The best albums of 2020, No 8: J Hus – Big Conspiracy
With his 2017 debut album, Common Sense, east London artist J Hus made a visceral impact. Nominated for the Mercury prize as well as pretty much every other UK music award going, it was an exquisite record that pulled together sounds from across the Black diaspora, melding bashment and Afrobeats alongside UK rap to represent a new generation of Black Britishness. As Aniefiok Ekpoudom wrote in an excellent essay last year: “Common Sense carves out a home in a country that can feel foreign, a reminder that though we are a generation stranded between heritage and birthplace, we have music that is distinctly our own, melodies that explain our existence, and albums that pay homage to the music we were raised on as well as the new sounds that found us in Britain.”
Beyond the significance of J Hus as the innovator of Afroswing, his music had another, more visceral impact: any given party, car journey, barbecue, park hang or night out (or night in) could be improved by pressing play. J Hus and his main producer Jae5 had an innate understanding of how to craft songs to get bodies moving and sweating.
It was quite a legacy to live up to. But when Big Conspiracy landed in January, not only did it match the general greatness of Common Sense, it pushed forward into new, more introspective territory. It would become oddly fitting for the year ahead, where carnival was swapped for dancing alone. The album followed an eight-month stint in prison for knife possession, and in interviews J Hus spoke about reconciling his sudden rise to fame while still holding on to elements of his past life. As he told Crack: “When I was in jail, people would look
at me like I’m crazy, asking, ‘How have you had this opportunity and ended up in here?’”
This plaintive side isn’t the whole story of Big Conspiracy: though the title track’s shuffling percussion is more downbeat than usual, the lithe buoyancy of Hus’s vocals remains throughout, accompanied at times by the velvety sweet intonations of featured artists Koffee, Burna Boy and newcomer iceè tgm (rumoured to be his sister). Flourishes of sax, piano, guitar and strings add richness, while warm steel pans echo through the mix, like a glowing prediction of what summer should have been. His swaggering libido is also apparent – you can hear his grin on the icy slickness of Cucumber as he implores: “Say ah J Hus make your pumpum sore / Come shake your bunda pon the dancing floor”, or on the delicious sunshine bounce of Play Play where he and Burna Boy speak almost entirely through the lens of cheeky innuendo.
But dig a little deeper, and you hear a young man navigating self-doubt in a world made to exclude him. “How you gonna run the world when you can’t even run your life?” he seemingly asks himself on Fight for Your Right. Helicopter unpacks the systemic racism of the carceral state, as inherited from slavery. On emotive closer Deeper Than Rap, he reflects on self-love, beauty standards and colonialism: “No blacks, no dogs, we were segregated / They took our history then they went and erased it.”
As elements of the mainstream finally started paying due attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, there was a renewed urgency to discussions pertaining to police brutality and anti-racism as well as how colonialism is taught in schools. The exquisite Big Conspiracy now reflects this moment, mapping out J Hus’s personal journey within the wider context of being young, Black and British – and yearning for the embrace of a humid dancefloor, one where every step forges new sonic space.