He remembers when £10,000 was a lifetime goal. And that’s what led me to rap.” He picked up writing poetry aged eight from his mum, prompted by his desire for the things he didn’t have: a phone, a bike, clothes.
“I could see everything negative in front of me. “There’s people who grew up on the same roads and have flown straight, but me, I was distracted by the hardship,” Cee says. The wealth she had once known quickly ran dry. He says his mother’s parents were well off and that she went to boarding school, but she met Cee’s dad, a hustler, when she was 15, and started a relationship, rebelling against her parents’ wishes. I’ve recorded one song this year we’re nearly three months in.”īorn Oakley Neil HT Caesar-Su to an Irish mother and a Guyanese father, Cee was raised in Shepherd’s Bush, west London. “What they say matters, but it doesn’t really mean nothing to my ego. “I read the comments, but only because I’m stable enough,” he says at one point. Removing his coat reveals a bulky, diamond-studded chain that says Live Yours. (He loves candles.) Reclining on the sofa in a Yankees fitted cap, a puffer jacket and grey sweatpants, he does a lot of talking with his hands, one of which is filled with overlapping script tattoos and the number 23 across his ring and little fingers. In the hours before Cee goes on, his team preps the backstage ambience to his liking, which includes a few unusual items for a rapper, most notably a Diptyque scented candle. “In America, getting into UK hip-hop is tough, unless you’re really into it.” But the 24-year-old has made short work of any obstacles thus far Cee refers to his music as “ignorantly conscious”, and that clashing dichotomy is what has made it so infectious. “Drake said: ‘Take care of him,’” the roadie says before the show, acknowledging the difficulties Cee faces. Help is on hand from the biggest rapper in the world, Drake, who sent his own tour technician to make sure Cee has a smooth stint on the road. But while he has been a UK sensation for some time, this is his first concert in the US. Cee specialises in expressive streams of consciousness that contain a matrix of paradoxes – romantic and realist, hard and unguarded, nostalgic and present – and, crucially, he’s boyband-pretty.
The London rapper’s first two mixtapes – Wild West, from 2021, and 23, from 2022 – debuted at No 2 and No 1 in the UK, and he was nominated for British artist of the year at this year’s Brits alongside Harry Styles and Stormzy. A writhing mass of arms and torsos, armed with cameraphones and the occasional vape, surge towards Central Cee as he takes on one of American hip-hop’s rites of passage: a show in New York City’s Irving Plaza.
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