As the UK gears up for yet another election in less than a week, it seems like as good a time as any to revisit everyone’s favourite word of the past three years – millennial. Okay no, the title gives it away, this is really about Brexit. But seeing as how every possible millisecond of soundbite and headline is analysed to death within an instant in today’s hyper connected world, I wanted to take a step back and look at the impact that Brexit has had on British culture. More specifically, I want to look at two of the best albums of 2019 that are directly shaped by recent politics, and have used the tumult and soul searching sparked by Brexit to create music that is bold, creative, unsettling, insightful, and above all, British.
The two albums in question are Nothing Great About Britain by slowthai, and 2020 by Richard Dawson. Before we delve further, here’s a sample of both to give you an idea of the creative forces at work:
slowthai – Nothing Great About Britain
Richard Dawson – Civil Servant
A cursory listen, even if neither grime nor weird avant folk noise art rock are your genres of choice, reveals one crucial connecting factor between these two artists – Britishness. I was often baffled by talk from right wing politicians and other conservative bodies in the run up to Brexit, of so called “British values.” I was confused as to how these people thought there was some underlying set of tenets that united everyone from Penzance to Perth, Lowestoft to Llandudno. What unifying values tied together the hedge fund manager living in Chelsea to the teenager on a zero hour contract in Bradford? How do the values of a student in Manchester align with those of a vicar in a rural Devon village? Unlike our distant American cousins across the pond, we don’t have a constitution to point to as some beacon of everything the British Isles stand for, and you can see my previous post for a look at the mess that is the British constitution.
We don’t have a “We the people” of our own, nor do we have a unifying national religion, dance, or traditional clothing. The English language has been adopted by majority of the world, the national dish is hotly contested between fish and chips and chicken tikka masala, and even the national treasure that is Olivia Coleman has graduated from Mitchell and Webb to winning an Oscar. In short, British values is a term that holds almost zero meaning, and like St George lancing the soft underbelly of a scaly dragon, this is where the two artists noted here have chosen to strike. This is Britain’s defenceless area, this is where it is exposed, weakened, and where the divisions and contradictions that riddle the country are laid bare. Let’s take a closer look.
Nothing Great About Britain
Let’s look at slowthai first, who has delivered possibly the strongest debut album of any artist I can think of. Over 17 tracks slowthai dissects modern Britain, taking aim at everything from the monarchy, economic disparity, drug use, to drinking culture and being a minority in Britain. One by one he tackles these subjects with wit and insight, and a writer’s eye for detail. The rapper with a saucer dichotomy of “sip a cup of tea while we’re spittin” in the opening moments, the Ken Loach like reality of “spent all my money, you ain’t gettin’ no more wages.” “One-fifty for a ninety-nine cone” will resonate with anyone who has experienced Freddo inflation, and the standout “I will treat you with the utmost respect only if you respect me a little bit, Elizabeth, you c**t” delivers a searing blow to traditional British notions of decorum and the relation between the commoners and aristocracy.
There are too many examples to list here, but more so than the lyrics is the mood slowthai conjures through his beats and delivery. His flow is sometimes frantic, like a man pushed to the point of breaking, and other times soft, like on the track “Northampton’s Child,” in which he heartbreakingly details the struggles of his single mother to raise him while working 12 hour shifts and living in poverty. slowthai paints a picture of a country of divide, a country that still harbours a buried resentment for people of colour, pushes those in poverty into out of the way council estates that become a breeding ground for crime and drug abuse. He highlights in visceral detail the divide between the rich and poor, as he threatens to “bust your nose with a silver spoon,” and falls for a girl described as “Parents minted, Mayfair, couple dogs” over a driving Mura Masa beat. slowthai’s Britain is one that hides its darker underside by projecting the wealth and pageantry of the upper class, as the poor enter a destructive cycle of drug use, violence, crime, and gambling. It’s a front of Made in Chelsea, Aston Martins, and Saville Row suits, when the reality is food banks, underfunded public transport, and Sports Direct trackies.
Yet running through all of these sometimes amusing, sometimes harrowing stories, is that elusive notion of Britishness. Blink and you’ll miss it references to “crumpets in the toaster,” “I love tea, got a cup brewin’,” and “Northampton, yeah man, I’m a cobbler.” The Britishness goes beyond just surface level references, it’s an integral part of slowthai’s upbringing and environment, and despite all of his criticisms he ultimately states “hand on my heart I swear I’m proud to be British.” Nothing Great About Britain is an album of its time, for its time, and I honestly believe it to be vital listening for anyone who either considers themselves British or has concerns similar to mine about what this all means. But where slowthai addresses this with visceral images, childhood memories, and raw emotion, our other artist of choice takes an altogether different approach.
2020
Richard Dawson is a fascinating artist, and one that could not come from a more different place to slowthai. Growing up in Newcastle as opposed to Northampton, and creating music that sounds like a mashup of folk, blues, noise rock, avant garde and post rock. His last album was set from the perspective of a peasant living in the 6th century Northumbrian kingdom of Bernicia, with a soundscape resembling a supergroup made of Fleet Foxes and Swans, and the one previous detailed his experience stabbing his hand with a screwdriver whilst attempting to crack a coconut open on a school trip. However with his latest, 2020, Dawson takes aim at a Britain of suburban malaise, Amazon delivery centres, depressed civil servants, and flooded pubs. In a way it aligns with slowthai’s explorations of the Britain that isn’t shown on Downton Abbey, but Dawson’s strength is in his ability to turn seemingly rambling anecdotes and lyrics about mundane day to day life into moments of humour and pathos.
The album starts with grinding, mechanical sounds and discordant chords in the aptly named “Civil Servant,” whose lyrics read like an Orwellian dystopia. The workers loathe their daily drudgery of work, and the chorus ends with the lines “I don’t have the heart to explain to another poor soul, why it is their Disability Living Allowance will be stopping shortly.” Dawson somehow makes all of this fit to music, his Geordie accent drawing out syllables to mould the words to the chugging rhythm, and the gallows humour contrasts starkly with the severity of austerity Britain and the plight of those trapped in the welfare system. Dawson’s album is full of lyrical moments like this, from “Busfulls of meat slumped in our seats, staring at phone screens and our own feet,” to “There’s a Kurdish family on the ground floor, had a brick put through their kitchen window, the police know who did this, still they do nothing – it’s lonely up here in Middle-England.”
Perhaps the peak of Dawson’s imagery comes in the song “Fulfilment Centre,” describing the day of a worker in a delivery warehouse, where he delivers the painful couplet “My body hurts all over but I must keep on working, to meet all my quotas or I may face the sack.”
I could write pages about Dawson’s lyrics on this album, every song is filled with imagery and short stories that dive to the very heart of the mundanity of middle class suburbia, the inequality and the heartbreaking sadness of the poor, and the appalling treatment of the homeless. Like slowthai, Richard Dawson has crafted an album that speaks to the Britain of today, a land of zero hour contracts and binge drinking, where the people have settled into a comfortable sense of discomfort, having just enough but never anything more. 2020 is an album that is at times uncomfortable to listen to, whether it’s because of the music or the scathing lyrics, but as with Nothing Great About Britain it is vital for anyone who cares, and for that matter worries, about the future of Britain to listen to it. Not just to listen, but to consider the message it sends, the images it constructs, because both of these artists are concerned with delivering messages of reality instead of flights of fancy.
Honourable Mentions
It would be a mistake to make it seem as if these artists are the only ones addressing these vital subjects with music that is both exciting and innovative – here are just a few more artists and tracks that have tackled themes and ideas that are more relevant than ever in the era of Brexit Britain.
Sarathy Korwar – Bol (feat. Zia Ahmed & Aditya Prakash)
I was fortunate enough to see Sarathy Korwar opening for Kamasi Washington in 2016, playing music from his album Day to Day, where he sampled field recordings of the Siddi community of India. With his new album, More Arriving, Korwar turns his gaze to the lives of minorities across the globe, questions of culture and identity, and in this powerful track the perception of South Asians in the UK. It’s a world of curry houses, gap year cliches, and being told to dance to bhangra. The standout line for me has to be “I’m Shiva, I’m Al Qaeda, I am auditioning for the role of ‘Terrorist 1.'”
Kano – SYM
Kano continues to be one of the finest grime artists working today, with another album full of personal stories and a genuine affection for the tough London streets that made him. This track in particular, at the close of his new album Hoodies All Summer, hits hard with his descriptions of the racial abuse still suffered by the black community in the UK, and takes a dig at Britain’s colonial past with the lines “They tell us to go f**kin’ back to our own country, but they won’t even give us back our own countries.”
Riz MC – Englistan
Winding back the clock to 2016, Riz MC dropped this track that delved into a Britain of migrants, monarchs, and mosques. Better known as Riz Ahmed, starring in the criminally underrated Four Lions before going on to make a successful career in Hollywood, Ahmed represents a large group of second generation migrants who were born and raised in Britain yet never treated as British. He has a bar for everyone in this song, but with the possible re-election of BoJo of Etonion V on the cards, “Big up the class born to rule, all in the same class since boarding school” has a particular sting.
I know this has been a long post, but I hope within it you’ve either discovered for the first time, or perhaps rediscovered, artists who are using this fascinating period of history as fuel for some truly exciting music. I’ve long since stopped worrying about every headline, every scandal, every think piece on the future of Britain, and although politically the future might look bleak, artistically we are experiencing some of the best that Britain has ever had to offer.
xoxo, The “internet’s busiest music nerd” Indian.
The Angry Indian 