On Father, the first single to be taken from Jim Legxacy’s third mixtape, the listener is offered a vivid image from the author’s past. The teenage James Olaloye, as he was then, is on the streets of Lewisham, the south-east London borough where he grew up. He is “rolling up a blunt, scheming for the funds … trying to come up off the roads on my own two / I never had a father”. Inevitably, this means he’s up to no good: “Making money off a phone … a key’s what they want.”
It’s a familiar scenario in the world of UK rap, a genre in which you seldom want for bleak descriptions of the life its stars have left behind on often deprived council estates. But in the case of Father, it comes with a small, but striking detail. “On the block,” he attests, “I was listening to Mitski.”
