Rapping ismylife..I couldn’t giveitup

Veteran MC Brian Jamieson leads from front as Scots hip hip grows in stature.. and his own career gets some long overdue recognition

HE WAS one of the founders of Scottish rap.

For nearly three decades, Brian Jamieson has been MCing and releasing some of the genre’s seminal albums.

At the start, the rest of the UK refused to take Scots rapping in their native tongue seriously.

And now that it is making its mark with acts like Young Fathers and La Fontaines, it’s time for the older crew to be given their dues.

Last Friday, BeeJay showed he was still game – entering and winning a freestyle rap battle against young gun MCs and is ready to get the recognition he deserves.

He said: “I was over the moon to get the win as I felt I got a lot of respect from my peers that I felt had been missing for years.

“The private messages I got from MCs was mind blowing. They they were genuinely happy I won as I showed a 42-year-old could still compete with the young guys.”

Looking back at the battle at Paisley’s Bungalow, BeeJay said: “I got my age thrown at me but I responded by saying things like, ‘Admit it you just got slaughtered by a pensioner.’”

It looks like this old rapper is still game.

BeeJay, who grew up in Glasgow’s Castlemilk, is one of the few rappers who has described scheme-living with humour and nuance.

In the 28 years he’s been rapping, he’s opened shows for hip hop legends Grandmaster Flash, Sugarhill Gang and 50 Cent.

But peer indifference and commercial apathy left him deflated.

He hadn’t competed in a rap battle since 2005, when he beat Professor Green. But BeeJay reckons a video of the encounter was edited to make the English rapper look good and the Scot steered away from doing them until last week.

He said: “I walked into it thinking I had to treat it like Anthony Joshua treats a fight.

“I was freestyling on average about three hours a day for two months as well as hitting more open mics than I ever had.

“I even lost about a stone so I couldn’t be called ‘Fatboy’ by a competitor.

“It’s a brutal environment where you have to be severely thick skinned and its weird throwing ridiculously callous insults at people you actually like.”

BeeJay is in a different mindset than he has been for the last couple of years.

After releasing his album Cover in 2017, which he thought was a masterpiece, he stepped back to consider whether he’d continue.

He said: “I was a bit scunnered. I thought it was going to change the face of Scottish music and cinema, as I wrote it as a film with the different guests on the album