black (and white) british (rap) music
Last night I eventually listened to Jim Legxacy's "black british music" and surprisingly, I liked it more than I thought. I've been coming across remarks about his music a lot lately but didn't truly lock in until reading the discourse about his song "stick" on Twitter yesterday. Since we're going through the amazing period of 2025s List Week, various publications and music personalities are releasing their top 10,20,50 etc and for someone who left Spotify and algorithms this year and isn't truthfully fulfilled by NetEast Cloud Music's playlisting procedure, it was indeed enjoyable to go over what people who don't put Taylor Swift and Drake on their top artists (aka Rolling Stones and Apple Music) have to say about this year's music.
I was reading about Jim Legxacy's music and in some interviews he mentioned how he's so much inspired by Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean and JPEGMAFIA (I can already hear Noa calling him "hispster") and amazingly enough, he's music is sounding the exact thing you can speculate from mixing all these artists, yet shocks you with how dreamy and distinctive his style is. Correspondingly, I genuinely respect the albums that don't outstay their welcome by putting together a long album that satisfies the intents of the algorithms, and Legxacy's "black british music" is one of the best models of that.
Likewise, another British artist that surprised me this year was EsDeeKid who just teamed up with Timothee Chalamet out of every possible option to do a remix for his banger intro, "4 Raws"; an amusing way to not only end the conspiracy theories about his real identity, but also an incredible marketing for Chalamet's "Marty Supreme". I was never a huge fan of UK Drill and unfortunately, that was the leading wave of Iranian Hip-Hop for a while. There is a literal generation of Iranian rappers who imitate this sound and drip (aka Fourth Generation) and most of them were from the North of Iran which at least climate-wise, is slightly similar to London but apart from that, I don't believe there's that much resemblance. EsDeeKid is another impressive case as nobody could predict that an underground UK rapper with a Scouse accent could dominate the charts in the US. His music isn't even as mainstream or radio-friendly as rappers like Central Cee or Dave to justify this massive rise but I guess even at its worst year, Hip-Hop culture finds a way to surprise.
The enormous commercial and critical success of both Jim Legcaxy and EsDeeKid in a year that US rap managed to push one slop after another, while some of its biggest artists exploiting AI to create (?) their next hit, indicates that while the creativity in US rap, on the mainstream status, is dying, there's an interesting emergence in underground, transnational and less-commercialized flanks of the culture that hopefully will make an even huger transition in 2026.