The business of reviewing the debut album by Central Cee entails a level of security you seldom encounter in 2025: no information is provided beyond the tracklist. His record label seems at a loss to tell you who produced it, there are no lyrics to clarify the knottier moments of the rapper’s famously torrential flow; the details of some of the guest artists – the owner of the Billie Eilish-esque voice on Now We’re Strangers, or the potent soul vocal on closer Don’t Know Anymore – is also apparently classified. But perhaps security isn’t really the point: artists who are really concerned about pre-release leaks just drop their albums unannounced. The whole palaver seems more about promoting the idea that Can’t Rush Greatness is a very big deal indeed.
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Well, of course it is. If some of the claims regarding Central Cee’s success and its spoils on Can’t Rush Greatness sound suspiciously like the lily being gilded – Does he really employ a private chef? Is it correct, as guest Skepta proudly claims on Ten, that he’s among the 10 biggest rappers in the world? – he’s still, unquestionably, the dominant name in UK rap. Private chef or not, the home counties pile that Can’t Rush Greatness says Oakley Neil Caesar-Su now calls home must be running out of wall space for the number of platinum discs he’s amassed over the last four years. Moreover, Central Cee has done the one thing no one really expected a British rapper to do, and succeeded in the ice-to-eskimos business of breaking America. “Nobody else from London’s gone Hollywood,” he swaggers on CRG, as you might if you had thus far scored three platinum US singles. It’s an achievement not entirely without precedent, although you’d have to go back 35 years, to the handful of US hits scored by Monie Love, to find a British rapper who achieved anything even remotely comparable.
Understandably, you can’t miss the sense of confidence that infects Can’t Rush Greatness. Some moments seem focused on maintaining Central Cee’s US success, with features from US rappers outweighing those from British ones. (Gata, with its acoustic guitars and vocals from Puerto Rican act Young Miko, has obviously been constructed with one eye on the vast Latin-American market.) But it never eschews its British identity: splendidly, at one juncture, a love rival is dismissed as a “plonker”. The production entirely eschews pop hooks in favour of intriguing details: the weird moment in Don’t Know Anymore where the pitch of the track lurches as if someone’s sped up the recording; the sudden shift in sonic texture midway through Walk In Wardrobe, where chattering beats and electric piano give way to thick synth chords, amping up the tension as it does. And there are subtly deployed samples from, among others, Ne-Yo and the Wu-Tang Clan.
The effect is to focus your immediate attention on Central Cee’s voice. It’s a smart move. He’s technically very adept – smartly cutting the samples into his own rhymes so it sounds like they’re engaged in dialogue; he’s never overshadowed by his guests and frankly raps rings around Lil Baby on Band4Band. More importantly, he has stuff to say. The album’s central topic is very familiar – the disparity between the rapper’s pre-fame and post-fame life – but his take on it is intriguingly original. Rather than simply swagger, or insist that nothing has really changed, he admits to confusion, constantly undercutting his boasts with expressions of discomfort at his wealth (“I feel like a snob”) and the sheer number of people who rely on it (“If I don’t pay the bills then who will?”), openly copping to the fact that he keeps contradicting himself. The 70s soul samples of Top Freestyle play host to both apparently impregnable self-confidence (“I’ll get a No 1 album, easy”) and worries that his success could prove fragile: “I’m one stop and search away from the block.” “Don’t trust anyone who says ‘I’m real’” he snaps at one point, adding, glumly: “I’m real.”
It ultimately feels like a very honest, realistic depiction of sudden-onset fame on an unimaginable scale, where, as Limitless puts it: “I’m living in a movie but I can’t press pause.” It’s filled with powerful specifics: the revelation that among the duties his wealth has brought him lurks the task of paying for his peers’ funerals; his struggle to sleep without what he calls “hood ambience” (“the sound of sirens”). Perhaps he’ll get more used to it in time: certainly, there’s very little about Can’t Rush Greatness that suggests it’s likely to dent Central Cee’s remarkable progress.
This week Alexis listened to
Kin’Gongolo Kiniata – Kingongolo
With their instruments made from found materials – plastic bottles, plates, scrap metal – there’s a sense that Kinshasa’s Kin’Gongolo Kiniata are descendents of fellow DRC mavericks Konono No 1: their debut single is frantic and thrilling.
Source: theguardian.com
