Towards the end of 2015, Adnan Khan was working in a mobile phone shop in Rochdale, fixing broken screens and unlocking handsets. After his shift, he would go home and make hip-hop beats on his laptop and put them on his website. “I treated my music as my second job, working in the early hours of the morning.” He was small-time, selling the beats online for a couple of hundred quid a pop, although he adds that even then they “were selling like hotcakes”. A year later, The Life of Pablo, the Kanye West album he contributed a track to, was nominated for a Grammy.
“Yeah, a lot of people have said 2016 was bad, but for me it’s very, very good to be honest,” he says down the phone from his hometown.
Khan, AKA Menace, now 22, made the beat that would end up on Kanye’s album in one sitting in his bedroom at his parents’ house, where he still lives. He reckons it took him about 90 minutes, “but honestly, it’s hard to remember, I was just working on beats every night back then”. He put it on YouTube under the name Maniac but it didn’t do very well – about 10,000 views, less than some of his other beats. He thought little of it when a then-unknown Brooklyn rapper called Desiigner bought the beat for £200.
Desiigner used the beat on his song Panda, an initially low-key release in December 2015. Menace had no idea the song even existed until someone tweeted it to him. “I used to go back to that video every day to see the views. When I first saw it, it was roundabout 30k. After a week, it shot up to 300k. It was unreal, I felt shocked.” At the time of writing, Panda has been watched 193 million times on YouTube alone. It is hard to think of a bigger hip-hop track from this year.
Desiigner was quickly signed to Kanye West’s G.O.O.D music label; West was so excited by the track that he wanted to put elements of it on his own album. A few days before The Life of Pablo was released, he added “Pt 2” to the tracklist, which lifts the chorus and production from Panda.
Kanye’s support led to even more people hearing the original track. In May, Panda spent two weeks at No 1 in the US charts. Menace was quickly caught in a bidding war to sign him for publishing. He ended up signing, he says, a seven-figure publishing deal with Stellar Songs.
But his life has not changed immeasurably. After he signed the deal, he stopped working in the phone shop and started to focus on music full time, but he hasn’t had any contact with Kanye: “No. He’s a busy man, ain’t he?” He has production credits on songs by big US rappers including Tyga and Kid INK, due to be released in 2017. Right now, he is trying to sort out a visa so he can make it to the Grammys and meet Desiigner face to face for the first time. He says the application is almost sorted, but is taking longer than normal because “they have to do a full background check because of my last name”. Is it because it’s a Muslim name? “Yes, that’s what I think it was, because a lot of people with my last name are linked to terrorism, so it’s understandable.”
Menace doesn’t seem angry about this profiling. Despite his moniker he is a shy and polite local lad made good, not remotely menacing.
“Where I live, you don’t see many people make it. There’s a lot of bad media about Rochdale, you’ve probably heard about it, it’s always in the news. So at least I’ve done something positive for my home town, and for Manchester too. People can look at me and say: you’ve done something great for us.”
