The London native rapping truths about this ever-changing city.
When I ask Jelani Blackman how he’d describe his sound to an alien, he says it’s “dark and dancey.” In truth, he’s underselling himself. Since first arriving on the scene with “Twenty//Three” back in 2014, the West London rapper has been crafting his name as a versatile and imaginative musician who can sound as dark as Blue Daisy and as soulful as Frank Ocean. He’s even put out a jungle-inspired mixtape (see: Jelanji), while still finding a place in his artistic vision to feature on a track with ambient overlord Brian Eno.
“I think I became an artist without making the decision to,” says Blackman, when I ask him how it all began. “I’ve always made music – played sax since I was 9 years old and started rapping young too. I just never stopped making it, until at one point it became something I could take seriously as a profession.”
Blackman grew up in Ladbroke Grove in West London, and was on the frontline of London’s gentrification overhaul throughout his teenage years. “It’s been mad seeing my area change so much from what I grew up in. Gentrification is such a buzzword now, but back then no one was really talking about it. London is chaos, but I still couldn’t live without it. It takes so much out of you to grow up here, and make it through. So many of my friends have been beaten down and lost out from having to grow up in a place with so much competition and the massive divide between rich and poor.”
The first thing that strikes you about Blackman is his voice, which is as deep as a Siberian diamond mine. After that, it’s his lyrics. “I write a lot about late nights,” he explains, “and a lot about love. I stopped doing that for a while and got deep into writing about myself, but now I’m back to thinking about girls.”
"She don't want my love but she do want my money / Well, I do have enough but you can't have any,” he raps on “Not You”, the opening song from his new EP, titled 5-8, “It's a cold, cold night every night in my city / The broke die young and the rich die pretty”. That line is indicative of the claustrophobic and confessional, yet soothing, atmosphere of his new material. It’s an EP that explores vulnerability and emotion, through the prism of London as both a utopia and dystopia. In essence, it’s Blackman rapping about what he knows best.
