Can a London rapper unify Britain's warring hip-hop and grime tribes with songs about the NHS and his mum? Angus Batey meets Klashnekoff Klashnekoff's debut album, Joe Buddha Presents Klashnekoff: Lionheart - Tussle With the Beast, has been the subject of much speculation on the UK hip-hop scene. The rapper teamed up with his Nottingham-based production partner, Joe Buddha (Richard Douglas), almost two years ago.
There is plenty riding on the album: not only will it confirm or deny the potential of two of British rap's most praised talents, it provides a rare opportunity to unite UK hip-hop's fractured audience. Kandler's and Douglas's futures are at stake - but so is that of their genre. After years of splintering factions and mutual recrimination, Britain's rap scene has settled into an uneasy stasis.
On the one side are those who purvey and support a British take on straight-ahead hip-hop, where rhymesmiths spin lyrics over sampled beats. On the other there are the grime crews, younger rappers and fans who feel traditional hip-hop has lost its edge, and favour a faster, dirtier, more confrontational style. To everyone else, most notably hip-hop-derived artists such as the Streets, Just Jack and their successfully hybridised ilk, such debates must seem inconsequential.
But if the UK hip-hop and grime audiences were to find one artist to unite behind, they could catapult both genres to new prominence. Sway, the Mobo award-winner, has come closest so far, but Klashnekoff seems much nearer to pulling off the trick. The East Londoner will be a new name to many, but within the worlds of hip-hop and grime he is a veteran with a compilation of early tracks, a mix tape and an album with his group, Terra Firma, to his name prior to Lionheart.
His first single, in 2001, made him an underground star. Arriving just as the BBC launched its urban music digital radio station, 1Xtra, his timing was perfect. His blend of atmospheric hip-hop production and reggae-tinged, reality-flavoured raps, in which he talked in site-specific dialect about life and death on the estates of Hackney, pre-empted and helped inspire the new generation of grime emcees.
Crucially for his potential as a genre unifier, he appeared on both the Word Lab (UK hip-hop) and Run the Road (grime) compilations, each an important signifier of their genre's health. "The grime guys got the mentality from the American hustlers," he says. "I respect the grime guys because they're really hungry for it, and that's what's lacking from the UK game.
People are tryin' to keep it in their little clubs. They don't want other people hearing it. That's why I like the grime kids, the positive ones, the ones who's really hustlin' and makin' good music - because they are movin'.
" Lionheart sounds like a record capable of uniting the tribes. The production weaves dub reggae, Ibiza piano, steel band samples and speeded-up soul into the musical backdrop, while Klashnekoff's lyrics mix revolutionary rhetoric with garrulous bravado and wordy vulnerability. It has already been hailed, by Hip-Hop Connection magazine, as worthy of comparison to such benchmarks as De La Soul's 3 Feet High Rising and Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
Whether it will break out of the UK hip-hop ghetto to find widespread acclaim is another matter - and one that will be settled, in part, by its media reception. Klashnekoff lists Paul Weller, Supergrass, the Smiths and Soundgarden among his favourite listening, but bemoans the double standards that mean the gritty slice-of-life rhymes he deals in are often denied radio and press time. Another debate about rap's influence on gun crime is rumbling on, and an album by someone named after a rifle and which contains tracks called Terrorise the City and Two Guns Blazing is unlikely to be cut much slack.
Yet the lyrics, while provocative, are never irresponsible. In The Revolution (Will Not Be Televised on Channel U) he talks about the need to "wake up the minds" dulled by the monotonous negativity of much urban music. Bit By Bit asks how the health service can work when "we pay the footballers more than the nurses".
And in Rest of Our Lives he writes movingly of his complex relationship with his mother, and the reasons for his introspection and insularity. All he is asking is that his music is given a chance to find an audience, especially when some of his peers have been afforded that opportunity despite over-the-top material and public profiles. "Why does this system promote people like Plan B, Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty?
" he asks. "Plan B was on the cover of RWD magazine stabbin' himself with a pencil and blood comin' out of his face. Amy Winehouse talks about how her dad wanted to send her to rehab but she said, 'No, no, no'.
Pete Doherty gets mad press for fuckin' smokin' heroin and bustin' cases. But when I rap about shit that's real to me, mo'fuckers say I'm a thugged-out rapper or I'm tryin' to be aggy [aggressive]. I'm tellin' real-life stories!
"I know all those people are real, and I'm a fan of all of them," he says. "Well, not Pete Doherty. But it seems like it's cool to be provocative in one sense, yet the industry is dictatin' to people what the truth should be like.
I think people want to see real shit and hear real-life stories, because that's what motivates people to say, 'I need to do something to better myself.' That's what living's supposed to be about, man. It really is.
" Joe Buddha Presents Klashnekoff: Lionheart - Tussle with the Beast is released by Riddim Killa on March 5.
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