“All UK rap videos look the same: same rented cars, same bling, same penthouse, same girls. It’s boring. I wanted a change.”
Grime veteran Shocka is ruminating on the instinct that made him reshape his career. Sipping a coffee in a Shoreditch, London, he looks every inch the socially conscious MC – tall, bearded, and conspicuously lacking designer logos. He’s riding high from the viral success of his latest single, the ridiculously catchy Self Love, an ode to positivity with a truly diverse cast for its video, which has been viewed by millions on social media (helped in no small part by a repost from rap’s favourite uncle, Snoop Dogg).
His message is the product of a topsy-turvy decade that has seen him move from underground fame to arena tours to a personal breakdown. He’s already been through the rise and fall – “This is the comeback”, he says.
Shocka rose to prominence as part of Marvell, a Tottenham trio of Shocka, Vertex and Double S, who came up under the tutelage of north London’s grime royalty: the likes of Ghetts and Wretch 32. The teenage Marvell were pioneers of the direct-to-fan mentality that the industry has now accepted is par for the course; they distributed their mixtapes for free via their own blog, which they kept updated with everything from classic Westwood freestyles to studio encounters with Drake and Rihanna. It was Instagram before Instagram. The BBC named Marvell as “Hot for 2010” alongside future chart-topper Tinie Tempah, and the tours started rolling in, first with Chip, then with Skepta, then with Diversity, the Britain’s Got Talent-winning dance troupe who were then the biggest act in the land.
“Diversity was the craziest experience of my life,” Shocka laughs. “We were playing arenas every night. I’d never seen anything of that magnitude. We had this proper hip-hop song called London to Atlanta – but the Diversity audience, they are not a hip-hop crowd. They were sitting there staring at us. We had to scrap the song from our set. The next night we just put a vocal over I Gotta Feeling and everyone was clapping along.”
The major labels were a mixture of interested and bemused. “They didn’t get why we were giving our music away,” sighs Shocka. “They were saying, ‘You lot have got it, but we don’t know how to market you.’ Let’s be honest, we were three black guys doing grime: they didn’t know what to do with us.”
Waiting in the wings were grime DVD outfit Risky Roadz, who had hustled up investment and were looking to move into running a label. They signed up Marvell, ploughed in cash, and sent them out on the road. Then things started to go wrong. The first single didn’t perform to expectations, and Risky Roadz abruptly pulled the plug. Shocka went from hyped artist to yesterday’s news, and he’s brutally honest about the consequences.
“Most artists have careers that are up and down, but I’d never had that,” he says. “From when I was a kid, I was always the comedian who gets attention. That decline, I wasn’t ready for it at all, and everything just deteriorated. I lost my girl, my house, the group broke up. I had a breakdown. I came home one day and just started screaming and shouting. I was shaking physically. Everything came crashing down and I had no answer for it. I was hospitalised and I had to put myself back together bit by bit.”
Aided by his friends’ open approach to his illness (“They just bust joke about it – they made me feel so comfortable, it helped me heal so much quicker”), Shocka rebuilt himself and, in time, started recording music – this time determined to impart meaning to the world. In 2017 he broke through with a freestyle dedicated to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire; recording directly into his camera phone, Shocka’s empathetic bars went viral. “I just spoke from my heart,” he says. “It’s the same with Self Love – it’s from the heart, celebrating all of those who have overcome their mental health issues, and for those still going through them. It’s a song to help people lift themselves up on their journey.”
With mental health still sometimes a taboo issue – especially in the often pitiless world of hip-hop – a tune like Self Love remains an outlier, but Shocka is convinced he’s going in the right direction. His approach – not following the industry standard approach to hip-hop, but going with what feels right – has the same single-minded energy as Marvell’s original social media savvy. “It still affects me, even me talking about it now gives me the jitters, it makes my voice shake,” he says of his lowest ebb. “But I have to confront it and put it out there, cos I know it’ll help someone else.”
