Music: Central Cee moves up a gear

Central Cee

3Arena, Dublin

The lithe, inked man who is arguably the biggest rapper in Britain climbs out of a silver car parked on stage, an unlikely entrance captured on 13,000 glowing phones. Like virtually every rapper before him, Central Cee has a back catalogue full of self-aggrandisement. Umpteen rhymes boast of his designer label drip. The title of the 26-year-old’s debut studio album for a big label, released in January, is a typically cocky quip: Can’t Rush Greatness.

Later in the show, he will wear a giant bejewelled chain from which the profile of the late Queen Elizabeth II dangles, part patriotic act, part celebration of money. It would be logical for an artist whose streams now rank in the billions to flex hard by stepping out of one of the many luxury vehicles he routinely gets excited about in his tracks; a Lamborghini Urus, say, or any of the fleet of cars mentioned on Band4Band, a 2024 hit for Cee and US rapper Lil Baby, off CRG.

The humble Toyota Yaris he emerges from, though, is foundational to Oakley Neil Caesar-Su’s rags-to-riches hero’s journey. He used to drive one when he was a broke pretender from Shepherd’s Bush, west London, dreaming of leaving the street life behind.

Mentioned on a few of his tracks, Central Cee’s progress from Yaris to Urus appeared most recently on Sprinter – a tune about cars and girls starring the artist himself and fellow British hip-hop hero rapper Dave – which broke records by spending 10 weeks at No 1 in the UK singles chart last year. He drops it near the end of the set. For a rapper whose even bigger claim to fame is breaking the US – something no previous UK MC has done to the degree Caesar-Su has, with a top 10 Billboard album chart placing – foregrounding your basic former runaround is an act of wry British self-deprecation. It would be hard to imagine a US driller such as Chief Keef hitting the top of the US charts, then hanging out of the window of an old Honda Civic.

But then, Central Cee comes riddled with sufficient contradictions to intrigue. Within a standard framework of road rhymes – selling drugs, the trauma of the trap life, racking up sexual conquests, pursuing money – some good lines will jump out. (He doesn’t play 2023’s Entrapreneur tonight but it boasts a zinger: “We put the trap in the entrepreneur, all of the time that we spent in the field, woulda thought that I got me Ballon d’Or,” it goes, referencing the football award.)

Sexism is not an unfamiliar element in hip-hop, but occasionally Cee will drop lines that hint at some emotional intelligence – such as 2021’s Commitment Issues – or even vulnerability towards the opposite sex. But he is arguably most famous for one puerile line: “How can I be homophobic? My bitch is gay!” from Doja (2022), the song that broke him internationally.

There are a number of reasons, then, why the biggest rapper in the UK might not be quite the best rapper in the UK. Cee’s frequent collaborator Dave is more insightful. On the collaborative title track to CRG, Dave effortlessly topped Cee with a line about how the pair’s pain has paid for their properties: “heart acres”. Cee’s arch-rival, Mancunian rapper Aitch, meanwhile, won the 2023 hip-hop/rap/grime Brit Cee wanted (the subject of diss tracks the pair have traded) and seems to be more naturally comfortable in his own skin. (For context, Cee just won his seventh Mobo.)

But from the Yaris on in, there’s a surprising amount to warm to in Central Cee’s victory lap arena tour. Above all, his output is about not shirking hard work and always looking after your mum and your own. (From Limitless: “I put up the bread for my broski’s funeral, that was my first time bookin’ a hearse.”)

Until recently, drill was perhaps the most controversial genre the UK has ever witnessed, with the authorities linking specific tracks and its frequently masked artists to knife crime, censoring the former and jailing a number of the latter. Drillers such as Central Cee and Headie One – who went to No 1 in the UK in 2020 with a moving album, Edna, dedicated to his mother – took the genre’s bleak, brutalising street vignettes and levelled them up, providing more storytelling, greater emotional context and expanded musical reference points while keeping the stony-faced threat.

To call Central’s Cee’s iteration of drill “poppy” would be disrespectful – there is a lot of hard-earned wisdom and suffering in it – but its chant-along accessibility and TikTok-friendly succinctness is the reason a lot of very junior Irish road men (and excited young Dublin road women) are here on a school night.

All of Caesar-Su’s beats bounce like a karaoke cursor, and he rides those beats spectacularly well. If his delivery often recalls a machine-gun monotone – setting up build-ups and pay-offs, a stream of words that never falters – well, that’s the genre trope. His chiselled features are often set to menace, but Central Cee also has what you might call a “resting bewilderment face”, a permanently startled air that occasionally breaks into a boyish grin. This is a mic-drop kind of a tour. But, high above the crowd on an aerial bridge, he actually manages to drop his microphone accidentally.

Photograph Brid O'Donovan