All photography by Dan Wilton
Cast your mind back, if you will, to 2014., the year Macaulay Culkin bravely embarked into the realm of pizza-themed cover bands, Courtney Love claimed to have unearthed a missing airplane, and Vin Diesel body-popped to Beyoncé like a damn superstar. As far as etching perplexing moments into the grand tapestry of cultural history goes, those twelve months were like one long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Yet one of the most bewildering things centered not on the globe’s newfound infatuation with Flappy Bird or the release of Sharknado 2, but on the whereabouts of our new favorite artist, Jelani Blackman. Releasing “Twenty//Three” at the start of the year, his devastatingly brilliant debut track seemed to arrive fully formed, ready to book-end the career of Britain’s next great auteur, placing his low-lit sonic somewhere between Jai Paul, twigs, and Sampha. “Twenty//Three” was so good, we put it in our top ten tracks of 2014. But, despite also featuring on a track with Brian Eno of all people, a follow-up song never arrived. Blackman disappeared mysteriously, and no further music was uploaded. So, what happened?
“Arguably, it was the worst year of my life,” chuckles Blackman, grinning through his teeth when we eventually meet in a West London bar, almost two years after unleashing “Twenty//Three.” “I spent months in a fucking agonizing period, a purgatory where I didn't have anything out. Imagine if you were in a conversation, and you had a sentence you wanted to say, but you couldn't say it for 11 months.”
Blackman is talking about the structural foundation that needs to lay beneath any burgeoning artist’s career – joining a label, getting sorted with a manager, employing PRs, and getting the budget to release music videos – the sort of thing he’d never thought about until the unexpected response to “Twenty//Three” thrust him into the room of A&Rs across the country, which is when he realized he hadn’t thought about any follow-up tracks. The sudden influx of music he’s now released – which has come in the form of a new four-track EP – is the result of a recently inked deal with LA-based label Quality Time. We’ll get to that later, though. For now, let us rewind, for there is no star without the story.
When I meet Blackman, it’s within the walls of a pub that’s situated a five-minute walk from his home in West London. It's evident that he's always lived here. A family member walks past the pub mid-interview; a guy he’s known since he was in nappies orders a drink at the bar; when we pass through the corner shop to pick up some crisps (BBQ rib flavor Doritos), he’s on first name terms with the shopkeeper. Arguably, it’s right here that Blackman’s music career started. “I've been saying it for over a decade – 'I'm making music,'” he says. He's referencing his whole journey, from spitting bars in his local park, to forming a seven piece band at sixth form with a member of Wolf Alice, to releasing a solo hip-hop project, to its inevitable outcome – releasing music using his birth name. “It’s become something of a running joke,” he grins.
Where other artists set themselves up firmly within the self-constrained borders of genre, Blackman’s voyage into his latest music has lead to something that’s more liberating. In some ways, it’s a sound that’s hard to pin down. “Submarine” is a jazz-infused romp through R&B, flecked with an insatiable pop chorus, and smatters of spoken word; “Repeater” is darker, recalling British acts like Blue Daisy or Kojey Radical; “Sincere” is reminiscent of the open-air guitar riffs John Mayer imbued into Frank Ocean’s performance of “Pyramids” on Saturday Night Live. But as much as Blackman’s music sounds genre-less, it also contains one distinct characteristic: before it's spat out in expansive, soulfully unique tracks, sound has been bled into his bones through his desire to experience life to its greatest, furthest extent.
Over the course of the evening, he tells me that he learned to play the saxophone, which he took up at age nine and continues to play on his new records. As we talk, our conversation flows through his personal experience with music, ranging from early beginnings spent listening to Eminem to discovering heavy metal in the back seat of his friend’s car. He has also been working with a classically trained musician, Fred from experimental pop duo Sylas, who helped to form the Jelani Blackman sound. But Blackman’s openness to music is only one component of his artistic vision.
“You know how first year [at university] is the year where you do what you want, and second year is really great because you get your own house, and third year you focus in? That was not the case. I just went hard for three years,” he laughs, sipping on a pint of Guinness with the manic yet friendly look of a character you wouldn’t mind guiding you through a night out. In fact, it’s that characteristic that plays a small part in the backstory to “Twenty//Three,” which finds itself buried in the dimly-lit, crinkled hours between sunset and not wanting to go to bed. It’s these experiences, combined with Blackman’s natural, charismatic ability to soak up both characters and culture that’s arguably led to the formation of an artist, and an EP, which are perpetually hard to pin down yet brilliant. Because, really, it’s easy to make genre-less music. But making it sound good? That takes talent, experience, and openness to everything the world has to offer.
All this has lead to perhaps the biggest score of Blackman’s career so far. As our interview at the pub wraps up, we jump in an Uber and head down to Abbey Road, where he’s been recording tracks for a new mixtape. Obviously, that studio is the stuff of legend and it’s not exactly the sort of place you’d expect a rising artist to be knocking out tracks for a free-to-release project. But it’s come through that natural aptitude Blackman has for maintaining relationships: one of the Sylas brothers has a studio room, and Blackman is allowed to come and go as he pleases, often recording late into the night or napping on the couch. And, as is his nature, he’s not even too hyped about it. “A studio is a studio,” he shrugs. “What happens in them is the more important thing”.
He makes a good point. Which leads us to the next step in his career: the mixtape that he’s been recording at Abbey Road. Tying together the late, three-night benders and a vast palette of sound, the mixtape forms another part of who Jelani Blackman is, expanding his artistry. “This is the furthest extent I would go in a direction,” he says, before running me through a selection of the tracks on offer. “This isn't a mixtape of off cuts.” Then he tells me he’d like to preview two of the tracks in the published interview.
Darker, more nocturnal and faded than Blackman’s previous work, the tracks sketch a portrait of an artist who is working intensely toward his limits, embodying what it means to explore music to its fullest. “TDTL” culminates in the most intense, burst of super-speed rap this side of a dial-up connection, while “Super Sharp” is a deranged, bass-line skank that rushes through so fast it’s like slip-streaming through traffic with the window open, as you struggle to avoid throwing up onto the street below. The two tracks form the basis for the Jelanji mixtape, which is essentially a collection of freestyles over slowed down jungle beats, which have been chopped and screwed and given a healthy peppering of British seasoning. You'll have to wait to hear it in full, though, as the entire mixtape won't be available until a few weeks time. This is just the starter dish.
Blackman’s “Twenty//Three” may have arrived fully formed, but as time has passed we’ve been right. And we’ve also been wrong. Right, in that the track put forth the initial bones of a new British auteur, but wrong in that we felt that track stood at the top of his sonic mountain, instead of at the bottom. As Blackman keeps soaking up more and more of his environment, his sound is one that’s going to keep on expanding. Which is exciting, really. “[Everything I do] is always 100%,” Blackman says, when I mention it sounds like he goes hard in his pursuit for life. “It's tiring. I enjoy it. But it's definitely 100%.” To think we missed him in 2014, eh?
You can follow Ryan on Twitter.
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