The London rapper JME has been making records for more than a decade. He’s a fixture in the grime world. With his brother Skepta, JME co-founded the Boy Better Know collective. He’s made a whole lot of bangers, both alone and with Skepta. And yet it’s possible that JME has never done anything cooler than the bit in the middle of his new “Nang” video where he’s standing out in the middle of a highway overpass, rapping while eating cereal.
Some background: Late last year, JME released the album Grime MC. At first, he only released the album on physical media and as a digital download, not on the streaming services. If you wanted to hear it, you had to pay some money. Lately, JME has been putting the album up online, one extremely cool and artistically shot music video at a time. Yesterday afternoon, he dropped the video for his track self-produced “Nang,” which is both a Skepta collab and an absolute banger.
Director Matt Walker opens the video with a long drone shot, panning over a busy highway and slowly zooming in on a lone overpass. We watch as JME casually sidesteps a speeding SUV, then slowly turns his attention to the camera. He’s standing there, in the middle of this road, in a bathrobe and a durag, no shirt, holding a bowl of cereal, rapping at the camera. It’s so cool. The later scenes — JME in front of a graffiti Big Bird mural, Skepta in a warehouse — are both cool, but that opening shot is an all-timer. (Also, JME comes with a truly great UK rap punchline: “Mandem are making history/ You man can’t do shit to me/ When you see me, I got the same energy, but you ain’t saying nothing like Mr. Bean.”) Watch it below.
Grime MC is out now on Boy Better Know.