Jim Legxacy – the rise of an unconventional rapper

It’s a familiar hip-hop tale, but one given a dizzyingly fresh treatment here, with a hype-man voiceover intoning slogans: “It doesn’t get blacker than this, baby.” Meanwhile, cascades of pretty keyboards play off against a ticklish trap beat, and what sounds like half a dozen snippets of other songs flash by in the background. Amid this overloaded collage, Legxacy, in a crisp WrestleMania T-shirt, pogos around the stage.

With barely a pause, he and his band – live guitars, bass and electronics – change tack, with fatter beats and an effects-laden vocal sample. The next patchwork of sounds is sweeter and more tuneful than before, but just as messy. “Put my phone on DND ... DND,” Legxacy chants, pondering a complicated romantic entanglement (“She don’t like no rappers so I told her I’m a singer,” he croons with a grin). The track is called, with no little swagger, New David Bowie.

At 26, Legxacy – the x is silent – is three mixtapes and the same number of live gigs into a fidgety, unconventional body of work, one that marks the arrival of an agile new talent. His sound spans everything from the slinky swing of Afrobeats – the west African pop form that has gone international – to classic, heart-tugging singer-songwriter fare; from pacy indie rock to the Black British tunes of the 00s. It’s internet music – anything goes – but with terroir: it is grounded in James Olaloye’s first-generation Nigerian-Lewisham upbringing, showing how the past has created the present, but is also powered by a burning desire not to be pigeonholed.

Legxacy’s 2023 full-length outing Homeless N*gga Pop Music (abbreviated to HNPM) pointedly used the word “pop” in the title, shrugging off genre expectations. It also bore witness to a family crisis and his generation’s struggle to find places to live in an ever-gentrifying capital.

Alongside his versatility, vulnerability is Legxacy’s other trademark. On the first half of HNPM’s Block Hug – met with more screams tonight – he raps over little other than descants of broken-up acoustic guitars, expressing both love for, and fear of, the streets he lives on. “She told me hood n*ggas don’t cry / So when she broke my heart, I had a straight face,” he offers.

Legxacy had a busy 2023. In June, the Brit and Mercury-winning UK rapper Dave and his white-hot peer Central Cee co-released a track called Sprinter. It was a song about cars and girls – pop fodder since time immemorial. Sprinter spent 10 weeks at No 1 in the UK charts, breaking all records for homegrown hip-hop, and by 2024 it was the most-streamed British rap track of all time. Olaloye/Legxacy had a production and songwriting credit, having batted the track back and forth with Dave, a mentor. (Those chopped-up acoustic guitars are one sign of Legxacy’s involvement.)

Tonight, Legxacy makes no overt reference to what is ostensibly his greatest hit. Instead, he plays blasts of his most recent album, Black British Music (abbreviated to BBM), one of the most exciting records of this year. Released in July, it packs in a lot: mercurial production flair and a brace of tunes that defy categorisation. An undertow of emotion alternates with lyrical zings, not least one throwaway line about “sellin’ Charli to the brats”, in reference to Charli XCX. Again, the title sets out Legxacy’s stall. The record is interested in the history of UK grime and the Y2K era more generally: an animated BlackBerry is the record’s visual motif; the initials BBM also stand for BlackBerry Messenger.

The voiceover says it all: “We’ve been making arses shake since the Windrush.” But there are sad-boy guitar tunes too. The implication: this is also Black British music. BBM is one of a number of UK hip-hop releases this year that wrangle explicitly with the double helix identity of Blackness and Britishness – Wretch 32’s Home?, AJ Tracey’s Don’t Die Before You’re Dead and Little Simz’s Lotus are three notable examples. Fans have brought little union jacks to the gig, echoing the album’s artwork. But BBM is in a stylistic lane of its own, with its own hyper-specific stories to tell.

The album begins with a spoken-word track called Context, in which Legxacy recounts how the glow of his 2023 was offset by the death of his sister, his mother’s two strokes, his brother’s psychosis and a copyright squabble that ended in the track Candy Reign (!) being removed from streaming services. BBM’s main achievement may be Father, an intensely catchy song about growing up without one, where every use of the word is sampled from I Love My Father by George Smallwood – sped-up, chipmunk-style, like a 00s Kanye West production. Tonight, it’s over too soon – an unsatisfying set closer.

The emotional centre of the gig instead comes earlier in the evening, when Legxacy unexpectedly tackles BBM’s rawest track, the acoustic ballad Issues of Trust. The song is another double helix, weaving together his struggles with his father and the impact of his sister’s death. He faces away from the crowd to sing it. “I still can’t talk about it,” Legxacy croons, “running and running and running.” He becomes overwhelmed. Supportive cheers ramp up, louder than before; fans shout “We love you, Jim!” By the end of the song, he is singing facing forwards.

Photograph by Gary Calton/The Observer