When you hear grime you hear London, you hear the Tottenham in Wretch 32’s easy flow, you hear the Tower Hamlets tilt of Wiley. But when you hear M1llionz, you’re hit by something different, not as northern as Bugzy Malone’s Mancunian tones, but something distinguishably Brummie. Something distinguishably new.
What you’re hearing when you listen to M1llionz is the sound of Handsworth, an inner city, ethnically diverse, deprived area of Birmingham noteworthy for the series of riots that erupted down its high street in the 80s, and its incredible legacy of music.
Despite a population of just over eleven thousand, Handsworth has been the home or birthplace to musical luminaries from Black Sabbath’s lead guitarist Tony Iommi, reggae legends Burning Spear, Alton Ellis and Dennis Brown, and spoken word genius Benjamin Zephaniah.
The Midlands has always been a quietly thriving hotbed of musical talent for inner city genres.
Britain’s new London to Birmingham motorway, the M1 (Photo: Keystone)
Devilman put Birmingham on the grime map when he clashed with Skepta at Lord of the Mics 2, driving down alone from Brum to appear in a close battle opposite Big Smoke’s fat London entourage, Mike Skinner through The Streets became the voice of the discontented working class through his stark spoken-word garage compositions and Jaykae has been a UK Hip-Hop mainstay for a number of years without ever really getting the deserved recognition of his London contemporaries. (In an interview with Gasworks he repeatedly mentions how he is still not ‘established’).
But now, the noise from the Midlands is so loud it’s deafening.
Pa Salieu, from Coventry, is one of the most fascinating and versatile voices in all of UK music, Lady Leshurr is a brilliantly acerbic rapper and a queen of punch lines, MIST, one of Brum’s finest, had a top 5 album release. But at the forefront of this surge of Midlands talent is M1llionz.
Technically, he’s one of the most interesting and experimental MCs on the scene, his bars short, no word wasted meaning every syllable has maximum impact. The lyrics flow with a liquid quality, with no clear breaths or concerted effort to break up his lines.
It’s prose akin to a James Ellroy novel – a bar on its own doesn’t look like much but the cumulative effect of the lines layer up into a rhythmic punch that is both ugly and utterly addictive. And like the American demon dog of crime fiction, M1llionz is a narrator of noir, only instead of the shadowy, sun-bleached outlaws of Los Angeles, he tells tales of Birmingham gangsters hustling to flip a pack or bag a girl without getting shanked.
Over the last year, drill has become an unstoppable music force: a genre bagging its first number 1 single, its first number 1 album with Headie One’s Edna and all this despite a swath of oppression and censorship from the musical gatekeepers – particularly on YouTube where even big artists like OFB would have their accounts taken down.
It’s a complex genre – an offshoot of the dying grime genre and the Chicago drill beats of the mid-2010s. In every way, while its lyrical content is often criticised for its overt depiction of criminality – there is little doubt that it is a genre of truth-telling – rarely trading full on morally dubious braggadocio for a genuine effort to describe the truth of this life, and also providing a framework to make money in a legal way.
Hills of Jamaica
This is a genre that has crucially made overnight superstars. Two years ago M1llionz was a complete unknown, not long out of prison when he dropped ‘North West’, a song that dropped a pin the weight of an anvil on the map of the UK. A tribute to the city that raised him, it’s a remarkably vivid and critical portrait of a young outlaw life that offers clear insight into the nihilism of road life.
What is most notable about ‘North West’ is the clarity of M1llionz’s Birmingham accent, there’s no attempt to develop a London cadence, it’s unmistakably Brum – made even more obvious by the song’s odd staccato flow that leaves you feeling every timbre change of every line.
What is also very apparent in M1llionz’s music, right from the start, is the influence of Jamaica over his sound. Vybz Kartel, Mavado and Beenie Man were the soundtrack of his upbringing and he incorporates dancehall rhythms into the ominous drill basslines merging two cultures and creating something that is simultaneously street and radio friendly.
Gravelly Hill Interchange, Birmingham, 1972. (Photo: R. Viner)
The Jamaican influence is most apparent in the bombastic ‘Lagga’, slang for ‘stupid’ in his ancestral home. It’s a vivid, effervescent track, throbbing out of its bassline, with a flow ready made for the club, the hook perfect to wail down the motorway as you push the speed limit. It’s this fusion of cultures and genres that make M1llionz such an interesting artist, all of his lyrics are patois heavy to the point of being borderline indecipherable to the untrained ear, not shirking, but placing his Jamaican roots at the forefront of his music.
There’s a restless innovation to M1llionz, he wants to be King of the streets and the charts without compromising his artistic integrity one bit. Incorporating dancehall means greater radio play, international appeal but his adherence to the venomous pulse of drill beats mean he never loses his soul to commercialism. Expressing interest in making moves with everybody from Ed Sheeran to Lil Durk to Buju Banton, M1llionz, in true rap fashion, wants the world.
Notably for drill artists, M1llionz has so far evaded the contempt of the authorities. Whilst many of his contemporaries are halted from touring, forced to submit lyrics to the police and victims of nervy politicians who fail to understand yet another subset of youth culture (even The Beatles had songs banned from the radio), M1llionz has been allowed to grow without restraint.
Being from Birmingham has helped this, it means he is away from the postcode feuds that are a staple of the scene in the capital which the authorities are incredibly twitchy over. And whilst he has fell over the thin blue line in the past, it’s from this darkness his musical brilliance came into the light. Ambitions of rap stardom were far from substantial when he put North West together, he was just a dude who rapped a bit but that tune took off online and around the Birmingham scene and he became the rose that flowered out of concrete.
Drill could only have come up over the last decade. Just as punk is the sound of the miner’s strikes and Thatcher and grime is the sound of ASBOs for placing radio antennas on top of high rises and banning hoodie campaigns, drill is the sound of austerity, of decimating school cutbacks and increasingly perilous work – sometimes criminal – and housing situations.
he became the rose that flowered out of concrete
M1llionz is part of the spread of drill past London, there’s even a thriving Irish scene these days and the differences are apparent. M1llionz does not sound like Bandokay who does not sound like Newcastle’s Simba Shore. He’s furiously Brum, you walk down Handsworth’s seemingly open 24/7 high street and you’re guaranteed to hear his voice reverberate over some sinister keys and unchained, off-key drums being played so loud it could disintegrate windows.
The UK is heavily regionalised, economically and culturally, and the hyper-local drill scenes popping up all over the country are being allowed to blossom organically as artists sprout out of their local area. Because as word of mouth spreads, it’s clear M1llionz does not just want to be the biggest artist in Birmingham, he wants to be the biggest artist full stop.
