The Guardian
100
(Method Records)
On his debut album, the Northampton rapper swears at the Queen, dodges the far right and tries to pull a posh girl. It all adds up to a hilarious punk portrait of the nation
The UK is currently teeming with hot new rappers, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out how 24-year-old Tyron Frampton has attracted attention amid the post-Skepta, post-Stormzy deluge. In the serried ranks of young British MCs, he cuts a very anomalous figure. He certainly isn’t the only rapper for whom music represented an escape from a miserable-sounding life on a stigmatised council estate, but he may be the only one whose shift was inspired by both some kind of psychedelically enhanced epiphany and exposure to Radiohead’s Creep. His live shows have garnered huge interest, as well they might, given that he seems to regularly perform clad in nothing but his underpants and prepares for shows by donning boxing gloves and beating himself around the head.
He reps, as they say, not for south or east London, but Northampton, a town that resident Alan Moore – apparently an acquaintance of Frampton’s – has called “the centre of the universe” but has thus far been ignored in the capital-centric world of UK rap. “Yeah man, I’m a cobbler,” he spits on his debut album, which presumably constitutes hip-hop’s first shoutout for League Two strivers Northampton Town FC, before going on to mention the Spring Boroughs estate and the suburb of Moulton among Gorgeous’s litany of youthful misdemeanours.
Related: Slowthai: ‘I love this country but we’re losing sight of what makes us great’
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Thu May 16 11:00:38 GMT 2019