Stormzy has finally completed the journey from super-cool to super-cringe. The rapper, once the symbol of youthful rebellion, is to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge. Meanwhile, in your local branch of McDonald’s, you can partake of ‘the Stormzy Meal’. How depressing to see Stormzy abase himself in this way.
Stormzy’s McDonald’s deal bring to mind other celeb sponsorship deals which have earned famous folk a fast buck at the cost of their credibility
ORDER LIKE STORMZY! exhorts the branding for this exciting McDonald’s offer. What does ORDERING LIKE STORMZY entail? Nine Chicken McNuggets, McDonald’s Fries (Medium), Sprite Zero (Medium), Oreo® McFlurry® (Regular). That’s what.
Great effort has been taken to keep Stormzy’s fast food selection as butch and urban as possible, in tandem with the Stormzy brand. Oreo’s are American, slightly gritty, and there’s no swirl like one of those girlie ice creams. But a McFlurry is still a McFlurry. You can’t evade the fact that it’s a camp little pot, a folderol of a confection. Grime rap and McFlurrys do not belong in the same universe.
Stormzy’s McDonald’s deal bring to mind other celeb sponsorship deals which have earned famous folk a fast buck at the cost of their credibility. Think Orson Welles doing the voiceover for Findus frozen peas. Or popstrel Jessie J dressing up as a majorette in blue and yellow: no, it wasn’t a gesture of solidarity with Ukraine, but a plug for TUC crackers.
Stormzy’s marketing disaster also revives memories of Anthea Turner posing with a Cadbury’s Flake at her wedding. Turner wasn’t paid for munching chocolate on that occasion. But the result was just as embarrassing. Stormzy’s pimping for fast food is so tawdry. Does he really need the McDonalds shilling?
True, only the very elite level of the musical firmament can resist the iron law of inevitable descent into what Smash Hits used to call ‘pop’s lost dumper’. And yes, Stormzy recently had a number one hit with his song Backbone. But chart success is meaningless now. Nobody knows or cares much whether you made it to the top spot.
For Stormzy, discovering that you’re the flavour of last month must be an awful shock. Every pop star imagines he will continue to rise on stepping stones of hit after hit like the Beatles. Or at least bounce back reputationally after a period in the naff corner like ABBA, the Bee Gees or ELO. For some lucky folk like Gary Barlow, the Pet Shop Boys or Lulu, there is a ghost life; they seem to manage to cling to the limelight forever.
But what about the rest? In days of old, there was always the Batley Variety Club and the chicken-in-a-basket circuit. Failing pop stars went on Give Us A Clue to remind the world they were still alive. Sadly, these options are no longer available to the likes of Stormzy. A shame, because, as Humphrey Lyttelton might’ve said: I’d love to see the look of amazement on Liza Goddard’s face as Stormzy brings off Twelve Angry Men in under two minutes.
So, yes, Stormzy is still around and in the headlines, but it’s clear that his career is on its way down. This decline mirrors that of the non-binary mania of a few years ago; the end of that particular phenomenon was made clear last week when former Corrie actress Shobna Gulati, aged 58, told the world she identifies as non binary. Who cares?
Rap, bizarrely, still retains its status as the eternal new thing that old people don’t understand, despite the fact that it was all over the charts when I was 11, and in four years I’ll be eligible for a bus pass. Like every genre of music with which one isn’t familiar, and wouldn’t particularly care to be, Stormzy’s sub-genre of it – grime – all sounds the same. There’s a lot of boasting, threats of violence and sexism. ‘Getting freaky in the sheets, we’re takin’ body shots, Then I finish with a facial just to top it off’ Stormzy tell us romantically in one of his big hits Vossi Bop, which also includes the daring ‘I could never die, I’m Chuck Norris, Fuck the government and fuck Boris’. Well hard.
Stormzy is perfect as the assumed name of Mike Owuo. Like his tunes, it is simple, catchy and funny in itself. It swiftly became excellent shorthand for middle-aged, middle class people saying ‘I don’t understand this’ and its close cousin ‘So it must, therefore, be quite the thing’. This is the syndrome that’s also given us preferred pronouns, Black Lives Matter, and Gordon Brown claiming to be a fan of the Arctic Monkeys.
If Stormzy’s McDonald’s tie-in meant the end of his credibility on ‘the street’, then there surely is no coming back from getting an honorary degree. The entire point of rebellion, I thought, was to be despised by the establishment. As with the Netflix drama Adolescence, you’re not exactly (another cringe phrase) ‘speaking truth to power’ if you’re telling them, contra George Orwell, exactly what they want to hear – and getting an honorary degree in the process.
The rise and fall of Stormzy fits with my theory of Britain as Grange Hill. Bear with me here: Yvette Cooper is Mrs McCluskey – a nice middle-class lady presiding over a feral pit with a sigh, and another retreat disguised as a compromise. Peter Hitchens is Mr Bronson, suppressing an inner volcano at the horror of decline. Tommy Robinson is Gripper, dispensing Chinese burns and jumping the queue at the tuck shop. And Stormzy is Glenroy, with his dub DJing – or, perhaps more accurately, Grange Hill’s hip-hop freestyle duo Fresh n’ Fly.
If I was Stormzy, I’d tell the progressive great and good where to stick their doctorate. If he wants to become cool again, he must do something unexpected that would really get up their noses: take up fox hunting; retweet Dr David Starkey; or pen a salty letter to the Daily Telegraph demanding the immediate deployment of gunboats in the English Channel. Instead, Stormzy has sold his soul for a bag of chips and a worthless gong. What a pity.
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