English (US)