Who is popular today?

An outlier in UK rap, the north London musician and actor’s patient “10 years in the game”, as she puts it on her winning album, have paid offAs you can hardly have failed to notice, these are high times for UK rap. It’s a genre whose biggest stars regularly reach the top of the charts: Stormzy’s forthcoming third album is among the year’s most hotly anticipated and a recently published list of 2022’s biggest-selling singles so far features entries for Dave, Aitch and D-Block Europe. It’s all a long way from the days when the Mercury – always keen to nominate, and occasionally hand its award to, worthy British MCs – looked like it was doggedly supporting an area of music the general public had little interest in.Little Simz has a high media profile – she’s critically acclaimed, has earned the praise of Kendrick Lamar and the patronage of Lauryn Hill, and has already won an Ivor Novello award for her 2019 album Grey Area – but commercially, at least, she seems to exist at one remove from the UK rap gold rush. Continue reading...