SBK

SBK 

I’m a local music artist who produces and writes all my own work. My music is a range of genres and I spit my own lyrics. I think I'm quite independent. I've worked with JME, Boy Better Know, Skepta and Wiley. Wiley is my idol. But in this right now, I'm just trying to do it by myself. 

Really was it was grime music to begin with. Grime music really resonated with me because it embodied a lot of the anger and confusion that I was going through when I was a teen. Like I was just really angry and wanting to prove myself.  

I think grime first of all is separate to drill music, which a lot of people will put that all in the same thing. Grime is like older as it was big in like the 2000s. But drill was like the more modern version of that, but we're basically saying the same thing. Drill is a bit more intense and violent. But grime itself is like, grime is like being from a council estate. This comes from black kids being in school and going to the playground and who's got the best bars, and they got the beat on her little Nokia phone with the Bluetooth and that and they're sharing beats. And then that's where grime comes from it's basically just takes, it's like, it's something from nothing. It expresses the complex worlds of growing up on edge in communities that have been left with nothing. It's how hip hop originated in New York in the 70s and 80’s. People just bought out their record players and speaker boxes and they just made it up, you know, put it together. And then you have like a million-billion-dollar industry now out there. 

I don't necessarily think Grime as a specific genre has become mainstream itself as a genre, but there's been Grime songs that have gone mainstream from artists like Skepta and Stormzy. It’s as mainstream as you can get. But the genre itself, I don't think it's even meant to be mainstream. 

I was coming to London. Even when I was underage, I was going to shows in Hackney and raves and get his snuck into venues. But when I was 14, I was going to raves in that in Hoxton to perform with grime artists when I was about 14 years old. I'm only 20 years old, but I've been doing it for a very long time. I've been coming to London for a very long time. When I hit seventeen, I was just like, I need to be here. So I just made that move.

I was grateful to move to Hackney as I came from an area where I was one of the only black kids in my school. When I walk down the road I can see other people that look like me. I feel like I belong here. It’s my home. I'm conscious. And I feel like that's, again, that's why I feel so comfortable. Because that's my roots. And I feel like when it's like that feeling that only black people can have. when I walk around the street, and I see like another black person, we just give each other a nod or the way that we look at each other, because we just both know that we're like, yeah, we're like part of something, you know? And that is like, this is like us. It's like life affirming. Because you're recognising something, I suppose an injustice, you know, that you both know, you're aware of even on the street, right?

I grew up in a working-class community in Stevenage with my single mum and brothers and sisters. I know and I got close to my Jamaican dad, but it’s been a difficult relationship. I grew up quite poor I had few opportunities and that's why I moved here. Yeah. It was the best decision I ever made to be honest. Because if not, I would have just ended up being a bricklayer or something like that for the rest of my life, and then just repeating the cycle. And that's it. That's one thing that I will say about Stevenage in towns like that, as well as like, it's a poverty and class cycle. Generational cycles of low education and little to do. Not being able to go on the school trips, and not being able to afford clothes, stealing food from the school canteen, I just felt like an outsider and alone, my entire life

I use my music because I want to reach out to other people who experience this type of exclusion, because they don’t want to be just another working-class kid in a low paid mediocre job. It’s horrible and we all know it is. So why don’t we talk about it. It’s not normal and it affects generation after generation. I try to talk about the trauma and emotional pain I have been through as I think these are universal experiences. 

I get comments about the tattoos on my face which say ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ and ‘Nature’. I suffer from anxiety and I have read advice around this which suggests that when you feel really low or down just remember that it doesn’t last forever. It will pass and you will rise.