Hak Baker, growing up in East London.
Hak Baker sounds like a white stereotype, he sounds cockney, he sounds Chas n Dave. He sounds like a twenty-first century update.
He talks about growing up in East London with such glee and melancholy, running through memories and anecdotes. Even though the memories are melancholic, he owns each memory, each one, builds him, makes him proud, of being from East London.
Then he drops the word ‘nigger’ into his lyrics, and you automatically get that he is black.
And then when I put the two things together – I get the impression of coming into contact, for the first, a new product of the twentieth century, a Black man who has adopted some kind of East London cockney stereotype – and seems – at least musically – to have pulled it off and to be completely at peace with it. And if he is at peace with it, I think, then, so must the people around him – and it sends my mind boggling about these new types who have emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century.
People who are breaking the mould of what it means to be Black, Cockney and an East Londoner. It feels fantastic, foreign and a mystery to me all at the same time.