Over the past two decades, Wretch 32, real name Jermaine Scott, has established himself as a pioneering figure in British rap. From his rise in the underbellies of an early-millennium rap and grime scene, to his mainstream success and songs with the likes of Ed Sheeran and Emeli Sandé, Stormzy and Giggs, he is among the handful of UK rappers who have scaled the heights of the British music scene while maintaining a deep connection to their communities.
At 39, Scott is ready to release his seventh album, Home?, a soul-searching record that reflects on his relationship with that word. “I feel like it always moves. I feel like it always changes,” he says of his relationship to “home”. “I’m still trying to put an exact location on it but as it stands it’s more who I’m with. I feel like I could make a home in any house.”
More than that, the album is a detailed account of his inner world, and a tender narration on the community that surrounds him. Over its 15 songs, it ruminates on themes of belonging, and on British-Caribbean and Black British history, as well as further commentary on the contemporary climate of the country at large.
“I think the word that comes to mind is ‘displacement’,” he says. “For anyone who feels like: ‘I’m here, but am I accepted here? Or am I just tolerated here?’ Anyone who is in the middle of that, this record is for you.”
On the album, home is a two-way street – one existing between a community and its country, as well as a country and its communities.
Scott more than most embodies this sentiment. His grandparents – both paternal and maternal – arrived in the UK from Jamaica, settling in north London, a family line starting anew on British soil. Both of his parents were raised in Tottenham. He is the third generation of his family to have called the area home.
Activism runs in the family. Growing up, he remembers a sense of communal resistance and care in the household. Both his dad, Millard Scott, and his uncle, Stafford Scott, were renowned in the local area for their community work and advocacy, standing firm in the face of entrenched racism and repression. “My uncles and Dad would be on GMTV before school,” he says. “I remember seeing my gran, my dad and my uncle on London Tonight because they had taken the police to court for harassment and had won.” Formative memories like these meant that from a young age “I was knowing that something’s not right in the system”.
As a child there were community activists holding meetings in his front room; he recalls the teachings he received on the likes of Marcus Garvey and the African National Convention, or on apartheid in South Africa, the posters of Muhammad Ali on the walls, and a deep-set understanding of Britain and its relationship to his people being seeded in his mind.
“The first thing was understanding it’s a difficult ride for Black people in this country,” he says. “I remember feeling displacement on that level, hearing these conversations with my dad, with my uncles, hearing them talk about injustices, the first Broadwater Farm riots, and the uprisings.”
Eventually, as he grew older and into his own life, he began to experience his own early feelings of displacement, subtle questionings of Britain and his place in it. There were early encounters with the police, being stopped or chased when he was as young as eight, and the occasional screams from passing cars, their passengers telling him to go back to where he came from. “On Black Boy Lane I was caught on my own,” he raps on Black & British, a track from Home? with Little Simz and Benjamin AD, “he told me to go back to my country, I thought I was home.”
In the late 00s and early 2010s, years after the first peaks of Dizzee Rascal and Kano, British rappers and MCs began to resurface in pop culture. Wretch 32 was among them, a rare case of an artist who managed to tailor his music for a wider audience without corrupting his reputation. After signing with Ministry of Sound, he released the commercially successful singles Traktor, Unorthodox and Don’t Go, the latter reaching No 1 on the UK singles chart. Emerging into the mainstream changed his fortunes. He moved out of working-class Tottenham to the north London and Hertfordshire hinterland of Barnet. Despite turning music into a viable career, that sense of displacement still followed.
“There was less of a community there than there was in Tottenham,” he reflects. “[In Tottenham] I knew all my neighbours. I knew their names; we helped each other out. We held doors, we carried bags for elderly women. When I moved into the gated community in Barnet it wasn’t the case.”
The sense of resistance that runs in the family continues today. In 2020, his dad, 62 at the time, was tasered by police, and subsequently fell down the stairs. The Met Police, in a review of the incident, “found no indication of misconduct”. After the footage was posted to social media, London mayor Sadiq Khan called for an urgent review by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). Scott appeared on ITV News alongside his father to speak on the incident. His father believed the tasering would not have happened if he were a white man.
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“Imagine the beautiful darkness,” Scott says. “I remember watching my dad on the news, watching my dad on London Tonight, and now I’m beside him on London Tonight. It’s not the full circle you would want but it is [what happened] nevertheless.”
Scott was born in 1985, the same year the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham blazed with late-autumn riots after the death of 49-year-old Cynthia Jarrett. She died from heart failure after the police raided her home on suspicion of her son having handled stolen goods.
Stafford would write in the Guardian years later: “There was such anger about Cynthia’s death, given the regular harassment local black people faced from the police, that the following day a riot broke out.”
This history is carved into the album. Stitched into Home? are voices and echoes from that time gone, catalogued in excerpts from a 1988 documentary titled Scenes from the Farm. Originally aired on Channel 4, the documentary was shot in the aftermath of the riots, capturing the mood and immediate realities of 80s Black Britain on the estate.
Scott’s grandma owned a copy on VHS, before accidentally taping over it. It would be years before he would watch it in full, eventually seeing it for the first time when the full piece was uploaded to YouTube. By this time, his grandma had died, her memory only existing in family photos and albums. So, as he watched for the first time, her presence came into full colour. Speaking to the pastor in a scene outside Scott’s baptism, she says: “If I die today I’m just dead, but as long as I know I died to let someone else live …” The scene struck Scott at his core. “To hear her voice was such a big, impactful moment, it was such a feeling. I haven’t heard this voice before. She only existed in family photos.”
Home? is a weaving of these realities, of a history extending beyond Wretch 32’s immediate reality. It was a charting of the political, social and cultural forces and history that preceded his entry into the world. In that way, this album, and his wider discography, are an extension of the work and legacy started by the generations of his family who came before him.
Home? is out this spring; the single Black and British ft Little Simz is out now.
Source: theguardian.com
