The savvy, quietly raging, rapidly rising, south London rapper Giggs is an interesting one. Especially if you're looking for a sign of something in the midst of ALL THIS FABULOUSLY AVAILABLE MUSIC that might connect not simply with how intensely pleasing pop can be, but how provocative. Pop that turns over reality and then explores the resultant new dynamic, as opposed to pop that assembles more and more attractive, distracting layers of synthesised reality. Such engaged, oppositional pop might be old fashioned, even dead. Or it might be the next big thing, a backlash against pert, pretty, post-reality iPop.
I'm of an age to call someone roughly other like Giggs "pop", but he more or less inhabits some highly specified area that flickers in and around hip-hop and gangsta rap and the knotty domestic deviation, grime, that added certain ragged home truths and electronically quarried sonic grit to grabby, waggish hip-hop alertness. Although branding Giggs as "thug rap" just media-boxes him in as stereotypical troublemaker aggressively glamorising violence, pragmatic Giggs pleads guilty. "I'm a thug," he gamely shrugs, because according to nervous, middle-British standards that's exactly what he is, "and I rap." The truth is more tangled and doesn't fit complacently established cultural patterns. You don't have to dig too far to uncover a distressed gentleness on the other side of the pilfered street poses, protective toughness and boastful defensiveness. He good naturedly indulges me as I explore the idea of him transcending certain stereotypes, but ultimately, there's a flickering, deflecting mask – of clothing, behaviour, gesture and language – that he must stay behind.
Born Nathan Thompson – he was nicknamed Giggs because of his tendency to slyly, even shyly, giggle, often at the absurdity of a given situation – he was influenced by the original sinners NWA and dirty south hip-hop. The hardcore American myths of fighting rivals, making it and escaping the hood mingle with the swagger, anxiety and wariness of an English black man born in broken Peckham in the early 1980s, raised by a feisty single mum, a father himself at 21, who ended up spending two years in jail on gun charges, numbly emerging in 2005 with a plan to better himself.
Living in the area that he did, intelligent but brutally ambushed by fate, race, education and history, he had three choices: "I could deal drugs, rob or rap. Who's going to give me a job with my record?" Inspired by one of his five brothers, he started to rap as a hobby. He "sold his businesses," desperate to embark on a legitimate new life. He made up sentences that helped explain to him, and therefore others in his dire, inhibiting situation, the bottled-up the pain he felt at being underestimated, pinned down, ignored, driven into the thieving, violence and ganged-up mischief that confirms all mercilessly applied stereotypes. He talked about what he knew. It wasn't pretty.
He worried that his voice was strangely low and slow and wasn't deft like his heroes', but there were those who rated it. It was something different, enough to separate him from all the competing others seeing rap as their escape. He drops some contesting declarations over a steamed-up astutely nabbed Dre beat. "Talkin' The Hardest" is a self-marketed undercover hit. His first album, Walk in Da Park, shifts thousands of independently pressed copies. He wins UK rapper of the year at the Black Entertainment Television awards in America in 2008, beating Chipmunk, Dizzee and co.
Words came to Giggs, gathering in a piled-up, motivated rhythm he had copped from Rakim and Young Jeezy. He didn't know he knew the words he thought up. "It's like the guy who painted the future in Heroes – my eyes roll white and this stuff comes." He gets tongue-tied talking about how great he feels when he comes up with a trippy image, a cracking rhyme, a tense punchline, the mute, beleaguered hoodlum society had made him into beginning to make a living. He is breaking away from a familiar, crushing cycle of despair and destruction, by being articulate and organised. By reforming himself.
For whatever the establishment now is, the idea of a black, British star transmitting an embittered, alienated slang that graphically illustrates urban blight, that draws unnerving attention to a tense, endlessly fracturing racial divide, is deeply unwelcome. Giggs having a voice is a threat. He faces being beaten back into his old life, or beating the deeply prejudiced system that even in apparently more enlightened times, never expects, or wants, an unruly, desensitised ruffian to transform into a transgressive, inspirational thinker.
According to the authorities, Giggs is still a potential riot-inciting menace, thickly eulogising vengeance and violence, using music to cover his tracks; a terrible example to susceptible youths who, apparently, will not be inspired by the grim, lonely, angry docu-dramas Giggs narrates to pull out of a wretched domestic imitation of gang life and find new ways to express and locate themselves. The obstructing forces of censorship and restriction slowly gather, while Giggs, ominously gaining in stature, signs to XL Recordings of Prodigy, Thom Yorke, MIA and Vampire Weekend fame. He's banned from appearing live in London venues. Radio would like him to be a little, or a lot, more Chipmunk. He says he has no intention of slipping back into a life of crime. "Better things to do." His ambition stretches to far-fetched America, where, he says, they're surprised to hear there are British blacks.
Can he make it – hard, progressive, conscientious, fighting free of the cliches – without losing his grip, dissolving into posture, whitening his stance, giving in to the softening, modifying temptations of post-real iPop fame? Will he have to float free of deeper, stranger truths in order to succeed or can he keep his sting? Like an episode of Lost, the questions keep coming. We can only hope the answers astound us.
