It starts with the name. Novelist, a 21-year-old MC from the south London borough of Lewisham, didn’t go with a particularly gritty byline when he started rhyming in his early teens. He chose Novelist, perhaps because novelists use words to a purpose; they are the masters of their own narratives.
It follows, then, that Novelist (Kojo Kankam on his passport) is one of grime’s brightest young hopes, one of a clutch of artists in his early 20s releasing key grime projects this year, and yet – simultaneously – a real maverick.
There is something of a class of 2018 shaping up, where fellow travellers such as AJ Tracey, Dave and Abra Cadabra (not to mention Stefflon Don) are expected to release official full-length debut projects into a wider listenership ready to receive them, but already Novelist is an artist apart. He is not “the next Stormzy” but very much his own man, lyrically and sonically: Novelist Guy is entirely self-written, self-produced and released on his own label with no guests.
The path has been long and increasingly idiosyncratic. Last year Novelist (known foremost as an MC) released Be Blessed, an EP of instrumentals with religious-themed titles; a couple of years previously, he collaborated with electronic artist Mumdance on a few tracks for XL (a good home to grime over the years) but declined to sign with anyone, and set up his own label, MMM Yeh.
The young Novelist came up aggressive, with a high-speed, take-no-prisoners flow that recalls much older iterations of the genre such as Dizzee Rascal, allied to a bounce that makes the vast majority of Novelist freestyles into instant dance music.
Here, tracks such as Man Better Jump are a command rather than a request – taut, relentless, old-school rhythms matched by Novelist’s flow. He is the product of a certain postcode – SE4 – and his music vividly reflects lived reality. That grimness has hit something of a new crisis pitch in the last few weeks with an upsurge in violence on London’s streets. “Mind your own, watch your tone,” runs Gangster, one nagging track on Novelist Guy, which rehearses street rules to icy, gaming-style production.
But Novelist takes the inputs he shares with many other MCs and refuses to turn them into the usual output; this is a stern, confident, uncompromising record about higher moral codes, one that sounds perfectly “street” without getting any guns out, one that you can jump up and down to very easily.
The track Gangster is actually about how Novelist didn’t turn into a thug. In the old days, he had a crew around him. Having left them, he is more likely to do a video featuring one long-shot take of a solo night-time freestyle. While most MCs are in the business of bigging themselves up, Novelist sounds consistently aloof, apart – a ninja sage among blusterers.
“Money, drugs, cars, girls, that’s for the films,” he spits on Afro Pick, one of the standout tracks, named for the comb he used to wear in his hair. “What does it mean when your own thinking can’t be still?” With killer production, both rubbery and stark, Afro Pick is actually about fighting for equanimity – about peace of mind, not “ps” (money).
He’s always “thinking, thinking, dot dot dot,” (Dot Dot Dot). As a younger teen, Novelist was elected deputy young mayor of Lewisham, and despite putting out a body of pre-album work that often rehearsed street values (Endz, from 2015; PissTake freestyle, from 2016), he spent the last general election campaign endorsing Jeremy Corbyn.
There’s a mention or two of that here, but Novelist has other priorities on this statement of intent. His own ambition looms large on these 15 tracks; he wants “the whole nine yards” (Whole 9 Yards). But it’s not just money and status; Novelist is motivated by self-reliance, independence (“I trust myself and not the gang”) and showing his peers that there are other ways to carry themselves, ways that don’t end badly. Another standout track here spells out a pugnacious south London take on #blacklivesmatter: Stop Killing the Mandem. Hydraulic digitals and punching beats underline the message, which isn’t limited to law enforcement but includes black-on-black violence; it ends on a coughing beat.
This is, for lack of a better word, a conscious album: there aren’t any shanks or mentions of weed, nor is there any disrespect to women. God gets a lot of shoutouts. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when God entered Novelist’s narrative, but a great deal of the rectitude on here has its backup in the musician’s faith.
You can’t help but wonder how Novelist’s audience will take to it, and to his reappearance after such a long absence; Novelist was incandescently hot three years ago. Grime moves fast and Novelist isn’t quite who he used to be.
However, Stormzy demonstrated that faith doesn’t exactly play badly on a grime album – the video for Blinded By Your Grace Pt 2 (ft MNEK) has 5.5m YouTube views. And neither does conscience: witness again Stormzy’s refusal to let the Grenfell Tower disaster be forgotten. Grime is now a maturing genre, with room for a multiplicity of voices and subject matters. And in Novelist, grime now has an upstanding and versatile outlier.
