Jim Legxacy's Triumphant ‘Black British Music’
Switching freely between genres and overflowing with charisma even when his writing is minimal, the London rapper/singer/producer turns in an examination of grief and identity that’s also a delirious good time.
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.
