By Genre: Grime
Favorite Tracks: “Greaze Mode,” “Redrum,” “Glow In The Dark”
Imagine if the Wu-Tang Clan had followed ENTER THE 36 CHAMBERS with a spineless cookie-cutter rap album about women and money. Now imagine if that album, instead of being in tune with its East Coast roots, ripped off stereotypical West Coast hip hop. That hypothetical is essentially the reality of Skepta’s IGNORANCE IS BLISS, an album that eschews the grime traditions the rapper helped to pioneer in favor of simpler American consumerism.
Skepta is essentially grime music’s GZA, Kanye, and Nas, all rolled into one person. The North London hip hop mogul’s career has exceeded a decade, and Skepta has played an integral role in grime’s recent second coming. Though Skepta’s career in the past few years has been marked with Nike collabs, GQ shoots, and Playboi Carti features, his crowning achievement of the 2010s was the release of his magnum opus, 2016’s frightening but stellar KONNICHIWA. The record provided both a fashionable set of party anthems for international music fans and also a gritty look into UK poverty. KONNICHIWA painted a striking vignette of a country whose urban youth were damned to a TRAINSPOTTING-esque existence, selling drugs out of trap houses and hiding from the law. Though rough around the edges, KONNICHIWA’s cinematic bars and refreshingly unprocessed production found Skepta a fanbase of young hip hop nerds worldwide. As the UK’s political climate spun into turmoil, Skepta’s career soared and he became a go-to collaborator and idol for a younger generation of rappers.
IGNORANCE IS BLISS is, at its core, an Americanized and apolitical record that exists within a movement whose main preoccupation is English politics and street culture. As Brexit tensions rise, a new era of grime rappers, most notably Slowthai and Octavian, are candidly addressing the harsh realities of life in Britain through their music. Skepta, on the other hand, has basically started to rap and act like an Atlanta rapper. Most of the tracks on IGNORANCE IS BLISS sound like cockney Migos or Lil Uzi Vert. “Same Old Story” is particularly cheesy, a “Mask Off” flute synth obtusely sitting atop a remarkably unpleasant drum pattern that can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a Roland 909 or an accurate replication of an acoustic kit. Although the aforementioned track is the most effective example of Skepta’s new “across the pond” take on grime, the lasting influence of Skepta’s collaboration with Carti can be heard on every track on the record. Although “Lean 4 Real” was a 2018 rap highlight, Skepta’s verse saw him embrace out-of-character mumble rap sensibilities. The gimmick was fun for a one-off collaboration, but the overpowering influence of southern rap on IGNORANCE IS BLISS gets old before the first track ends.
IGNORANCE IS BLISS does have some okay moments—“Greaze Mode” is an objectively good grime song, although it does kind of sound like something that would be playing in the background of an underground auto repair shop in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, and “Redrum” is decent, the beat being cool in a Yung Lean-ish way. However, when Skepta talks about murder, it doesn’t feel as scary or real as it did on every previous record. On KONNICHIWA, lines like “Crack residue in the buttons of my phone / Black leather boots when I run into your home” didn’t just feel like morbid pump up bars. Instead, Skepta’s persona was that of a stouthearted villain, ruthless and powerful, yet mature. Now when he talks about murder it feels like the only thing Skepta could kill is the colorway of his next limited edition run of Air Max 97s. “Glow In The Dark” is a good attempt at Skepta incorporating elements of Jamaican music into his production, and the “Chamber Of Reflection”-ish synth in the background is pretty to listen to, but the inclusion of reggae in the context of a grime beat would have been more true to Skepta’s London roots had he rapped over a jungle or drum and bass instrumental.
IGNORANCE IS BLISS is a total cop out that sees one of the UK’s most prolific musicians apathetically sell out. The good news for grime fans and the bad news for Skepta is that his 24-year-old collaborator Slowthai’s recent debut album picks up exactly where KONNICHIWA left off, concocting a dystopian portrait of contemporary London that harkens to the bleak storytelling of Tom Waits’ 1985 freakshow masterpiece RAIN DOGS. While I went into IGNORANCE IS BLISS with high hopes for another shocking set of gripping and unrefined rap tracks, what I got instead is an album that sounds like it was composed as background music for a party scene in the first season of British SKINS.
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