It took being beaten up on London’s Victoria line aged 13, in front of his mum and two sisters, for Jeshi to change tack. “I was sitting on the train, eating McDonald’s; I think we were going to the cinema. I look up and there’s all these guys in front of me. By the time I’d taken my headphones out, they’d punched me.” He chose not to retaliate. “Ego says: go and do something back. But I thought: ‘Who cares? I’m here, I’m alive, there’s no problem.’ I am a rarity in that situation.”
This moment, he says, was “this pivot”, away from a life of retaliatory violence and towards his current career as a strikingly singular rapper. Growing up in a deprived part of Walthamstow, east London, he started carrying a knife aged 11, something that “just feels so normal. You never really leave this two-mile radius where everyone is like you, and you find yourself in situations that are quite fucked up. But when you’re in them you’re like: this is just life. You’re born into situations where you have problems with people you don’t even really know, but you want to kill each other.”
Now 27, radiating zest in his record label offices, he is well aware of the path he could have gone down; an old schoolfriend was stabbed to death two years ago. “You feel guilt: he could have been me. He wasn’t some drug lord. It’s just as you get older these things get more intense: instead of being punched a couple of times on a train, you’re getting stabbed outside a club. It’s just a natural progression of that stuff, if you don’t remove yourself from it.”
Knife crime is one of the social ills Jeshi explores on his superb debut album Universal Credit, but as with its other subjects – such as living amid austerity, or self-worth being eroded by social media – he documents it plainly. “When it feels like someone’s preaching at me, I switch off,” he says. Inspired by Radiohead, Pink Floyd and Amy Winehouse while sounding nothing like any of them, and in its own hook-strewn lane somewhere between UK drill and underground US hip-hop, the album rivals the Streets’ Original Pirate Material or Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in Da Corner for frank, sometimes bleak but often funny framings of UK city life. Jeshi stumbles around in a druggy fog, going clubbing, driving, working and listlessly watching Phillip Schofield and Loose Women, a portrait of the hand-to-mouth existence you live when you’re poor. “Everything’s about today – what’s going to make me look good, or feel good, right now,” he says.
A frequent assertion by the comfortably middle class is that the perpetrators of knife violence (or other predominantly working-class crime) should simply choose not to be criminals – easier said than done in an environment where social mobility is close to nil and retributive violence can circle for years. “I love that people are that idealistic,” scoffs Jeshi, putting on a Jacob Rees-Mogg voice: “‘You should just stop doing that and go off to school, young sir.’ And I don’t like it when people say: ‘Well, they need to open youth clubs.’ Open as many as you like: you think all these kids are going to be like: ‘Let’s drop the knives and go and play pool?’”
To try to succeed in a music career, for instance, particularly a style of rap that doesn’t sit in the mainstream, “you have to be a bit crazy”, Jeshi says. “The odds of it working out are slim; you have to be naive. I hate whenever anyone says ‘Plan B’ to me – shut the fuck up. I always took it as an insult: why should I not think I can do this?” He talks, tongue half in cheek, about the “superpower of poverty: what it does, sometimes, is that it gives you nothing to lose”. But he is scathing about a UK that leaves behind those who can scarcely risk that kind of fearlessness. “You can work in this country five days a week, in most places, and never hope to get a house. The other thing I hate: if you’re on benefits – ‘How dare you get your nails done?’ Well, maybe it makes them feel good. That £25 getting their nails done brings them some kind of happiness.
“The world of the lower class, of knife crime, of drug use: all these are people who have had the humanity ripped away from them. No one cares why they’re doing it, or what makes them feel like that. They just want to hit them with the ‘bad’ sticker: outcast, goodbye, stay over there.”
Jeshi’s success – some of his tracks nose into millions of streams – is hard won. He has never met his father, who was deported to Jamaica in his very early youth; he was raised by his mother – after she had a spell in prison – and grandmother, who are hymned on his track Two Mums. “In the community I’m from, [not having a dad] was so normal, it never felt weird. If someone was like: ‘I live with my mum and my dad’, you’d be like: really?” His mum never finished school; when Jeshi did, he didn’t know where to go next. “You don’t know how to manoeuvre your child through that – it’s foreign territory,” he says. “There’s not this thing of: now I’m going to buy my first house. All these things were completely alien concepts.”
In the late 00s, Jeshi’s peer group were making the most of free recording technology to create their own grime tracks: “To see it in such a tangible, accessible way it was like: whoa, these are people I’m in science classes with.” As his tastes expanded, he realised he didn’t want to make straightforward music. “When you’re from those kinds of environments, the mind-state is very limited. You do what everyone does, because if you don’t, people are going to look at you and say: that’s weird. I distanced myself from everyone I was around. I wanted to mould my own opinions before I let other people.”
Beginning with the Pussy Palace EP in 2016, his atmospheric tracks did touch on topics shared by his peers, with lyrics about getting high and/or horny, and listlessly attempting to manifest material things – Prada glasses, champagne, marble floors. “I was drawing from nothing in particular,” he says. “I got to a point where I wasn’t happy with where things were going for me, and it’s human instinct to blame everyone else: label, manager.” To make Universal Credit, “I snapped out of it: how can I put in more energy, effort, thought?”
His previous EP, 2020’s Bad Taste, didn’t set the world alight. “You have these grandiose ideas: I’m going to put this out and I’m going to ride off into the sunset. And it’s very grounding when it doesn’t happen. Everything I’ve ever released has been painful: you’re still in the same jobs you hate, getting fired and having to get a new one, having to borrow money off people.” He went on universal credit while he made his album – the cover shows him receiving a cheque for the benefit’s monthly payout, cut to £324.84 after the Tories removed the temporary Covid uplift – and then worked in a warehouse for £8.50 an hour, “barely any different” in terms of take-home pay. “That cut to universal credit, it wouldn’t have made a difference to the government to have not done that,” he says. “That extra bit wasn’t debilitating the UK economy, and £20 a week means a lot to people. Unfortunately, this is a cold, callous world.”
Jeshi says that at 27, he doesn’t remember a time before the Tories’ austerity measures, the unspoken central thesis of which is to lower the threshold of what people find acceptable. “There’s this hopelessness, that this is just what people expect it to be at this stage.”
In his lyrics, his solution is frequently to use ecstasy or alcohol to blot this all out, as on the exceptionally good single 3210, which evokes the grey sweat of bad pills. “Sometimes when you don’t have money, you go out, you get pissed, and that [stress] all disappears. You’re tapping that Monzo until the overdraft maxes out: ‘It don’t matter, we’ll fix it tomorrow.’” These snapshots are all part of his central project: “I have a duty to open a window to my world. I don’t want it to feel vague, or,” – he grins righteously – “fucking American.”
He admits that he doesn’t have any solutions to inequality; but, while you suspect the Tories would rather citizens and the private sector take responsibility for working them out, nor should he. Instead, his self-portraiture is inspiring in its craft and damning in its truth. “Anything hard that happens in your life shapes who you are,” he says. “You just learn to wear this stuff, and walk through life with it.”
• Universal Credit is released 27 May on Because Music
