Son of the Ends - Jesse James Solomon feat. Suspect (2017)

I'm still waiting for it to appear on streaming platforms. Until then, the YouTube video of this hypnotic UK rap classic by two lyricists painting a portrait of their south London ends will have to do

In the summer of 2017, the relatively tiny strip of south London that I called home was having a disproportionate impact on global hip-hop music culture. As I recount in my book Cut Short (2021), I worked as an education mentor in a secondary school near the hectic roundabout in Elephant & Castle, where the remains of Heygate Estate, formerly the biggest social housing estate in Europe, had been razed to make way for the shiny new build towers that now dominate the skyline, and the (eventually lost) fight to protect the old, crumbling shopping centre and its moat market at the roundabout’s core wore on. I lived two kilometres to the south in a flat in north Brixton whilst volunteering at a local youth club in Loughborough Junction. These two poles of my inner-city existence encased the quaint, concrete town of Kennington between them.

UK drill music was still in its infancy, barely acknowledged by adults but obsessively listened to by teenagers, especially in London, especially south-of-the-river. In April of that year I’d written the first story on the internet about the new British genre, interviewing 67 producer Carns Hill in a pub in Brixton Hill. The following January I would write a follow-up for Complex, juxtaposing Kennington’s flower garden, cricket crowds and cozy gastropubs with the harsh rawness and crazed success of local teenage drill crew Harlem Spartans, who were gaining tens of millions of views and streams for their rugged, bleak brand of music. Their temporary reign across 2016 and 2017, which helped to catapult British drill worldwide, would only last for so long, as tragedy and incarceration eroded the group’s togetherness — with baile-funk-inflected star boy Blanco, who I interviewed last year about his journey, the only core member still on the circuit.

Meanwhile, just round the corner, up the busy Kennington Park Road and into the quiet warren of residential roads and single-storey estate blocks, an adjacent but contrasting rap musical strain was telling a delicate counterbalancing story and alternative urban worldview to drill and Harlem Spartans’ young, trappy violence.

Jesse James Solomon had been riding the Soundcloud wave for a few years, building his name as a poet-rapper capable of piercing, thoughtful social commentary and intricate wordplay, since the release of his debut project Jesse From SE in 2014. Later, in 2018, he would put out Strata EP — a project whose name is dedicated to the unique building with three defunct wind turbines at its head that towers over this part of London, visible from aeroplane windows and the city’s reaches alike (Solomon painted the artwork himself)— and become a staple acquaintance of Skepta and Giggs. Earlier this year he put out a long-awaited project OIL☯WATER with producer MACK.

But it’s his June 2017 track Son of the Ends featuring fellow SE Londoner Suspect, released when both artists were in their early prime, that remains my favourite, a classic I return to again and again. Each time I am a a little more pained by its absence on streaming platforms yet still happy to see its crisp video by filmmaker Hector Dockrill.

Jesse and Sus sing and bark back to back, their ying-and-yang voices dovetailing over a hypnotic, energising instrumental by RedLee to frame a window into life off the ‘Wooly Road’, in the shadows of Strata and among arguably the city’s most hectic thoroughfare.

The name of this song inspired the title of Chapter 9 in Cut Short, ‘Sons of the Ends’, in which the book’s first tragic climax takes place.

Take it in.

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