In 2012 Skepta found himself at an impasse. He was integral in grime’s early hustle during the halcyon pirate radio days, but the music he was making, from 2008-2012 was soulless, kowtowing to a sanitized version of grime that went hand in hand with the slow-burning corporate ransacking of the genre that started with Dizzee Rascal’s breakthrough almost a decade earlier. He recently compared this dissatisfaction with his role in the mainstream with Britney Spears' infamous shaved head incident. If there is a similar meltdown for Skepta it happened in April of 2012, in a 26-minute video posted to Youtube, titled “#UnderdogPsychosis no.1” with a caption that read: “Break the cycle.” In a monologue by turns manic, vulnerable, self-aware, and inarticulate, he castigated himself, the system, (in DJ Khaled’s parlance the pervasive “they”), the industry, reflected on his forgotten and youthful musical past, and celebrated the life of the underdog. He promised to make music that had meaning. The video was later shown at the Tate Modern, a strange high watermark for the grime renaissance he helped ignite.
It’s been five years since a proper studio album from the 33-year-old Londoner, and after many delays his long-awaited Konnichiwa has finally arrived. It is arguably the first appointment listen in a genre that has never been defined by albums, but by singles, loosies, hotly pressed riddims, and pirate radio broadcasts. This partly comes from an album roll out and rebranding that has lasted almost two years. Last April, he organized an impromptu rave in a Shoreditch car park attended by almost a thousand people via an Instagram post. He helped hijack the stage of the Brits with Kanye West a month before. And even earlier than that Drake had cribbed lines from Skepta’s “That’s Not Me” for “Used To” starting a cross-continental musical love affair, leading to Drake symbolically signing to Skepta’s BBK label. He’s helped unfurl a ocean-spanning red carpet that’s led to wide ranging institutional support prompted magazine covers, documentaries, and a litany of think pieces asking, yet again, if was America ready for grime.
The sudden explosion of cultural cachet seems to have made no dents in his anarchic attitude. Konnichiwa is easily the most blatantly anti-authoritarian statement from rap this year, overflowing with sneering contempt for popular culture’s industry of image, the press, the police, and the government at large. No matter the respect he’s garnered recently, and the friends he’s gained along the way, Konnichiwa proves that Skepta still bristles at the very idea of institutions. He is still flipping the bird, compelling you to help him burn it all down.
“That’s Not Me” was the first song Skepta released off Konnichiwa, and it’s a template for the album's tone: A combination of snarling bravado and earnest self directed criticism—an elegantly brutal volte-face from a previous life. He’s thrown his designer clothes in the garbage, donned his famous black track suit, and disavowed the trappings of the last few years (“I put it all in the bin cause that's not me”). He’s come back out of the thicket of a forced absence, full of self-aggrandizing swagger. (“It's the return of the mack/I'm still alive just like 2Pac”). A year later, at the height of his return to prominence, the music video for the best song on this album,“Shutdown,” was released. Dressed in all white, in the middle of London’s bloated symbol of divisive gentrification the Barbican Centre, Skepta makes very clear that he fears no one: “Me and my Gs ain't scared of police/We don't listen to no politician/Everybody on the same mission/We don't care about your ‘isms and schisms," he rapped, lines that scan as both an indictment and a call-to-arms.
Skepta produced eight of the twelve tracks himself, and they have the same roughly hewn power of his early instrumentals, measured but fiery stews of dancehall, jungle, UK funky, and garage. When it works, it's bone-rattling stuff. Elsewhere, it's a mixed bag, sonically and qualitatively: He caricatures Noah “40” Shebib’s rose-quartz soul on “Ladies Hit Squad;” “Crime Riddim,” produced by Blaikie and Skepta’s brother Jason, has the wild flair of a Death Grips track; and “Numbers” (featuring and co-produced by Pharrell) fails to shoehorn Skepta into Pharrell's bubbly funk universe.
As for his lyrics, there is nothing coded about them, or their meaning: He raps exclusively about distrust and independence. He’s very much aware that London, and the world, will continue to exploit him and erase his individuality. This awareness is why he refuses to appear in pictures with fans or answer press emails in “Man.” It’s why he pulls way back, and samples Wiley’s call for peace in the middle of a battle (“Lyrics for lyrics, calm”) in “Lyrics.” He finds peace, if he finds it at all, in his roots: by remaining loyal to family and friends, by being appreciative of the past, and by incubating a future for his genre. Konnichiwa is as nakedly vulnerable Skepta has ever been, and it represents a tantalizingly wide-open door for grime. It’ll be our job as listeners to step through and discover what we’ve been missing.
