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. 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. 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. But while he has been a UK sensation for some time, this is his first concert in the US.
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. “Drake said: ‘Take care of him,’” the roadie says before the show, acknowledging the difficulties Cee faces. “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.
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. (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. Removing his coat reveals a bulky, diamond-studded chain that says Live Yours. “I read the comments [online], but only because I’m stable enough,” he says at one point. “What they say matters, but it doesn’t really mean nothing to my ego. Music is not my life. I’ve recorded one song this year; we’re nearly three months in.”
Born Oakley Neil HT Caesar-Su to an Irish mother and a Guyanese father, Cee was raised in Shepherd’s Bush, west London. 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. The wealth she had once known quickly ran dry. “There’s people who grew up on the same roads and have flown straight, but me, I was distracted by the hardship,” Cee says. “I could see everything negative in front of me. 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. He remembers when £10,000 was a lifetime goal.
At 13, he started making music with little outside influence beyond 2Pac’s Ghetto Gospel on MP3. He did regular jobs in the meantime, by which he mostly means dealing drugs. “When you’re coming from where I’m coming from, everybody from all walks of life, nine times out of 10, they had to do that. It’s like learning to ride a bike. In my little radius of Shepherd’s Bush, there’s like six, seven phones ringing all day long, making like £2,000 a day. Who do you think is making this money? It’s little kids,” he says, animated. “That’s why, this music thing, I find it quite strange. Because I’m telling my brothers’ stories. I’m telling all my people’s stories. They are just as important as me. You’re fascinated about my story. I don’t know why, because it’s all of ours.”
It wasn’t until he was a young adult that Cee started really studying rap, especially the science and commerce of it. “J Cole, Kendrick Lamar: I had to go and listen to these people for the first time. Even Jay-Z. So that was a fun time, because everything was clicking. I just remember lightbulbs.”
Cee started putting out music in 2017, inspired by the melodious trapwave sound that was engulfing the UK rap scene at the time. Listening now, he sounds nearly unrecognisable, the drab Auto-Tune in his singsong flows worlds away from the brutalist nature of his music today. He was, he says, “on this ‘pretty boy’ ting, kind of. That’s how people was perceiving me. I was just trying to find a sound and make money.”
One of his brothers, who is also a rapper, helped set Cee on his current course. “He was jumping in my car and rapping on real rap beats; pain beats, like Mobb Deep beats. It took me back. ‘You sound harder than me right now,’ that’s what I told him.” Inspired, Cee made a freestyle about Covid on Akon’s Locked Up beat, and things started coming together. The music he released in 2020’s pandemic months embraced the skittering hi-hats and sliding basslines of UK drill, and his rapping turned austere and jagged. That June, he put out Day in the Life, shedding his previous style. “Turn off the Auto-Tune, let’s hear how you really rap,” he quipped on the track. By October, there was Loading, his announcement as a major player, and five months later, he had a No 2 album to his name and was modelling for Drake’s Nike collection.
If Cee isn’t the biggest breakthrough UK rapper in the US, his rise is certainly the most meteoric. Some of it is serendipitous, the internet having collapsed the borders for K-pop idols, African giants and UK drill stalwarts alike. “I’ve definitely paid my forefathers their dues. They’ve come and bust down certain doors,” he says. “And the internet, TikTok – I can just reach so many people with just a click of a button. I was anxious about the American shows; I didn’t know what to expect. But I’m seeing the same characters in the crowd.”
The clearer path notwithstanding, Cee has sprinted down it thanks to a drill-adjacent sound with eclectic, chart-friendly samples. His global popularity is such that four of his tracks have broken the 200m-stream mark on Spotify (for comparison with his UK rap peers, Stormzy and Dave only have three between them). The rapper also knows how to best structure his verses. “I’ll tell you this in a mathematical way: when I rap, I never really end my lyrics on a word that could be misconstrued through my accent. I’ll never end saying ‘matter’ like ‘matt-uh’. If you” – an American – “sang ‘bitch is gay’, it would sound the same way how I say it,” he says with a grin.
This is a reference to the line that opens his massive viral hit Doja: “How can I be homophobic? My bitch is gay!” In a rap culture that isn’t always progressive on LGBTQ+ rights, this crude line may as well be a rainbow flag. Built on a sped-up flip of Eve and Gwen Stefani’s Let Me Blow Ya Mind, Doja went Top 5 in eight countries, the perfect powder keg for an explosive international breakout. With familiar production, cheeky lyrics, a celebrity namecheck (namely pop-rapper Doja Cat), it’s so absurd it’s funny, and just problematic enough to be gossipy and shareable.
Sudden success, especially sudden success based off selling the excess of a rap persona, can be overwhelming for a young artist, so how is Central Cee managing? “I think I’m level-headed, but recently I’ve been thinking maybe this is unhealthy. Maybe I’m really, really deluded,” he says with a laugh. “I’m about to buy a £3m yard like it’s nothing. But, bro, do you know what man was doing even a couple years ago? I ask myself: ‘Why am I not overwhelmed like everybody else seems to be?’ I think it’s because I think I deserve it.”
An opposing thought is often only seconds away, though, just as it is on his tracks. “That’s only one side of my mind. Because at the same time, I have a lot of survivor’s guilt where I don’t feel like I deserve anything that I have. I don’t know how I do it. I think it’s a survival instinct: what am I going to do, start going head over heels and lose this all? I just treat it as work.”
He compares his approach with that of the Louisiana rapper NBA YoungBoy. “There’s a lot of people that will testify that he’s shit because there’s no science to his thing, musically. What I think sells is his personality and his vulnerability in the music,” he says, having an epiphany. “Actually, that probably influenced me a lot.” Even through a muted delivery, he can convey many things concurrently. “When I rap, I’m in a neutral mood and I can relate to everything, every emotion that I’ve ever felt.”
There is a moral panic surrounding drill music around the world: some see it as an accelerant to violence. Cee won’t defend it from the pearl-clutchers, but he does laud its liberatory power for those that make it. “I’m super aware of the blessing this is having on my little community,” he says. “Just me succeeding is opening many doors, many more opportunities for good for the people that’s around. It trickles down.”
Before the show at Irving Plaza, the queue outside is wrapped around the block and full of Central Cee lookalikes. One nine-year-old fan named Ari – who is dressed the part in a black Jordan hoodie, an open-face balaclava and a trio of gold chains – gets to meet his idol when a note he wrote for the rapper makes its way backstage: “You’re my favourite rapper. Hope we can meet in person. My favourite song is Doja.”
As long as rap has existed there have been questions about the misogyny of its lyrics, and the sway it has over young minds like Ari’s. On recent single Me and You, Cee raps: “When I said that my bitch was gay, I didn’t mean that shit in a degradin’ way,” a clunky but earnest clarification, and he spares a few more words on the matter. “Rap can be very misconstrued by people who don’t relate to it. My mum will hit me, saying things like: ‘Why are you saying bitches?’ She had a lot of bones to pick with Let Go.” This is one of Cee’s biggest hits, with a chorus that ends: “You said that pussy mine so why’d you let it go / You’re such a ho”, but elsewhere on the track, Cee is emotionally astute as he thrashes about in post-breakup pain. “When we actually had a conversation about it, she had the whole wrong end of the stick. She thought I was saying things that I wasn’t actually meaning.”
To Cee, it is possible to hold more than one idea at the same time, even if they are contradictory: an attempt to make sense of the chaos of his psyche, where intrusive thoughts can win and rise to the surface. Although the likes of Ari may not see the nuance, expressing and processing these thoughts doesn’t mean they’re validated. “I have a positive relationship with my mother, with all women,” Cee says. “But at the same time, I get angry at my mum, sometimes. I might say something rude to her, to my girl. It’s just a human thing. And it comes out in my music.”
If there is something Central Cee is considering changing, it’s his process. After his hit mixtapes, he envisions a more comprehensive, live-feeling setup for his debut album proper. “Let’s go to one room and just camp out and work. I know that’s how real musicians do it,” he says, before backtracking a bit. “At the same time I’m kind of nervous to do it, though. Because what I’m doing right now works for me.” It can be hard to argue that when you see the songs go off live: any questions seem to disappear into the squirming heap.