Jim Legxacy's Triumphant ‘Black British Music’

On Black British Music, Jim Legxacy’s spectacular new record, the London rapper/singer/producer sets twitchy UK garage rhythms next to cherubic acoustic-guitar ballads, piles rave synths atop boom-bap-era hip-hop drum breaks, delivers wistful indie-rock hooks worthy of a teen movie montage or Journeys in-store soundtrack, and, over chirpy vocal samples that Just Blaze might have laid down for Cam’ron in 2002, raps about listening to Mitski while selling drugs as a kid. He’s clearly an omnivorous music fan, and probably has the chops to pull off an entire album in any one of those styles if he chose to settle down. His range is maddeningly impressive, but he uses it for more than just showing off, interweaving genres as if there’s no difference between them rather than playing up his jumps from one to the next.

Legxacy’s restlessness and sense of musical holism may have something to do with one of Black British Music’s overarching themes, laid out plainly in a spoken-word intro called “Context.” Legxacy suffered some heavy losses in the years after his breakout record, 2023’s Homeless Nigga Pop Music: his sister died, his brother struggled with psychosis, his mother had multiple strokes, his surprise musical success and the tenuous stability it offered—the title of that previous release was autobiographical—seemed on the verge of slipping away. In “Context,” he explains that he hopes the new record will reflect the pain of those losses along with the “bullshit of me distracting myself” from it, expressing both the weight of grief and the myriad ways we try in vain to forget it. Accordingly, every uptempo track is streaked with melancholy, and every ballad is charged with the bittersweet feeling that a celebration is happening somewhere down the hall, seeping in occasionally through paper-thin apartment walls. 

The title makes clear that Legxacy is also interested in staking a claim on a Black British musical canon. His sweeping vision includes styles any well-informed listener would rightfully expect (grime, jungle, garage) and others that may be more surprising (the acoustic ballads, the peppy ’00s-style indie rock). But then, what band better exemplifies the skinny jeans era in British indie than Bloc Party? What Brit wrote more beautiful ballads than Labri Siffre? The name feels mostly like a righteous statement of purpose, but also at times like a dryly puckish bit, poking fun at the branding and commodification of Blackness: as when a DJ drop informs us that “This message is brought to you by FastGas,”—a popular whippets brand in the UK—“proud sponsors of Black British Music.” I can’t help but think of the title’s sly humor in the verse of “D.B.A.B.,” when Legxacy slips into a tongue-twisting dancehall cadence and starts riffing on the hook to Snow’s “Informer.” In his hands, everything can be Black British Music—even White Canadian Music. 

Legxacy mixes genres and writes about his own tough backstory so deftly that his two big themes come to seem like one and the same. One representative couplet comes in “Sun,” rapped over a breezy guitar loop. First, a scene of debauchery with someone else’s girl: “She said she rollin’, she don’t give a fuck what her nigga said.” Then, “Back in the day, I hid the drugs in my brother’s bed”: a flashback to a scene from childhood, delivered so nonchalantly that it feels almost involuntary, the sort of abrupt intrusion of complicated memory that can happen even—or especially—when you’re set on tuning it out and just having a good time. “Sun,” among the album’s more straightforward rap songs, is followed by “’06 Wayne Rooney,” the aforementioned indie-rock throwback, with lyrics about the whiplash from street life to industry acclaim and the way Black music so often soundtracks parties for outsiders with no real sense of its stakes: “They play our war cries in their clubs.” Next comes “Issues of Trust,” the record’s most direct account of Legxacy’s grief over his sister. The distraction, the heartbreak; the war cries, the bangers, the ballads: By making the case for the depth and variety of Black British music, he’s also doing the same for the Black British experience. 

Black British Music is filled with voices chattering and testifying at the edges of Legxacy’s own remarkably mutable instrument. Other than a superhero-cameo of a guest verse from Dave on “3x,” it can be difficult to tell what’s a sample, what’s a feature, and what’s Legxacy himself singing through a pitch shifter or some other effect. Even on the tape’s tenderest moments, godlike DJ drops are constantly affirming what record you’re listening to, and by whom. “Somebody tell those bastards to turn that mediocre bullshit off, we’re listening to Jim Legxacy right now, so shut the fuck up,” goes one of them, offsetting the prayerful gospel refrain of “Stick,” the album’s first song, with a bit of deliriously swaggering levity. Those gospel refrains are a regular presence, sometimes dosed pitched up with Ye-style helium and others slurry in the manner of a latter-day Bon Iver sermon. Then there are the snippets of jungle MCs sucked through whirlpools of reverb and delay, lending a note of ghostly elegy for past eras of Black British Music, like faded transmissions from dying pirate radio stations. 

All that sonic flotsam, together with Legxacy’s stylistic code-switching, makes Black British Music feel it’s also an album about the internet, if only in subtext. It’s nearing the point of cliche to point out the way certain young electronic musicians overload their mixes to mirror the experience of being online, ricocheting between genres and plugin presets like clips in a frantic scroll. Legxacy’s evocation of the internet is more subtle and expansive than that, recognizing how thoroughly it now permeates our consciousnesses, in our pockets and prodding at the edges of our attention even when we’re engaged with something else: trying to remember a lost loved one, maybe, or just walking to the corner store. 

In his lyrics, Legxacy is often batting away these intrusions on his peace: “Put my phone on DND,” he raps as part of the hook to the joyous “New David Bowie”; “No, don’t hit my phone, I’d rather be alone” he sings sweetly on “3x,” a deceptively shimmery Afrobeats-inflected banger about ruminating over the loss of his sister while growing paranoid about jealous enemies and hangers-on. (If you’re looking for a fresh infusion of globetrotting croon-rap club anthems about dodging haters and fake friends in the wake of Drake’s post-Kendrick banishment, there are a number of songs on Black British Music that run circles around Aubrey Graham’s recent output.) But in the carefully organized cacophony of Legxacy’s production, he finds delicacy and beauty in the barrage of information itself. My Bluetooth headphones have been on the fritz lately, suddenly desperate to remind me all the time that they’re connected to my device, via a message from an artificially soothing lady robot voice that’s only supposed to show up when I first turn them on and pair them. Mostly, I find this to be an annoying interruption of whatever world it is I’m trying to escape into, far from the constant nagging of push notifications and calendar alerts. When it happens while I’m listening to Black British Music, I don’t mind as much.

Black British Music is presented as a mixtape rather than an album. Despite its big ambitions, that designation feels correct. Its 15 songs all come in at under three minutes; some consist of little more than a hook repeated with slight variations and a single brief verse that ends up feeling more like a bridge. But its fleeting and fragmentary nature come across as intentional, not lazy or aimed cynically at algorithms that privilege shorter tracks. He’s doing something interesting with song form, and he’s got enough charisma to sell his lines even when he’s not saying much. (Coming from anyone else, the hook of “D.B.A.B.”—”If you want to be a bitch, then that’s OK”—could be repellently bitter; from him, it’s weirdly earnest, like he put his foot in his mouth while trying to tell a woman that he respects her agency.) The music, on some level, is about fragmentation: of an artistic diaspora, of a grief-stricken mind. 

The single best song on Black British Music could be “Stick,” the first one, with a goosebump-raising sung chorus that suggests hard-won triumph over crushing adversity and a rapped one with more workaday concerns in mind: “Them niggas bite swagger then they wonder why it never sticks.” After the dazzling 35 minutes that follow, it’s hard to imagine who would have the guts to try.