When Wiley started picking fights at the end of 2019, most grime fans assumed it was the scene’s old hand turning to a tried-and-true promo playbook: call out another MC on the radio, trade a few diss tracks, piggyback off each other’s rep, create a buzz, then drop a new album. Having rattled through a 15-minute BBC radio interview—calling Drake a “pagan” and Ed Sheeran a “culture vulture”—Wiley followed up with a bunch of tweets and war dubs aimed squarely at Stormzy, who was preparing for an extensive world tour off the back of a second number one album in a row. It worked, of course. The two sent shots at each other. Wiley met with A-list boxing promoter Eddie Hearn about promoting a live clash between him and Stormzy at London’s 20,000-capacity O2 Arena. Broadsheets filled pages awkwardly explaining the dispute, while fans debated online as to who was coming out on top—and whether there was anything more to the beef than Wiley stirring the pot to his own end.
But then no album appeared. According to people on Wiley’s side of the argument, label wrangling behind the scenes meant Wiley had to wait out his term’s expiry date before he could release the record on his own. But while his beef with Stormzy tailed off, Wiley was driving around London linking up with MCs to lay down verses. To what end, they couldn’t be sure—when Godfather III finally dropped last week, a number of MCs tweeted out that they didn’t realize they were going to feature on the finished album—but for Wiley this was an exercise in taking grime back to its roots or, in his words, “back to the village.”
All of a sudden, the beef started making sense. His real umbrage is not so much with Stormzy’s success or the perceived lack of homage paid to grime’s originators, but the way in which he believes control has been wrested from artists by the suits—or, in the case of Sheeran’s “Take Me Back To London” remix, by a dorky singer-songwriter. It’s hard not to view Godfather III as a direct response to all of this. The album’s first half is stacked with songs directly addressing the issue. “Protect The Empire” packs a blunt-force chorus of “We built this up, that’s why we must protect it.” On “The Game,” he can’t resist taking another jab at his former protégé and fellow grime innovator, Dizzee Rascal, for starring in ads for Ladbrokes (a gambling chain accused of targeting deprived urban areas and leeching off the UK’s most vulnerable) instead of putting his efforts into pulling the scene up with him.
Wiley has flirted with major labels throughout his career, and he’s left pretty much all of them with a bridge blazing behind him. Last year, a star-studded dancehall album called Full Circle featuring Future, Tory Lanez, and Nicki Minaj, among others, was ground into nothingness by rights disputes. A commercial shoo-in that would surely have been Wiley’s retirement fund following the massive success of 2019’s “Boasty,” the record was canned as egos and bureaucracy prevailed over the music. Godfather III, which packs close to 30 featured artists over its 22 tracks, shows Wiley holding up a mirror to the industry’s bureaucracy.
In place of familiar faces from the Billboard Hot 100, he invites grime MCs from all eras of the sound to bar alongside him. Veterans like D Double E, Flirta D, and Scratchy bump up against newer names like Jammz, Jon E Clayface, Big Zuu, and Capo Lee. Some, like K9 and Manga, straddle both epochs, while others have just a handful of credits to their name. Two tracks—“West London” and “South London”—are dedicated to showcasing talent from small pockets of the city. The beats derive from the years of dubplates and car-trunk distribution up to streaming hits too: On “Alla Dem” he raps over a Scratcha DVA instrumental that dates back as far as 2007; Zdot’s beat for “Da Vibez Is Back” hooks on a sample of one of Kanye’s infamous 2016 rants; while “South London” is produced by Mazza—one of the beatmakers behind Big Shaq’s viral UK drill track “Man’s Not Hot.”
At 22 tracks, it’s a little bloated—but with most songs barely scratching the three-minute mark, it zips along at a pace reminiscent of the radio sets and stage shows that the sound incubated in almost two decades ago. This plays out to literal effect on “Eskimo Dance.” Named after the series of raves Wiley started in 2002, the track shows 11 different MCs passing the mic to spit their most explosive bars in an eight-bar rally as classic instrumentals from the sound’s first golden age slide into one another. (In a neat historical nod, the first three instrumentals on the song are the same three instrumentals that opened the very first Eskimo Dance.) When things do slow down and Wiley centers his own voice—see “Free Spirit” or reflective closer “Press Record”—the pause is welcome: Not only for the insights and insecurities revealed (“We’ve done things in music we didn't know we could/The crowd’s gone overground but we all came from the hood /I don’t know where I'm going but where I’m going is good” on “Free Spirit”) but for his idiosyncratic ability to drop punchlines like “I never liked Marmite on toast, and no no I never liked porridge” amidst the profundity.
This month, Wiley told The Guardian that Godfather III will be his last album. Needless to say he hasn’t mentioned any retirement plans. Maybe this was just another leaf from that well-worn promo playbook? But if Godfather III is to be his swan song, then fans could hardly hope for a better send-off: it’s about as pure an encapsulation of grime’s past, present, and future as the album format allows.
