A bright afternoon has turned a foreboding shade of grey. The rain picked up a few moments ago, just as cameraman Barry Edmunds was negotiating an awkward set of steps, backwards, trying to squeeze Kairo Keyz and eight of his gesticulating friends into the frame. “Welcome to the glamorous world of freestyles!” Edmunds’ long-time creative partner Tim Chave had joked when this shoot had been postponed for a third time, and in the drizzle his words feel prescient.
We’re on a postwar housing estate in Norwood, south London, just a short walk from where Keyz, a rising independent rapper, went to school. “This is mad,” he says, fiddling with the earbud piping a beat into his ear. “I look like a federal agent.” Keyz hasn’t shot a video like this before: he’s used to being able to take his time, lip-syncing to a backing track, and breaking the song into sections until he’s got each bit right. Today’s task is to nail it in a single take, and to do it – as the title of the freestyle series he’s shooting for makes clear – with No Miming. “It’s more challenging,” he goes on, “but I’ve been preparing for this all week.” There’s a break in the rain, hush falls, and Keyz goes again – careering down the stairs, mob-handed.
Since the first Handycams arrived on UK shores from Japan, enterprising rap fans have been sticking lenses in the faces of their talented friends and asking them to lay down a verse. No Miming is just one among countless freestyle series that run like mortar through British rap, generating hundreds of millions of views every year. They rest on a simple premise: a rapper, a microphone, and a moment in time captured for ever.
Freestyling in the UK refers back to the original 1980s US definition of pre-written rhymes that aren’t hitched to any specific structure or theme. Untethered from any requirement for distinct verses, choruses, hooks, or refrains, artists can focus on flexing their rapping ability. “It’s the technical side of things: the wordplay, the double entendres, the references, the rhythm, the pocket,” says Tottenham MC Avelino, whose 2015 Fire in the Booth (FITB) session alongside Wretch 32 remains among the series’ most-watched, with over 30m views. “I like to see it as when Ronaldinho would step on a football pitch. I want to entertain. I want to mesmerise, with words.”
All the key rap channels on YouTube have their own takes on the format. There’s GRM Daily’s flagship, Daily Duppy, and the talent-seeding One Mic; Mixtape Madness has Next Up?, the drill-focused Plugged In, and Mad About Bars; LinkUp TV offers an extended universe of HB, #MicCheck, Behind Barz and more. BL@CKBOX has been the proving ground for acts including Dave, J Hus, and Abra Cadabra, and its annual Under-18s cypher consistently unearths new talents. Birmingham-based P110, meanwhile, spotlights the north with Hoods Hottest, Scene Smasher, and #1TAKE.
Before these operations, the late Jamal Edwards’ SBTV laid the groundwork with Warm Up Sessions and F64 videos. Impresario Charlie Sloth has shipped his Fire in the Booth brand from a short-run web-series to Radio 1, and now Apple Music, and racked up close to a thousand episodes in the process. The freestyle circuit has solidified as a rite of passage for homegrown MCs to the extent that, at the peak of his UK love-in era in 2018, Drake stopped by to record his own (admittedly toe-curling) Behind Barz freestyle – and dropped a Fire in the Booth a week later.
Collectively, these series have formed a rich catalogue of UK MCing. This is a culture which, until relatively recently, has been at best overlooked and ignored by tastemakers and cultural arbiters – and, at worst, demonised and stifled by authorities. “When we first started filming freestyles for YouTube, everyone said, ‘What are you doing? That’s just a platform for cats on skateboards and TV rips of The Wire or whatever,” says Chave. “Content wasn’t a thing. But we saw it as the future.”
Sloth has a similar recollection from when he joined the BBC. “It was almost ridiculed,” he says, “the fact that I wanted to do a video format freestyle feature on a radio show.” He recalls his first two years with the broadcaster, when FITB sessions were shot on a threadbare setup: “I’d be holding one of the cameras while the rapper was rapping, and then a good friend of mine would film on the other camera. When he panned to me, I’d have to put my camera down so you couldn’t see that I was filming it.”
Capturing freestyles like this wasn’t entirely new – the grime scene spun a good trade in DVDs with titles like Practice Hours, Aim High, and Risky Roadz, themselves inspired by hip-hop’s VHS era – but putting them online for fans all over the world to watch for free certainly was. This immediacy was what shaped the format. “Someone like Jamal Edwards would just back out a camera and be like, ‘Where’s your bars?’ and you couldn’t get away with not having put in your 10,000 hours, and not being ready to go,” says Avelino. When it comes to freestyles, Sloth says, “there’s no hiding: you can rap, or you can’t rap. It’s as simple as that.” Fiddly earbuds aside, Kairo Keyz doesn’t appear to be feeling the pressure; behind monochrome shades, he’s a picture of control.
The format also gives rappers outside the London industry bubble a means of cutting through. When Birmingham rapper Mist made his debut on SBTV in 2015 it was only the second time he’d set foot in the capital. He remembers the only hurdle bigger than his nerves was whether anyone from London would decipher his Brummie tones. “Having a Birmingham accent, we don’t get it easy, you know!” he laughs. His Warm Up Session remains a classic. After Manchester’s Bugzy Malone wrapped on his debut FITB, meanwhile, Sloth told him his life would never be the same again. Five UK Top 10 albums followed.
“It was a long journey up there for about three or four minutes of recording,” says Brighton-based ArrDee of his recent trip to the FITB studios in north London, “but I grew up watching those freestyles, so it was a little bit of a full circle moment for me.” For an artist like ArrDee, who’s previously been typecast as a cheeky-chappy, chart-friendly rapper, having the chance to showcase his raw rapping ability feels particularly significant. The mention of “three or four minutes of recording” seems like a deliberate signal that he nailed it in one take. “You go there, touch mic, and shell it,” he says, “leave the place in flames.”
As the audience for UK rap has boomed, and the scene has attracted investment from major labels and brands aiming to buy their way into youth culture, bootstrapped ventures like No Miming and BL@CKBOX, which place an emphasis on live, single-take performances, have become less common. Today, the UK’s freestyle landscape is dominated by slicker operations that have swapped filming on street corners for studio setups. Artists record their freestyle track in advance, then shoot the visuals separately – just as they would for a more traditional music video. Competition for ears and eyeballs has pushed online broadcasters towards more narrow branding, be it Mad About Bars’ orange hues, Daily Duppy’s playful lyrical animations, or Fumez the Engineer’s grimacing Plugged In cutaways. For signed acts with a new album or EP to promote, trotting through a run of Daily Duppys and Mad About Bars has become a standard campaign route. And the more these platforms come to reflect the industry’s wider machinations, the more they show up where UK rap is lacking too – particularly in its representation of female talents.
While not without their merits – look to Fredo’s Daily Duppy or Kenzo’s Mad About Bars for blistering storytelling at its best – there’s a broad agreement that these developments have sapped some of the raw energy from the freestyle format. “I feel like a lot of the newer platforms have taken the edge off it somewhat,” says Sloth. “There’s no pressure on the artist to deliver, they’re not getting taken out of their comfort zone. Which is, I feel, what brings out the greatness in the artist.” He highlights the difference between artists who cut their teeth on pirate radio or by passing a mic in youth clubs, and those who’ve come up on bitesize social media buzz. “It doesn’t mean they’re not as good as artists,” he says, “but how they’ve developed their skills is just different.” And while technology has flattened access to some opportunities, it hasn’t necessarily plugged the gap left by shuttered youth clubs and radio stations – particularly when it comes to honing the skills required of live performances.
As the landscape has shifted, streaming has provided monetisation that didn’t exist when the likes of Chave and Sloth first whipped their cameras out. Most modern freestyle platforms, with the exclusion of FITB, essentially function as record labels: they front the production costs for a cut of the royalties in return. The video will go on YouTube, but the track itself will go on Spotify and other streaming services. The economics won’t guarantee riches in all cases, but it does mean less dependence on brand tie-ins. “What’s won is more than what is lost,” says Avelino. “We’ve lost a lot of the necessity to be able to spit bars [on the spot] to cut through. But then I look at it today and see more kids from the gutter, from the trenches, making careers and changing their lives. I think that’s a bigger win.”
Back in Norwood, Edmunds is beaming under his sodden beanie. “That was the one,” he says, calling cut on take four. “When it works, you can just feel it.” He has the look of someone who’s bottled magic. And that, ultimately, is what any freestyle shoot is about.
