Locals, by Cecil B & Ben Hauke; a dissection

by JJ Hunter

Note to readers – This article is a running commentary of Cecil B’s lyrics for Locals, used as jumping-off points for my own unresearched musings on the topic of his rap: Gentrification. I do not know Cecil B and have not communicated with him about the meaning behind his lyrics, so there’s every chance I’ve subconsciously misinterpreted him to suit my own agenda. If so, I’m sorry, Cecil. 

Ben Hauk’s bullyboy beat shoves you off the bus and down the high street past gambling arcades and building sites. An ambulance screams by. This is the bump and scrape of a resampled cityscape, a bolshy London cousin to El-P’s abrasive New York bop. Plaintive vocals cut through, 

“Locals. We used to scare you off. Now we’re a recommended tourist attraction on TripAdvisor.”

I know I grew up in Europe’s ‘Food Town’, because there’s a sign that says so on the side of the A180, that notoriously loud cockup of a road with its experimental concrete surface layered the wrong way up, that screams in your ears from Scunthorpe to Grimsby. Similar to miners across Britain, and the tough dockers of Newcastle, Liverpool, and elsewhere, the trawlermen of Grimsby and nearby rival, Hull, could at times be pretty damned frightening to outsiders even in bygone days of high employment. 

Through the 70s and 80s, as successive governments began gradually outsourcing Britain’s hard graft to nations with dangerously cheap labour, homeland grafters, including those enticed here from former colonies, were left with the option of upskill or die. This being an easier feat in some places than others, many areas were sadly left to flounder, their grafters growing restless. 

A couple of booms and one catastrophic bust later, and the descendants of many of the grafters who managed to upskill and make it out, found themselves back in their parents’ old stomping grounds.  

For rapper/lyricist Cecil B and producer Ben Hauke, the old stomping ground descended upon is the London suburb of Deptford.  

“Getting rid of our history, when you’re the ones with the strange fetishes.”

‘Strange’ is a word whose definition is as subjectively diverse as the fetish scene itself. My knowledge of Deptford is nil, likewise my connex in the BDSM scene, so I have no way of knowing whether the gentrification of Deptford was preceded by an influx of bondage clubs.  

As happy as I am to project my opinions onto someone else’s lyrics without their input, this line is the one I would be interested to speak with him about. 

My unverified assumption is that he is commenting on the acerbic and often crass manner with which so many of us working class people pay tribute to our local history, good, bad, or ugly. Local working-class histories include local dialects; readers from Grimsby are likely to be familiar with words like ‘mardy’ and ‘deffin’. Such dialects often include liberal use of an arsenal of expletives, fair use of which has recently (and sometimes reasonably) come under scrutiny from the more sensitive (you may read: polite) quarters of today’s liberal middle-class.  

One of the small handful of achievements for which this class deserves to be truly proud is its natural intersection with and support of the bold and boundary-pushing queer and kink scenes. It’s clear from the summary of Cecil B’s musical output that he would have no quarrel with this statement. 

With any social justice movement comes a necessary amount of militancy, and my feeling is that Cecil B is here commenting on moments when he feels that militancy is misapplied.  

Elsewhere in his discography (I’ll let you search for it, because it’s all worth a listen) he raps about “Safe spaces for people from safe places”, which when coupled with his line about strange fetishes, feels like an artist exploring definitions of tolerance and safety in a cross-class culture clash.  

“Soon Morely’s will serve your chicken in a shoe and give you a garden spade instead of a wooden fork cuz the aesthetic is pleasing.

Soon Morely’s will give you a chicken that’s made out of bread and we’ll eat it and say ‘Yeah, it is aesthetically pleasing’.”

My trawlerman dad wrote in his memoirs about a day when he went into a greasy spoon on Grimsby docks and saw cappuccino on a menu for the first time. He has way more exciting stories than that, but I especially loved this little nugget for the way it showed the gradual gentrification of our diet.  

LS6 residents of a certain age will remember Murton's Bakery on Cardigan Road; lovingly nicknamed Mucky Murton's for selling 12p sausage rolls that came with free entry to the e-coli lottery. 
That place got me out of a pinch whenever I was broke, and the ladies who owned it were quintessential Leeds grafters who called everyone pet, duck, or love. The shop front was even immortalised in a T-shirt by a local artist and is now rarer than a working-class indie band. 

Happily, though Murton's ultimately went the way of all things, their former premises is still knocking out baked goods for the students of Hyde Park, albeit in the form of eight-quid donuts. (Prices may vary, as it's been a while since I could see the line between fact and hyperbole.) 

“Locals, do we even exist?”

Defining a local is as impossible as defining an indigenous Briton, and in the coming rental economy, may well be as pointless. Middle-class folk forced out of the southlands are not so dissimilar to migrant workers forced out of Poland, Romania, Nigeria, or anywhere else. 

Gentrification. 

Take away class-based labels and all the word describes is the mostly forced movements of a population thrown into flux by its own increasing affluence. While money is certainly very tight, we are still privileged to live in a country with surplus, as evidenced by the on-site parking that seems mandatory in many modern student developments. 

When considering the word ‘gentrification’, I see a dozen horsemen in red riding coats, driving hungry hounds in pursuit of the cunning fox. A manor house appears in a background fading gently to porcelain white, the detail turning blue, freezing beneath the glaze of a Wedgewood plate on the living room wall of a back-to-back terrace in Leeds. 

Curiously, Ruth Glass – inventor of both term and concept – did not witness redcoats tethering resplendent steeds outside whatever former slum housing they’d come to purchase. She saw a newly affluent group of people skilled-up and financially empowered by a system beyond their control, wisely choosing to invest their newfound micro-wealth in some affordable property. When Glass first released her work on gentrification, the reins of British society were still held by the same hands as they had been since government overtook church and monarchy in the social power struggle; old money families, rich industrialists, wealthy men with the capital to build entire towns in their name; see Saltaire and Bourneville, and the gentrification of graveyards, where all interred are only as rich as the soil. 

“I don’t know where I am, bruv. I don’t know where this is.

I can’t find my way home, even though I’m not that pissed.”

Is all this just the likes of me and Cecil B mourning the loss of the good old days, sipping on gin and sour grape juice? 

By now the song is surging through its second half, drunk on nostalgia and shoutouts to the legends of Deptford. The geezer who if you tell him the date of your birth, he’d tell you the day. The knife-wielding ex-con who would try mugging kids coming home from school. The cantankerous Mr Pink (RIP). 

I pause from typing to raise my drink to Ozzy the Tramp aka Colin (RIP), stalwart of Grimsby town centre for many years, and dearly loved by many, in contrast with the seemingly pejorative nickname bestowed upon him by that oh so darkly comedic town. Colin was a high-spirited and good-humoured man bent a little out of shape by a few too many horrors of the human condition. He used to walk around the town’s busier spots, occasionally entertaining passersby with ‘magic tricks’, like pulling a living and surprisingly placid pigeon from some unknown crevasse beneath his jumper (My guess was always armpit). 

The backstories of such icons are symptoms of the fact that things were hardly going swimmingly before the economic refugees moved round our way. 

“I wasn’t in gangs but being from Deptford was something I couldn’t change.”

You can’t change where you’re from, but where you’re from can be changed by you.  

2009, Sao Paulo, I spent a little while working on a building project in the favellas. Founded by Felipe Pinheiro, a peaceful and empathetic middle-class guy from Mogi des Cruises, the project's aim was to demonstrate simple housebuilding techniques (often ancient techniques reimagined by one who studied ecology and sustainability) by building houses alongside a team of suitable locals who would keep the work going after Felipe moved elsewhere. 

Similarly important social enterprises have been launched by Britain's recently displaced middle-class, and while their approaches may sometimes seem oblique to working-class sensibilities, it is important to focus on the intent as well as the method. 

“I like that my area’s become safer, but I’m starting to wonder for whom”

These strange cousins, estranged from us since the arts and crafts movement first birthed the liberal middle-class, have returned to the estates, newly déclassé, and we all must learn to get along. In many ways this reunion of cultural kin separated by a few generations is an accidental experiment to approach with some relish. 

Hastily constructed luxury flats whose owners don’t care how long they sit unoccupied are not the fault of middle-class people having to move somewhere cheaper. To conflate the two under a single banner is as cruel to the middle-class as it is lenient to the real ‘gentry’ in this cracked commemorative plate. 

“Cuz we can’t afford the rent.”

Much like the international refugees of war, the domestic refugees of the '08 Downturn and the opportunistic Covid Land Grabs of 2020, have been relocated by forces greater than they. We live in the time neatly foretold by erstwhile prophet David Cameron, when he looked us in the eye and with a subtle smile said, "We're all in this together". 

[When run through my Politician to English dictionary, 'we're' in this instance means 'you're'.] 

The downturn's dominos fell one against the other in a cascade of 'gentrification' that put so much of our nation's land in the hands of so few, it might as well be called 'The Trickle Up Effect'. As well-meant as Ruth Glass might have been when naming her hypothesis, she took a label already feared and loathed by the working-class and attached it to a group who a moment before were themselves working-class, and who rather than being blamed and despised, should surely stand as examples for others of their socioeconomic lineage. 

Setting aside strange fetishes and chicken made of bread, working and middle-class alike must collectively acknowledge that we've been inadvertently reunited by another class altogether: the ruling class.  

They hunt power not foxes.  

History tells us there is no such thing as permanent power, no such thing as ubermensch. In a natural society, all things remain humbled by nature. 

The gentry of Europe were purveyors of global imperialism and the inventors of industrialised slavery. They are the ones who first set in motion this money-fuelled conveyor belt that propels entire generations up and down society’s tiers. 

Certainly, guilty are we for playing their game, though they make it a difficult one to avoid. But fool me once, shame on me...  

We're back to square one or thereabouts, and they have even more land, money, and titles than before. 

“Locals. Do we even exist?”

One of Deptford’s development cash cows is Convoys Wharf, brought to you by CK Asset Holdings. Registered in the Cayman Islands and presumably therefore staffed by hundreds of Cayman architects, project managers, surveyors, and such, this is the same Chinese property developer that in 2019 bought UK pub chain Greene King.  

For locals in north Leeds, this means the majority of the nearly thirty pubs on The Otley Run, a long-running fancy dress pub crawl and student rite of passage. Locals from across Britain and around the world pay a fortune to study here, to upskill, in a place increasingly filled with a million ways to take their money back to the very entities making it so difficult for those same students to start an independent business or become a freelancer when they graduate. 

Locals.  

As the track careens to its finish, I wonder if I’m a Leeds local or not. I moved here in 2004 and loved it dearly ever after, until the pandemic brought the latest and foulest winds of change to our cityscape. With disappearing venues and defunded local projects came the arrival of an unfamiliar demographic. 

They too are victims of circumstance, just as we. But the we outnumber the few, and by throwing us together on the poverty pile, the few have surely undone themselves.