Label-less
ENGLISH MC AJ TRACEY DISCUSSES HIS NEW EP AND FENDING OFF ATTEMPTS TO LABEL HIM
AJ Tracey’s Secure The Bag! EP is a project. It’s not an album — at eight tracks and 26 minutes, it’s too short. It’s too carefully curated to be a mixtape. What it is, unquestionably, is a tantalising glimpse of what Tracey is capable of.
Listening to Secure The Bag! is like watching a car chase in a movie; those moments of adrenaline as it swerves a way you weren’t expecting, driving at breakneck speed with plenty of heat behind it.
Tipped by The Independent as ‘one to watch’ back in December 2016, his upward trajectory has been just as fast, seeing the 23-yearold switch up his flow without fuss on a recent episode of Fire In The Booth, rack up millions of views on Youtube and debut his new EP in the top 20 UK album charts.
Sipping a bottle of Coke, the artist born
Ché Wolton Grant is talking a million miles per minute outside a pub in Kensington. “It’s a moment, you know?” he says at the idea of Secure The Bag! making the top 20. “Exciting, and a little bit scary. Independent, no label pushing, no backing... So it’d open doors for other people, that’s what matters to me. And the only reason it’s possible for me, to be honest, is because of Stormzy.”
One of the most impressive things
about Secure The
Bag! is how diverse the influences are. There are his classic game samples — Pokémon on Alakazam ft Jme and Denzel Curry being the most notable — perhaps a little more subtle than on previous tracks such as Thiago Silver with south London MC Dave, where they feature more heavily as a constant synth tune.
But there are also moments that throw you for a loop, like on Shisha, where the tripping beat beneath a female vocal recalls Kerala off his latest record Migration.
When he was starting out, Tracey had to put up with some hostility from some of the old guard of the grime scene; some believing that he’s broken too many rules. Now, he says they hide that hostility, but it’s still there. “People were telling me I shouldn’t care so much, and it is true, but when you’re coming up and people completely disregard your existence it feels a bit cr*ppy,” he says.
He’s highly selective about who he features on a track. There are only four credited features on Secure The Bag! — Jme, 67, Denzel Curry and Craig David. The latter, who appears on the closing track You Don’t Know Me, was a fan of his work and reached out through his management. They ended up recording around nine songs together — one track went on Tracey’s EP, another went on David’s upcoming album The Time Is Now.
Jme, co-founder of grime collective Boy Better Know, reached out to him early on in his career. “He’s one of the few gatekeepers who supports,” Tracey says. “He doesn’t need to, he’s established and cool with his life, but he does. He’s local but he’s busy, but when he’s around he’s up for chilling. When I asked him if he wanted to put a verse on Secure The Bag! he was like
‘bro I started writing it already.’”
Almost as fast as his rise to widespread recognition was the rush by the media to label him as a “new grime star.”
Yet Tracey, like several of his contemporaries, is reluctant to be pinned beneath one genre. His music draws on much more than that, and it’s understandable that he’d also want to distance himself from a scene where some of its more established stars have been less than friendly.
“It’s weird with grime in general,” he says.
“Me, I’ve broken bare rules and that’s why some people don’t like me. Because I can go on a radio show and spit grime, 100 per cent grime, in a tracksuit... then on the flipside I’ll be in LA in a sports car with loads of girls. So they’re like ‘ah he’s not traditional.’ But music changes. I try my hardest to show people that I’m versatile.
“I said to J Hus, it’s annoying that the media always say we’re grime, all they care about is labelling us. It sounds like I’m playing the race card but it does feel a bit racist to label everything in the UK and black as grime. With me, I was actually a grime MC, I do dabble, so it’s fair enough — I’m not that offended if you call me that. J Hus is not anything to do with grime, Loyle Carner… even Rejjie Snow gets called that. Giggs gets called grime. He is a rapper. Out and out.
“I don’t think a lot of them pay attention,” he continues. “They care more about the heat on something than what’s actually happening.
Just the fact that I’m British, people should be celebrating — me, Giggs, Dave, whoever’s dropping music and doing really well — and celebrating that, because it makes our country look better. That’s the realest.”