Vulnerable Hip-Hop: The Authenticity of Loyle Carner

By Issy Bowyer

South London hip-hop artist Loyle Carner is one of the most distinctive voices in popular music. Carner’s music reaches deep inside his own personal emotional landscape and externalizes that sometimes traumatic landscape through his lyrics. The authenticity of Carner’s music is primarily produced through the direct honesty of his lyricism and its narration of his life story, evident in his first two albums Yesterday’s Gone (2017) and Not Waving, But Drowning (2019), poetic representations of his grief, his family, and his experience of ADHD. In his 2022 album, Hugo, Carner again sings about his personal fears, but expands this to engage with his Guyanese identity and politics.

In the two earlier albums, Carner uses his personal experience of grief as material for his songs. In his early single Tierney Terrace, he raps over a melancholic guitar riff and driving drumbeat, broken up only by a few mournful seconds of an organ playing softly. He raps about the shock of the death of his stepfather, a greater presence in his childhood and teen years than his estranged biological father, and the immediate responsibility he then had for providing for his mother and younger brother. At twenty, Carner hadn’t perfected his flow; his musical sound and ideas were raw, but this rawness effectively expressed his grief. Sun of Jean is musically unique in its sampling of his deceased stepdad’s unreleased album and a poem composed and read by his mother. Here, Carner’s grief is subverted, turned into something positive – a way of immortalizing his parents who mean so much to him. The authenticity we feel in this track comes from the different ways Carner sees grief in his life coming together: he brings back his stepdad by giving him a presence on the track, and brings his parents back together by combining their artistic expression.

Carner’s lyricism is not just characterised by the emotional value of what he says, but also how he says it. The Isle of Arran (the title a nod to his grandfather’s home in Scotland), a track about losing faith, is brimming with quiet anger, the many voices of the choir build tension throughout the track, repeating “the lord will make a way” throughout, the melody of this phrase mimicked by the bass guitar. Carner’s lyrics make ‘fathers’ interchangeable: “Know that I've been holding out, hoping to receive him/I've been holding out for G but he was nowhere to be seen/When I was bleeding”, the ambiguous ‘G’ symbolising both God, and his biological father. He raps that he has been doing the hard work himself but in the hope that his estranged biological father will change and step in, just like the hope people have that God will intervene and help them. After communication from neither, Carner resolves not to hold out for his father anymore, in the same way that someone might abandon religion when their prayers go unanswered.

In last year’s Hugo, Carner explores how his relationship with his biological father has changed. In the track HGU, which begins with a hopeful, rippling piano chord, he raps: "I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you/and I hope that it continues after everything you've been through”, the rawness of his voice is reminiscent of Tierney Terrace, almost like he is holding back tears. Carner forgives him not because it will give his father closure, but because it will “set himself free”. The end of the track includes a sample of conversation between himself and his father, which, like his stepfather’s piano playing in Sun of Jean, effectively immortalises his father in Carner's music. The relationship between father and son is new and tentative, and Carner sharing this, following the anger of The Isle of Arran, is the artist's vulnerability at its best.

Fathers and vulnerability come into play again in Lasting Place; the track is mellow, with a soft echoing piano riff and relaxed drumbeat, and explores Carner's anxieties about losing fame, becoming a father himself, and getting older: “staring back at the reflections of a grown man/but I don't want to be an old man”. Carner’s twenty-something year old desire not to lose his youth, popularity and hairline, or face up to the responsibilities of fatherhood are mundane enough, but the track’s gut-punch comes from the poem halfway through, read by Carner’s partner, and the sound of their baby boy babbling resulting in his mother’s giggles in the background: "What kind of man weeps at the feet of his wife in pain/Holds up the pink and shrieking thing and feels the throb of time?" Because the poem is spoken by a mother within a father’s rap about fatherhood, we are forced to simultaneously think of what it means to be a mother and to be a father, of absent fathers and the presence of mothers, of responsibility and of a father's love.

Though Carner raps about racism and politics in his previous music, Hugo’s exploration of his identity as a black man living in London, of UK politics and Scottish and Guyanese identity is musically and emotionally more developed. Carner’s exploration of his Guyanese identity and the music he encountered there is most evident on the track Georgetown. Named after the capital city of Guyana, the track utilizes instrumentation drawn from Caribbean music, notably the baseline that repeats throughout the track, a constant support beneath Carner’s lyricism. On The Sound Odyssey Podcast: ‘Loyle Carner in Guyana’ (2019) Carner collaborated with Guyanese flautist and composer Keith Waithe, “a leading figurehead and champion of Guyanese culture”. Though Carner stays true to his previous rap style and lyricism on the track, the instrumentation is influenced by Waithe’s Guyanese music, producing a sound that is both familiar to Carner’s style though somehow also completely new. On the podcast Carner says of Guyanese music: "It's giving me a black identity and I've never had that before, so to me that's everything". In Hugo (2022), Georgetown is a project that does something similar; Carner raps about his black identity repeating the lines “I’m black like the key on the piano/white like the key on the piano” throughout the track. The lines are a reference to the poem by John Agard, a poet and playwright born in Georgetown, who features on the track himself at its beginning and end. The poem is significant to Carner’s Scottish and Guyanese identity as it explores the experience of being mixed race in the UK.

Carner raps about the experience of being black and living in the UK in other tracks on Hugo.  Blood On My Nikes, in which Carner raps over an echoing piano note that sounds over and over and what sounds like a siren sample, raises the issue of knife crime in London that statistically predominantly affects young black men and boys, an issue stemming from “poverty, inequality, austerity, and a lack of opportunity”, to quote the track itself. The speech at the end of the track is a recording of the speech given by Youth MP Athian Akec at the Youth Parliament. He finishes with: “As knife crime claims more lives within our country/Never has so much been lost by so many/Because of the indecision of so few”. These few lines of the powerful speech reference and re-write the familiar words of Winston Churchill, criticising government incompetence, and politicians who ignore the reasons for this happening, ignoring their own fault in this issue. Carner gives voice to a young black boy from Camden, Athian Akec, someone directly affected by this issue, to articulate its severity. In doing so he promotes a voice of the black youth of London, showing how children and teens have a far better understanding of the issue, of its causes and ways to tackle it,than the pre-dominantly white, middle aged UK government,. On the track Carner articulates the suffering and trauma of a community, and the way in which it effects individuals: the opening line “Yo, I was just a kid, I was barely sixteen” and the chorus that softly repeats “Mama, I lost a friend” and “Mama, I lost again” communicate how for Carner this is an issue of both collective and personal trauma, and the tragedy that it is children who are experiencing this trauma and loss. The track grieves lives lost and articulates current fears, though it also is a political act: Carner challenges the UK government and calls them out for how they have failed young black people in London – Blood On My Nikes is authentically both a song of mourning and of rebellion. Hugo gives further, authentic expression to the pain and vulnerability of Carner’s lived experience. These are emotions that are relatively unusual in male hip hop and that give his music its distinct voice. Though vulnerable black masculinity is not the common image projected by the majority of male hip-hop artists; for Carner, it is the raison d’etre of his music and the source of its raw energy and power.