“Yo, it’s the hyperman set, AJ Tracey, live and direct!” Roll down a car window or scroll the radio dial over the past few months and Ladbroke Grove, the no-frills garage tune by the west London rapper, will have no doubt been making the speakers shake. Tracey’s track, with its pitched-up sample from soul singer Jorja Smith, cut through all the season’s Latin-flavoured pop, functional house and endless Ed Sheeran singles and still sits, unbudged, in the charts, a feelgood summer hit that refuses to accept that autumn is here.
Tracey, whose real name is Ché (after Guevara) Wolton Grant, though he usually goes by his stage name, has been having a breakthrough year. In February, he self-released his debut album, which has since become the second-biggest album of 2019 by an independent musician; to cap it off, he’s playing two sold-out nights at the 10,000-capacity venue Alexandra Palace next month.
Unlike many of his peers, who are at the beck and call of a major label, Tracey is used to calling the shots. “I can do whatever the hell I want,” he tells me. It’s a lot of pressure, doing shows that big, but he doesn’t get nervous, he says – or at least you can’t tell. “I’m the least animated person I know,” he quips during our photoshoot. “Even on stage”, he says: “I just walk across it.”
That isn’t entirely true. Tracey is celebrated for the rapid-fire displays of his vocals and his versatility, flipping between the various styles that are defining UK music right now: grime, trap, drill, anything lightly syncopated – no genre has gone unturned. Until 2019, however, the 25-year-old watched as his peers raced ahead. He’d been grafting for years on the underground, working largely within grime music, releasing a string of well-received EPs, featuring on songs by American rappers such as A$AP Rocky and collaborating with his mate Dave, on the 2016 track Thiago Silva.
Meanwhile Stormzy, who started releasing music after Tracey did, has become a national treasure, with the kind of cultural weight that led Time magazine to put him on its October cover . Dave won this year’s Mercury music prize for his debut album Psychodrama, and stars in the new series of Top Boy, alongside rising London rapper Little Simz and grime veteran Kano.
Because of illness, Tracey also missed out at this year’s Glastonbury. During Stormzy’s Saturday headline gig, Tracey’s was the first name to be mentioned in the rapper’s celebratory roll-call of British MCs. But the next day, when Dave performed Thiago Silva, he plucked bucket-hatted teenager Alex Mann from the crowd to rap Tracey’s part, which promptly went viral. The Mann video drew some criticism for pushing the focus on to a young white guy instead of a black artist, but it also underlined how grime had gone from gritty underground subculture to the unequivocal sound of the suburbs. And it cemented Thiago Silva as one of the most memorable duets of the decade. “You know what, I’ll say it, yeah, I think it’s the greatest grime song ever,” says Tracey.
On the one hand, Tracey fires off boasts like a bazooka. His album cover, which pictured him dejectedly cradling a goat, may have seemed like an oddball choice, except “GOAT” is an internet acronym for Greatest of All Time. I’ve read about journalists having to interview him at home while he plays video games, but he says now that he has trouble concentrating – he’s fun to be around and a little mischievous (he says one minute that he doesn’t judge anyone and then calls an anonymous rapper “trash”). He is tall and smells expensive (it’s Dior Eau Sauvage), dressed in designer tracksuit bottoms, his afro tucked scruffily under a baseball cap, a style he calls a “little weird”.
Behind the bravado, though, Tracey hints at having struggled to find his moment. “People would never have expected Ladbroke Grove to be in the top five for 10 weeks,” he says. “That’s, like, power numbers! I feel like the type of music I’m making and who I am, people expect me to do well, but not be in the main spotlight. And now that I am, they’re like, ‘Oh! What’s going on?’”
What’s going on is that since grime – the urgent, inner-city rap/electronic hybrid that evolved out of UK garage in the early 00s – bounced back in 2014, the landscape of British pop has shifted dramatically.
Look over the top 40 songs of the summer and it encompasses a variety of MC-led sounds that grime paved the way for but which, except perhaps for some similar slang, are wildly different. There’s the seductive syncopation of UK Afrobeats, which amalgamates dancehall, African pop melodies and R&B, or the adjacent sound, Afro-swing, spearheaded by Mercury-nominated rapper J-Hus. The harder-edged road rap, meanwhile, emerged when grime fell out of favour, and a more recent development is drill, a nihilistic offshoot of trap that began in Chicago and transferred to London estates.
Stormzy told Time magazine that the reason he did the Glasto roll-call was because of a “historical thing of letting [only] one black person in at a time” to the mainstream – now there are countless MCs commanding attention. Grime, for example, was called “one of our most successful musical exports” in a 2019 report from a UK parliamentary committee, which would have been unheard of in the days of its early stars, Wiley and Dizzee Rascal. Also unheard of would have been Tracey’s forthcoming Ally Pally appearance or Kano’s recent, triumphant homecoming at the Royal Albert Hall.
“This is the first time we’ve seen MC-led music and culture have such a lasting impact on mainstream music,” says Safiya Lambie-Knight, who works in artist and label marketing, Urban UK at Spotify. “I don’t think we’ve seen a time like it before.” She says that as “more doors have been opened” via the success of artists such as Stormzy and Skepta, who both released their albums independently, it’s allowed other artists to “carve their own names in this world, without necessarily having to be a grime artist”.
Tracey is different in that he has scooped up these many-tentacled styles in his musically omnivorous net. His album spans soca, drill, UK rap, various cap-tips to American trap and sad-rap and even a strum-tastic song called Country Star. (Tracey says he had originally tried to get Billy Ray Cyrus to appear on it, which maybe gave the US crooner the idea to join Lil Nas X’s super-smash Old Town Road.) With Ladbroke Grove, too, Tracey was keen to do something with undeniable crossover appeal. Bigging up one’s “ends” has always been a cornerstone of grime’s lyrical content, but here was AJ putting it on a clubby beat with a video shot with some camels in Marrakech. “I wanted to make it for the mums, the nans, the dads, their kids. I wanted it to be a song for everyone.”
For some, this move away from his roots was confusing, especially as he told Esquire earlier this year: “Just don’t call me a grime rapper.” But even his earlier tracks such as Spirit Bomb and Buster Cannon, he says, used trap beats. “I never felt like I was in the grime scene,” he shrugs. “I was the outsider. So when I veered away from it, I didn’t feel like I was leaving the circle – I felt like I was never in it.” He says that many of the grime originators who were around during the genre’s inception weren’t interested in giving him a leg up. “No one paid me any attention,” he says. “I had to do everything on my own.”
Stormzy, however, has been a key mentor: “He’s given me so much good advice. He comes and collects me, we drive around, and he says, ‘Listen, the more popular you get, the more people gonna hate on you for reasons that are non-existent.’ He told me, ‘Bro, ignore them, they don’t mean anything.’ When you’re sitting there thinking, ‘Why did these guys hate me? Why did they think my new song’s shit?’, it doesn’t matter.”
Tracey puts his eclecticism down to his Welsh single mother, whom he holds in the highest regard. A former pirate radio DJ, she used to play him dancehall, rap, garage, jungle and house, he says, in their home on the Sutton estate in North Kensington. He honed his speedy rapping skills over his mother’s drum’n’bass records, which are far faster than your average rap or grime tune. “It’s like when footballers run underwater in water tanks,” he explains. “There’s a high pressure against your body. If you can run fast in a water tank, when they take you out of the water, you can run way faster because there’s less pressure. I used to go on to radio sets and be spraying so fast, people would be like, ‘How are you doing that?’”
His Trinidadian father, meanwhile, who moved out when Tracey was six, had been in a UK hip-hop group in the 90s, which Tracey has always refused to identify. He taught his son how to write lyrics but also about “the dilemmas of being black, which my mum can’t teach me,” says Tracey. “Some things you never really fully understand unless you are actually black and you experience how it feels when someone treats you differently based on your skin colour.” But he encountered prejudice of another kind too. The estate he lived on was largely white and as a mixed-race kid, he says, “I feel like I was more accepted by the white community than the black [one]. A lot of the time, the black kids would be like, ‘Oh, ’cause you lighter, you’re not as “gang” as us. That’s really the attitude they have. It made me misbehave more because I felt like I had to prove a point.”
He sold drugs for a while, nothing heavy. “Everyone did that,” he says. “That’s bog-standard. White kids from good homes sell drugs. I just did what I had to do because we didn’t have enough money. I stopped as soon as I had enough to survive.” His mum “didn’t even know” about his extracurricular exploits “until she heard my lyrics”. He was a smart kid, and briefly studied criminology at London Metropolitan University before dropping out to focus on music.
When he first started rapping, Tracey says many of his lyrics reflected his frustration at his social situation. “I was very angry: angry at society, angry at life, angry at everything,” he says. “Being a black youth in London is very hard and it’s not fair. Why is it that I have to pay this much for school uniform when my mum can’t afford it? Why is it that the government doesn’t help? Why is my rent so high? That’s how I was feeling, so all my music sounded very aggressive, violent, angry, all these negative things.”
“The government should be putting things in place to help young people of colour,” he says, “like youth clubs.” He is passionate on this subject; his mother, a youth worker, ran the club on his estate but spaces like those are in steep decline. Between 2012 and 2016, 600 youth clubs shut down across the country, and a parliamentary committee in May this year found that more than 100 councils had slashed their budget for youth services by 91%. Such budget cuts, they said, could be linked to the rise in knife crime, which is up 93% in five years.
“There’s definitely a connection,” says Tracey. He explains that his mum was “always cool with my friends chilling in my house – she knows it’s much better for us to be in the house smoking weed [because] it’s safe rather than being on the street, [with] police stopping us, harassing us [or] maybe we get into some sort of gang altercation”. But he says that “a lot of people don’t have that” and so youth clubs provide a “safe haven for kids to hang out in”.
“To solve the knife problem,” he continues, “you need to uplift the youth – guide them and help them. Give them a purpose. Taking away the youth clubs and places for them to hang out means, obviously, they’re going to be on [the] road now [where] there’s friction, there’s problems, there’s postcode gangs, there’s drugs.” Shutting down those safe havens, he continues, is “obviously encouraging this beef” and “making it worse – but the government is never going to listen to that”.
While Tracey often addresses such complex subjects in conversation he has mostly swerved them in song, unlike many of his contemporaries. Dave’s song Question Time, which confronted the Tories about their litany of incompetence, won an Ivor Novello award in 2018, while Tracey’s cousin, the rapper Big Zuu, released a Grenfell tribute.
The Grenfell tragedy in particular hit Tracey hard. “My friend and his whole family died in that fire,” he says, “so that’s very close to my heart. We can see Grenfell from my mum’s front room window.” He says he doesn’t feel the need to refer to it in his music. “Whatever I need to do to help in that situation I will do, but I don’t need to promote it,” he says. “It doesn’t need to be a PR stunt. That’s not a shot at anyone, but I deal with it in my own way.”
Instead, Tracey’s music majors in braggadocio and smutty bombast, with zingers such as “I’m young, rich and hung” (Wifey Riddim 3) and tales about, well, chasing tail. “I’m proud of myself, man,” he says. “People used to always tell me to stop gloating but I have the right to gloat, I deserve to talk about my achievements. They could call me boastful. I am boastful.” Any songs detailing his sexual encounters with women, he continues, are just him speaking his “truth”.
“If a woman [has] shared her body with me, why can I not speak of my experience?” he says, a little defensively. “It’s not me casting a judgment on someone, it’s something that has happened. You can rap about whatever the hell you wanna rap about – that’s why we’re rappers. You can have an opinion against it but you can’t tell me not to do it. At the end of the day, that’s the way it is.”
Genres such as drill are increasingly popular but they are still demonised in the media and Tracey says that he wanted to present an image of young black youth that was more carefree and fun. “I’m trying to be that source of release,” he says. “My music, it’s escapism.” He says he used to be very angry (“at life, at society, at… just everything”) but doesn’t feel that any more, not least because he’s upgraded to a nice apartment in Chelsea “with glass all around it – there’s flowers in my house, I read cook books. I’ve got a painting of Fidel Castro on my wall and I play Fortnite every day. So I’m not going to be rapping about that [his old life] ’cause it’s not what I live.”
He is, however, pragmatic about being a role model. “I don’t think it’s my job to be telling people how to conduct their lives: ‘Youth, you should put your knives down’; ‘Youth, you should do this, do that’’… I understand the complexities of all the struggles the youth go through and I don’t have the right to tell them, ‘Don’t roll with a weapon’, because [then] they might not roll with a weapon, and they might meet someone who doesn’t like them, and they might lose their life because they didn’t have a weapon on them. It’s not as straightforward as people think it is.” Instead, he’d rather lead by example. “I have loads of kids who copy what I do. So if I do stupid things and they go and do it, I’m letting them down.”
The next album he makes will be more “conscious”, he continues, although he adds that he doesn’t actually enjoy talking about politics, as “everything that’s said can be twisted”. In June 2017, when the last general election was reaching peak mayhem, there was a grime pile-on of support for Jeremy Corbyn on Twitter (#grime4corbyn). It helped to create a “youthquake”, encouraging the largest number of young voters in the country since 1992. Tracey went one step further and appeared in an official UK Labour video, filmed in Ladbroke Grove, saying that the party could “give young people hope”. At the beginning of the clip, there’s a glimpse of Grenfell, which went up in flames the following year.
What motivated him, at the time, to do the video for Team Corbyn? “I dunno, man,” he says. “I felt like he was the best of a bad bunch.” He thought that voting for Labour was “the only way” to shift the government “over to the fair side a bit”. The #grime4corbyn campaign he says was “very cheesy”, but even though it helped to mobilise a generation, he is disappointed about its outcome. “It actually helped him a lot and I feel like he didn’t capitalise on it,” says Tracey of the Labour leader. “He didn’t utilise what he had.”
The video has left a faintly bitter taste but, if it came to it, with a quick election looking ever more likely, Tracey would do it again. “Not for Labour, though,” he says. “If I’m voting for anyone now it’s the Green party. Corbyn is a great guy and his morals are in the right place but I don’t think he’s strong enough to be our leader.” And the less said about Boris, the better. “He’s just an idiot, innit,” says Tracey. “He’s trying to be the big man, but he’s a very small man.”
Could British MCs get together and galvanise young people again in that way? “Stormzy could make everyone mobilise,” says Tracey. “He’s the guy that could do it. If Stormzy ran for prime minister, he’d stand a chance of winning, I swear to God.”
And if he was in charge himself? The first thing he’d do is “tackle climate change, hard”, he says. “I’d put a massive tax on cars that aren’t eco-friendly and I’d do some kind of initiative where you can come and get your car scrapped and maybe get free travel in exchange.”
For now, at least, the latter might be achievable. Tracey says he isn’t so bothered about courting the US music industry – his focus is on his home turf. “I haven’t conquered the UK yet,” he says. “When I have, then we’ll talk about America.”
In the meantime, there are those two massive sell-out gigs to contend with, which led him to jokingly tweet recently: “Can I come to someone’s house for dinner tonight, I spent all my money on Ally Pally production?”
These are the little-shown downsides of being a modern-day independent artist, but Tracey remains philosophical. “I’m going minus [figures] for these shows,” he says.
“I’ve got to invest in myself, you know what I’m saying?”
With thanks to Keystone Crescent members bar, King’s Cross. AJ Tracey plays Alexandra Palace, London N22 on 8 and 9 November. A deluxe version of his album, AJ Tracey, featuring five new tracks, is out now.
