One Thursday evening last month, the rapper Central Cee performed in New York City for the first time in his young and rapidly ascendant career. Central Cee—or Cench, as his fans affectionately call him—is British, and a Manhattan stage can sometimes feel like a proving ground for a newcomer. Instead, thanks to the familiarizing power of the Internet, the frenzied, sold-out show, which was at Irving Plaza, felt like a homecoming. Cench once rapped that he’s “not performin’ if I can’t come with all of the guys,” but in a gesture of confidence he began the show alone, backed only by an impassioned d.j., who queued up tracks behind his laptop, shouting lyrics into a microphone at key moments. This tactic, usually deployed to drum up excitement, was, by and large, unnecessary; the audience had come prepared to sing along to every word. “How many of you lot have ever been to London before?” Cench asked the crowd, eliciting a wave of screams. “I’m all the way in New York,” he said, and added, “I hope I can paint a picture for you to understand where I come from.”
Onstage, Cench wore an oversized chain and a classic Yankees cap. The latter might have simply been a topical accessory, but it also brought to mind the shared DNA of contemporary New York rap and Cench’s music. In the past three years, Cench has become one of the most prominent ambassadors of the U.K.’s thriving drill scene. Drill, originally inspired by a brutalist wave of hip-hop from Chicago, has become a dominant strain of British rap in the past decade. The signature drill sound—characterized by cold, off-kilter 808s and swaggering gruffness—was eventually exported back to the States by way of Brooklyn rappers. Their sound has, in recent years, crept into the mainstream, adding a truly international chapter to the history of street rap. Across the pond, Cench is a home-town hero, but to a New York crowd he offered an intoxicating mix of the exotic and the familiar.
As his music has travelled farther from home, Cench has often acted as a game tour guide to anyone new to the universe of British rap. Last fall, he visited an American hip-hop institution, the Los Angeles radio station Power 106 FM. He was there for an appearance on a show hosted by L.A. Leakers, who are best known for a series of beloved YouTube videos in which guests freestyle. Freestyling is not exactly au courant among young American rappers, but it has been crucial to Cench’s success. He first made a name for himself in 2015, when he appeared on the prominent U.K. music platform Link Up TV. Back then, he was in the early stages of crafting his style, which was dense, digressive, and diaristic, full of references to intensely difficult lived experiences. But seven years later, during his L.A. Leakers appearance, his freestyling had taken on an air of levity. He performed a clever educational rap skit explaining the differences between British and American slang. “We don’t trap in abandoned buildings, shots get hit out of vacant flats / In other words, ‘apartments,’ hidden compartments get detached,” he rapped.
The lyrics were, in keeping with the modern approach to freestyling, too well crafted to have been impromptu, but the performance was such an acrobatic (and funny) feat of storytelling that the video quickly went viral. The song has become a staple of Cench’s live shows. “You want to learn some U.K. slang?” he asked the crowd in New York, before launching into the L.A. Leakers bit. Cench’s loquacious lyrical style didn’t dampen the crowd’s ability to sing along. Audience members relished the opportunity to show off their knowledge, proudly reciting U.K. street slang, such as “leng” (sexy girls), “skengs” (guns), “nanks” (pocketknives), and “prang” (paranoid). “In London, I’m ‘verified,’ ” Cench rapped. “In N.Y., I’m ‘valid.’ ”
The influence of U.K. drill has spread widely, but few British rappers have broken out in the United States. Cench is one of the rare exceptions. Reared in West London, a hotbed of rap talent and gang warfare, Cench was exposed to a variety of local influences. The mixtape “17,” one of his early releases to streaming platforms, from 2017, was more like R. & B. than like rap, and it sounds as if it drew heavily from the Caribbean influences that surrounded him. He often filtered his vocals through Auto-Tune. This was a move he later scorned, as he developed a more unforgiving street-rap style. “Turn off the Auto-Tune, let’s hear how you really rap,” he taunts on “Day in the Life,” a standout from his 2021 mixtape, “Wild West.” He punctuates the line with a snide endcap. “Ha-ha,” he quips.
In an interview with a British publication in 2021, Cench discussed “Wild West.” “It is all drill,” he said. “Well, actually, I don’t know if I do drill, or what it exactly is.” Although he picked up steam as a drill star, earning the affection of celebrities including Drake and Ed Sheeran, Cench’s crossover moment came by way of American pop music. Last summer, he released a track called “Doja,” named for the chart-topping chameleon Doja Cat. The song relies heavily on a sample of Eve’s slinky 2001 hit “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.” If sampling was once meant to display a producer’s credibility through the use of esoteric source material, it has become a much blunter tool in the age of TikTok. Now Y2K-era hits are being used to add rocket fuel to an artist’s career. The road-tested appeal of “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” turned Cench into a global pop crossover.
There are plenty of reasons that someone like Cench would want to graduate beyond the confines of drill’s unsparing style. There are personal and commercial rewards to be had by making sweeter songs. But, for British rappers, evolving one’s style beyond street rap is also a genuine matter of survival. In the U.S., there are ongoing debates about whether rap lyrics that mention drug use or violence should be admissible in court as evidence of intent to commit a crime. In the U.K., where there are fewer protections against censorship, authorities already comb through rappers’ lyrics and music videos for legal ammunition. Digga D, another rapper from West London—and a huge breakout talent in the drill scene—was ordered by a judge, in 2018, to cease releasing any music that referred to gang violence. He also has to notify the police twenty-four hours before putting out new music, and to provide them with the lyrics, until at least 2025. This policing practice—and moral panic—has an outsized effect not just on the careers of individuals but on the genre as a whole. It has likely compelled British rappers to be nimble in evolving their slang in an effort to outsmart the police. For Cench, turning violent slang into a cutesy educational shtick for digital audiences, rather than crafting world-weary street-corner narratives, could also be an incidental act of self-preservation.
Cench seems to be actively grappling with this push and pull, even during his live shows. At the concert in New York, he tempered the expectations of anyone in the crowd who might have expected wall-to-wall party music. “Anybody can do the turn-up thing,” he said. But when it came time to close the show, everyone was prepared for the grand finale, “Doja.” In an effort to pay respect to the song’s origins, Cench’s d.j. has made a habit of playing a snippet of the original Eve song first. In New York, this caused a rare moment of boredom. When Cench launched into his own version of the song, however, the audience roared to life. He pointed the microphone into the crowd, prompting it to complete the performance on his behalf, confident that everyone in the room spoke his language. ♦
