In 2018, during the two years that Joshua Emmanuel Pinto João Eduardo, or Blanco, spent in prison, he had an epiphany. He decided to move away from making hardened UK drill music – a genre that he’d helped to popularise as a leading architect of the teenage collective Harlem Spartans – and tap into his Portuguese-language roots. “Drill was fun when I was doing it with people, you bounce off each other,” he says. “But doing it by myself, I couldn’t find any passion. I found passion for the Brazilian sound.”
Losing loved ones while incarcerated had forced him to reflect. When Blanco’s father died in March, he attended the funeral handcuffed to a prison officer. “Going around the coffin with someone who didn’t even know my dad was crazy. My dad always used to say certain things that were important about family. And obviously, in his last moments, I didn’t even get to see him in hospital. That was my fault,” he sighs. His friend Latwaan Griffiths or Latz, a fellow member of Harlem Spartans, was murdered in July 2018. “Prison was a mistake. I didn’t want to go back,” Blanco says.
Born in London in 1999, Blanco is the son of Angolan refugees who escaped civil war and came via Portugal to the UK. The family moved around south London before settling in Kennington, where he attended Archbishop Tenison’s School, opposite the Oval cricket ground. “I didn’t know my parents were refugees until I was grown,” says Blanco, now 24, who exudes a warm presence when we meet in central London. “One day my dad just started telling us stories about his life. I was in shock, because his life was so different to mine. It was so much harder.”
Blanco was raised against a backdrop of big family gatherings, Brazilian cable television shows and baile funk, a Miami hip-hop-infused musical genre born in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. As a teenager, he started visiting Alford House, a local youth club with free studio facilities. His friends Bis and Zico had released songs on SoundCloud that they recorded there. “So I thought, why don’t I try something? We were so young, we weren’t even allowed to swear. If it weren’t for Alford, I would not be rapping.”
Within years of Chicago drill’s inception in 2011, the genre had cross-pollinated with artists in British cities. Its loudest voices were initially found among housing estates between Lambeth and Southwark, where groups such as 67 and 150 translated their rivalries into cryptic songs to pique online gossip with haunting hood videos.
In 2016, Harlem Spartans followed suit, but they were younger, more playful and had a digital-nativist grasp of social media marketing. Bis, Zico and Blanco were joined by others, including Loski and MizOrMac. (The former would become a successful solo artist, while the latter is still regarded as the archetype of lyrical drill.) They danced in videos and showcased homegrown beats that rejected US drill’s lethargy in favour of garage’s sub-bass and grime’s patois-laden vernacular, helping the UK’s latest sonic subculture soar.
When Blanco released his solo song Jason Bourne in November 2016 – a rare venture away from the group and a signal of future endeavours – people started calling him Mr Bourne. “I couldn’t shake it off,” he chuckles. Hence the name of his eclectic new mixtape, ReBourne, a refined, soulful blend of Afroswing, baile funk-fused drill and philosophical UK rap. The title symbolises a continuation and fresh start, simultaneously. “The style of music I am doing now is different, to show it’s a new me,” Blanco says.
Before that, Blanco’s voice became known when Harlem blew up in 2017 on tracks such as Call Me a Spartan, Kennington Where It Started, No Hook, Kent Nizzy, Money on the Roads and more. Their low-budget videos achieved tens of millions of YouTube views – unprecedented at the time – catapulting their creators’ wintry south London aesthetic around the world.
Their lyrical provocations attracted fans as well as rivals. “When you’re getting views and people are repeating things you’re saying, you’re gonna feel it 10 times more,” Blanco says, conceding to music’s capacity for amplifying confrontation in the digital age. He stopped attending college because people would be looking for him “for good and bad reasons. Social media was popping them times, especially Snapchat. Maybe people were getting envious.”
Harlem were popular before politicians started blaming drill music for the rise in serious violence among young people. Still, they were constrained by the dog days of the Metropolitan police’s Form 696, which forced venues to reveal what kind of music acts they were hosting, leading to cancellations that disproportionately affected Black artists. “They would makeup stories and threaten clubs with taking their licence away,” Blanco says. “We were getting so many views but no shouts from labels. Money was slow at the start. We were looking to move out of the estate. That would have saved us all going to prison.”
In February 2017, Blanco and MizOrMac were arrested on weapons possession charges. They were two of the most talked-about underground rap artists in the country yet still embroiled in the deadly territorial feuds that consume the lives of many young men living in London’s densest social housing estates. A year later, they were charged and sentenced, Blanco to three and a half years in prison, MizOrMac to six.
“We didn’t realise how big we were until we were all in prison,” says Blanco. “Everyone knows you and wants to be your friend. I was in prison when Drake put one of our lyrics in his caption.” He recalls discovering that the Canadian star had quoted his and Bis’s lyrics from Kennington Where It Started on his social media accounts, demonstrating the global height of their fanbase. Meanwhile, with Form 696 scrapped (at least theoretically), drill stars were finally getting the chance to perform live. “You’re looking at everyone else’s career and thinking, ah, we would have been doing that if we were out.”
But drill was facing new challenges as a kind of folk devil targeted by tabloid media headlines. The Met started to request that videos they deemed to be inciting violence be taken down, placing limits on the lyric-writing of artists still plagued by their criminal pasts. Drill’s notoriety and survivalist creativity, however, would help it to spread online and develop into a commercially viable product. Drill artists rapping over UK-style beats abounded in cities across the world, from Sydney to Brooklyn to Accra. But the Harlem heyday was over.
This time, the labels couldn’t afford to look away. Soon after his release from prison, Blanco released his debut solo project, English Dubbed, on Polydor Records in 2019. Its opening track, Pull Up, was the start of what has now become his distinctive sound: neatly laying softened drill flows over the catchy shuffle of baile funk drum patterns. In 2021, his City of God mixtape became an instant classic. The laid-back, short-and-sweet Shippuden and a feature from Central Cee on The Great Escape remain by far his most streamed songs.
Blanco’s reversal of fate has not blessed the other members of Harlem Spartans. In 2019, his original collaborator Bis, or Crosslon Davis, was stabbed to death in Deptford, south east London. MizOrMac and Loski are both currently in prison on further weapons charges. When I ask Blanco how he escaped the offending cycle that his peers are still trapped in, he is clear.
“The main reason is opportunity,” he says. “I was lucky. When I came out, I had a bit of money set aside from before. A label signed me and got me a house. A lot of people wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if they had the same opportunities as me.” He explains that while he responded to deaths in his circle by pledging to turn his life around, not everyone is able to respond to heartbreak in the same way. “When people die, it changes different people in different ways.”
Blanco’s commitment to patient self-development is captured in The Long Way featuring Kojey Radical, an uplifting single from ReBourne. “Rap about escape, but I’ma die in vain,” he rues. “We come way too far and took the long way.” It’s a truly eclectic project, full of Blanco’s characteristic playfulness and colour: anime references alongside poetic reflections on life; a sample of 20th-century US film composer Henry Mancini on corner shop ode Londis; more baile funk drums on Brilliant Mind.
It also speaks directly to the biographical challenges that Blanco has overcome, such as on Son of a Refugee. “I’ve matured. My writing is more complex and it makes more sense now. I’ve got better at making choruses,” he says. He admits feeling some self-consciousness about travelling further away from the Harlem sound that made him and risking the loyalty of drill fans. But he is committed to growing, experimenting with new genres, refining his writing and hopefully expanding his fanbase.
“Music was key for my life, personally. It makes me feel good and makes me feel as if I’m doing something. It makes me feel like I have a job. I want to make the people around me proud,” he smiles. “My mum didn’t come to this country to go backwards. Music makes me feel as if I’m going forward in life.”
• ReBourne is out now via Believe UK
• This article was amended on 23 August 2023 to more accurately reflect Blanco’s heritage in the headline.
