“He’s the reason why I’m here today. This was God.”
God graced us with his presence that evening. A towering black Adonis preaching to the masses, making believers of us all. It’s an image that will stay with me forever. I say image – it’s more a work of art. As Blinded by Your Grace Pt 2 nourished the souls of the converted onlookers, Stormzy paused. Just for a moment. A moment of stillness so gloriously timed it had surely been choreographed by a higher power.
The UK’s most influential grime artist
The grime landscape may well be sceptical of religion, but we were witnessing the ultimate vindication of a lifelong devotion to faith. A child raised by the streets of south London preaching gospel on the largest stage of them all. That evening, faith rewarded Stormzy as he became the most influential grime artist the UK has ever produced.
As certain as this spiritual declaration may have seemed, it was a long time in the making. Defined by their use of syncopated backbeats pulsating 140 times per minute, grime artists stand on the shoulders of their hip-hop predecessors.
The genesis of hip-hop lies in faith, a commodity its founding fathers (Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Sugar Hill Gang) needed for survival in a hostile 1980s New York. Grime, by contrast, is the heathen child hip-hop wished it never had, where addressing religion remains a privilege reserved for the established few within the genre (Stormzy and Christianity, JME and Islam).
Stormzy’s early work
A self-confessed child of grime, Stormzy’s tentative first steps into the world of music were markedly unreligious; the few references to faith in his earliest releases (Mike Lowrey, Gunshot) are as fleeting as they are inconsequential.
The absence of obvious statements of faith within his music, even as he entered the mainstream performing Not That Deep on Later with Jools Holland in 2014 and going viral with Shut Up a year later, reflects a level of artistic deception. Stormzy by no means lost his faith in that time, but he needed to secure mainstream legitimacy before he could become an activist with his music.
If so, this deception ended abruptly with the release of his 2017 debut album Gang Signs & Prayer, affirming Stormzy had finally accepted faith and grime could work together, in tandem.
“Something that’s come from my soul”
This shift in his artistic process was so overt, the album cover depicts Stormzy at The Last Supper, a Jesus of unapologetic blackness among his balaclava-laden disciples. Such was the significance of this shift, he couldn’t even describe his 2022 album This Is What I Mean as grime music:
“It’s a soul album. When I say soul album, I don’t mean soul music. It’s just something that’s come from my soul.”
But how did Stormzy rationalise this inability to express his faith through music?
Sacrifice and devotion to music
An assessment of Stormzy’s earliest work shows his willingness to promote himself as a god, cultivating the relationships all celebrities of his stature have with fans who know only his media portrayal, even if explicit reference to faith is missing in his early work.
In his 2014 WICKEDSKENGMAN [PART 2] freestyle, Stormzy positions himself as the superior. A tall, burgeoning figure dressed in white, relegating his compatriots dressed in black to the shadows of irrelevance.
Donning the now infamous Union Jack bulletproof vest at Glastonbury, he once again intentionally positions himself as the numen; a grime artist prepared to sacrifice himself for the enjoyment of his devotees watching on.
On reflection it is no coincidence that he portrays himself as a god. As we all do, Stormzy has moulded himself on that which he respects most, embodying his saviour while his music could not.
Faith in a ‘progressive’ world
With statistics showing ever fewer people in the UK hold faith – neither in religion nor in the state institutions that guard our future prosperity – the justification for faith has never been stronger.
Through the application of his faith for social good (#Merky Books, Stormzy Scholarship) Stormzy subverts the atheistic paradigm that rationalism will be our ultimate saviour, securing faith’s place in our ‘progressive’ world.
Reflection on how the piece is informed by Orwell’s influence
“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.” This paraphrased quote from Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia III reminds us of the inevitability of faith, even in a post-enlightenment world.
Orwell’s lifework may offer a consistently impassioned critique of faith and its institutions, but a closer inspection reveals faith to be something that was as necessary for Orwell as it was for Newton.
Labelled a ‘Christian Atheist’ by Robert Gray, Orwell readily partook in Christian culture despite his literary output demonstrating his conceptual rejection of religion to be a contradiction in terms.
In a 1932 letter to then love-interest Brenda Salkeld, Orwell addressed this directly and with indifference: “It seems rather mean to go to [Holy Communion] when one doesn’t believe, but I have passed myself off for pious & there is nothing for it but to keep up the deception.”
From examining the merits of Christianity (Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool, 1947) and the solace that can be found therein (A Clergyman’s Daughter), through to outright rejecting faith as a concept (1984 as an allegory of the dangers of Christian theocracy, the ‘lies put about by Moses’ in Animal Farm), Orwell’s dichotomous internal conflict between the social value of religious affiliation in his personal and professional life remains a profound tenet within his work.
While Orwell and Stormzy differ vastly in artistic discipline and frame of reference, Orwell’s religious conflict and subsequent (if reluctant) acknowledgment that personal faith was necessary in a progressive world mirrors Stormzy’s acceptance of grime being a legitimate platform for gospel in an unfaithful world.
Both artists and their respective works show that, while incongruous with the social structures in which society operates, faith can be, and arguably ought to be, rationalised in progressive society.
