Slick Rick is tucking into a late room-service breakfast in his Park Lane hotel room. He is back in London, the city his family emigrated from when he was a boy, because he’s launching a new album, Victory, his first since 1999’s The Art of Storytelling, which featured an array of guest artists – including Outkast, Nas and Snoop Dogg – paying homage to one of hip-hop’s legendary figures.
Even today, he remains the rapper’s rapper, the most-sampled hip-hop artist in history. Ghostface Killah has called him the greatest of all time. Eminem described himself as “a product of Slick Rick”, Jay-Z likened him to Matisse and Mark Ronson once gave a Ted talk dissecting his work. Questlove called his voice “the most beautiful thing to happen to hip-hop culture”.
