On the Rise
Ceebo

It’s just one of the many reasons why Ceebo, the young and Lambeth-proud wordsmith, is establishing himself as a new kind of musician – at once a storyteller and a commentator, he’s someone with something generationally important to say, plus the tools to say that to great effect. 

“I see myself as a writer more than I do as a musician” he tells me with no hesitations, and it’s easy to see why. In a late-night internet trawl through these articles, which began as a necessary way to ‘contextualise’ his music and its themes, I find a post titled ‘An Empire Built on Stilts: UK Underground and the Illusion of Change’. In it, Ceebo laments the historical lack of authenticity within popular music, and then poignantly observes that despite the new successes of ‘the underground’ in mainstream media, there is ‘a fetishistic nature to the way in which black music is consumed by white people, specifically the special relationship between rap and suburban white teenage boys’, also citing Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 

It’s the kind of intellectual dexterity and strength of messaging we’re met with in the opening track of his 2025 album blair babies. The song “1997-2007”, named in reference to the years in which Tony Blair was the UK Prime Minister, acts as a kind of opening monologue or thesis statement through which Ceebo and his peers are the ‘children of postmodernity’, their generation one ‘engendered by a feeling of hopelessness in the face of a world built and shaped before [their] input’. 

Ceebo studied Politics and Sociology at the University of Warwick and graduated in only 2021, making him both highly accomplished and perceptive for his age. The songs on the album, which range from grime to gospel to drill in tone and inspiration, call back to old school rhythms but with fresh lyrical containment, ultimately achieving the difficult feat of being both reflective and forward thinking at the same time (for example, there are as many references to the era of ‘Cillit Bang’ as they are to ‘Buzball summers’).

When asked about how he created a sound so instinctively rich in meaning and political intent, he lists off notable works of influence including Black on Both Sides, Psychodrama, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and Boy in da Corner. As in these examples, blair babies uses samples and referencing to very strong effect, including his own “black on both sides (?)” where we hear parts of Blair’s Callaghan Memorial Lecture in Cardiff, 2007, where he called for the Black community to be “mobilised in denunciation of gang culture”. 

"I’m aware of aware of how much culture has an influence on politics, and how much art serves to be a place for ideological shaping, whether that be for the establishment or against it,” Ceebo notes, “art is part of an instrument for getting my beliefs out there.”

And even though this is an album of social insight for the digital age, Ceebo has been writing since a pencil was his only tool, and a few kids at school were his only crowd. “I only started writing rap because I started writing poetry, and I started writing poetry because there had been a death in the family and there was a lot I couldn’t speak about. I didn’t have an outlet, so poetry became that age the age of 15, and then rap at 16.” 

Having excelled at English and being both an avid reader and writer, Ceebo was one day invited by a friend to join a cypher in the school playground, "my year 11 friends used to hold cyphers in the school, because it had become a thing where you needed a valid reason to be in a group of a certain number. So rapping was initially just a ploy, but then I wrote my first verse on the back of a book and took it with me, and it became something I wanted to show up to.” 

Ceebo credits the South London borough of Lambeth, however, for making him musical in the way he is now. As a working-class child of an immigrant growing-up in one of London’s most multi-cultural boroughs, there was a tapestry of influence available: “Lambeth’s quite a musical place, we have a broad history as far as it pertains to rap, reggae, Ethiopian music, house, techno, jungle etc. Let alone what we would go on to explore on the internet where there are no bounds. With this tape, I wanted the scope to be large because the thing I’m discussing is large in scope, and I needed to work with people who saw music in the same way.”

Some of the people he’s referring to are heroes within the modern music scene. Producers and multi-instrumentalists such as Jim Legxacy, Chefbkay and afrosurrealist were all involved in the making of the record, and can be heard in the fluttering production nods to Amapiano, alt-R&B and UKG. With the guidance of these musicians and weight of subject matter to match, the 23-year-old has therefore quickly graduated from his debut single “Zonin’” in 2022, and 2024 project “LambethNotLA”. With release of “blair babies”, Ceebo has been named by critics and local tastemakers alike as the ultimate one to watch, including South London’s very own Bradley Zero, or the community YouTube platform 'IN THE KITCH3N’, where producer SAMSON aims to ‘cook up’ a beat in fifteen minutes while Ceebo strides ahead with a verse to match.

It's no surprise then that Ceebo also has a lot to say about the industry itself. There are benefits, on the one hand, to the “meritocracy of the internet” he explains, where “before it felt like you had to know someone or pay someone for an in, and neither of those I could do. I just want to continue to give my fans the same feeling that I got listening to the people that inspired me. The idealist in me is always music first – the music has to be up to scratch, any decision I ever make is not gonna be at the cost of the quality of the music. But in the industry, I talk to a lot of people who have resigned themselves to one or the other (commerce vs artistic integrity).”

This all relates back to his Substack, where he writes ‘knowing that not only are labels and distributors not interested in music that won’t turn an immediate profit, meaning most underground artists are shut out regardless of talent, but that this system of survival of the most commercially viable will never change as long as we continue to latch on to the ideas that if those at the top eat we all eat, it’s hard to say I feel optimistic about the state of the underground’. 

This is how Ceebo stays true to himself, by rapping for ‘passion’ not ‘fashion’ or aesthetics. It’s a mission he seems fully capable of, and staying true to; when I ask him where his next show will be he says “it’s probably for my friend’s birthday, he’s doing this big charity fundraiser that’s dedicated to getting young people into music.” Like so many rappers Ceebo can most certainly talk the talk, but it’s in the world outside of and beyond his music that someone truly dedicated both to their craft, and their craft’s vital message, is beginning to emerge.