Straight Outta Pecknarm

At a party some time last year, M. and I met a policeman working in Peckham. I said that when I’d first moved there from East London I’d bought an album by a local rapper because I’d heard it was good, and I was curious about musicians in the area. Lyrics were along the lines of “if you’ve been in a gun battle in Peckham, you know me.” (I haven’t, as it goes…). The policeman said “Ah, you mean Giggs.” Giggs is well known to the local force – although this particular member of British law enforcement seemed more keen to see him succeed than some representatives of Operation Trident (according to this article, anyway), as it would mean his not having to fall back on other “businesses” (quote from this Paul Morley interview). The picture the policeman painted was of detectives spending a lot of time on YouTube watching clips of local rappers to glean names, faces, details of incidents, in a bid to build up knowledge of the area’s gang members. (SN1, the name of Gigg’s shop, is also known to be a clique of local gang The Peckham Boys.)

I like about half of ‘Walk in Da Park’, beats-wise and for Giggs himself. Giggs is not a rapper you admire for his acrobatics – he’s a ‘grain’ or ‘presence’ rapper, one you love for the sound of their voice more than for their speed and rhyming dexterity. I’m not sure in what way he could be seen to be “fighting free of clichés” while at the same time “thickly eulogising vengeance and violence”, though, unless it’s just through the very fact of him having a voice at all, or being charismatic and articulate. Which clichés are we talking about, exactly? Judging by an episode of Silent Witness I watched recently (a repeat I think), the white, middle-class Other can countenance a black yooth from a 'bad area' being self-aware and blessed with wisdom beyond his years, as long as the character explains that gang violence is caused by rappers and computer games.

What is certainly interesting is that, despite the apparent obstacles, Giggs has got this far without tempering the music or his ‘real’, which is (and also addresses) the intertwining of “thug” fantasies (capitalist fantasies in the raw) with social and specific local concerns. So it seems strange, then, to worry about Giggs “dissolving into posture” when a lot of ‘Walk in Da Park’ is simultaneously about a posture that needs to be maintained, and a posture being maintained. Concerning Giggs’s further success, the question – which is hardly unique to him – is more: will he have to adopt new postures and, if so, will it be possible for him, for others, to reconcile them with the earlier ones?