Without Giggs, few modern London MCs—glitzy rap prince Fredo, post-grime rockstar AJ Tracey, anyone making UK drill—would be the same today. His debut album, Walk in Da Park, unzipped the subterranean world of a young gangster planting a stylistic flag in local turf. Years later, via Landlord, he would self-identify as a managerial godfather. Giggs made it out of what he habitually calls “the jungle” to kick down the industry door. Giggs designed the blueprint for spitting slow and cruddy. Giggs built the structural foundations of UK rap.
Big Bad... builds on the idea that he’s spent his career steadily ascending London’s layer cake. A promotional trailer for the album shows a giant Giggs towering over the commercial city center: smashing buildings, grabbing helicopters, and evading tanks. Understood allegorically, the implication might be that Giggs now transcends the city that birthed him, dominating it from way up high. It’s an attractive narrative. His influence over junior MCs, reputation in North America, and collaborative omnipresence with everyone from Lily Allen to Mr Eazi to Drake are all traits that are admirably, if imperfectly, reinforced on Big Bad.... It is repeatedly entertaining and experimental, and therefore memorable.
The video for the first single, “187,” starts where the trailer finishes. Giggs leaps south of the River Thames, shrinks down to normal size outside of Peckham Library, and marks his grand return through fierce, gravelly bars. The song caps an opening trio of hard-body tracks, alongside “Great Collectives,” with Auto-Tune powerhouse GASHI, and “Set It Off.” The rest of the album ebbs and flows between this trusted breed of electronic road rap and Giggs’ continued attempts at forging a new, forward-thinking vocal palette, in partnership with countless A-list friends. Most of it pays off.
Giggs is at his best while rhyming simple, fearlessly well-timed, cryptic truisms about the rougher edges of urban life, as calibrated by his razor-sharp mind and communicated via a slang dictionary that he’s kept tight to his chest for over a decade. Big Bad... overflows with different iterations of this strength. “Show Me Respect” channels the soulful, contemplative philosophy that “The Essence” and even “Slow Songs” once did: “I just show man the life/Used to show man the death/Mad years, but there’s so many left,” he ponders existentially. More of this introspection would have been welcome. Still, the thumping soundsystem intensity of bangers “Baby” (despite a bizarre reference to Madagascar’s monkeys), “Gwop Expenses” with Wretch 32 (a Snips beat with aesthetic nods to haunting old G-Unit instrumentals) and “You Ain’t” (one of the best displays of pure, hard British rapping in a long time), are all irreplaceable ingredients.
To have attracted French Montana, Lil Yachty, Swizz Beatz, Theophilus London, and Jadakiss from across the pond to contribute verses is a triumph in itself. It’s surreal to hear Swizz shout out Peckham, and reflect upon the fact that Jada’s D-Block style of hood realism would have undoubtedly influenced Giggs’ late-noughties takeover. All of these features do their job to accompany Giggs on his demonstration of newfound versatility, laid over a massive selection of crisp, heavy, whip-ready beats. The point is that only the Landlord could bring together, under one figurative roof, such a broad church of transatlantic hitmakers, from Jahlil Beats to Da Beatfreakz.
A nagging question looms over the album, though. Should Giggs be singing? His decision to do so is likely to divide audiences. Moments like the off-tune chorus of “Spun It,” whose rap verses are amongst the fiercest of Giggs’ career—“Man ain’t the aggressor, but I’ve been aggressive” he growls—were always going to be risky inclusions. The album could have been a few songs shorter. But risk aversion was never going to be a viable attitude going into a long-awaited fifth album at Giggs’ level. He can’t really be blamed for trying something new, even if the result does present the one crease in an otherwise well-ironed British trap project.
Recently, Giggs told BBC Radio 1’s Annie Mac that he is happy because he is seeing more “yutes every day getting off the streets” through their music, like he did. Big Bad... is yet another example of his continued career elevation, signaling what is possible if you stick to your guns while caring little for what others think. Its reverberations will be felt for years to come. The bonus, of course, is that it seems realistic to imagine that somewhere out there, the next generation’s Giggs has been shown a clear path not only away from the increasingly violent London roads, but toward international stardom.
