Album Review

Year: 2011

Artist: Lowkey

Rating: Informative 3/5 | Entertaining 4/5 | Inspiring 5/5

Content warning: This article contains mentions of suicide.

The tail end of last year marked a decade since the release of Soundtrack to the Struggle, the sophomore album by British-Iraqi rapper and activist Lowkey. The album instantly became a cult classic and shot to Number 1 on the hip-hop charts in the United Kingdom (UK). Uncompromising in its political messages, the album is a behemoth with 20 songs and six skits which make for over 90 minutes of content. 

The album opens with the titular track, in which Lowkey states that the album has “been in the making a quarter century”—at the age of 25, the album is his life’s work. This starter serves as a perfect prologue to the album, touching on the themes that will come up in the following tracks. These include the difference between state-sanctioned terrorism and what is deemed terrorism by state, explored in ‘Terrorist?’, and political and social justice more broadly, explored in 'Long Live Palestine’. Lowkey is unabashed in his criticism of arms trading by BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, and Lockheed Martin in ‘Hand on your gun’, and in his condemnation of household names such as Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and Marks & Spencer for their support of the occupation of Palestine. Written through a critical social lens, his lyrics cover many of the broader political issues that affect the health and wellbeing of individuals in the United Kingdom and around the world on a daily basis. 

While much of the album is underpinned by social politics, there are moments of personal introspection too, particularly covering mental health and suicide in ‘Dreamers’ and ‘Haunted’. In the latter, Lowkey details his grief over his older brother’s suicide, reflecting that he is now older than his brother and questioning whether in the afterlife he will be “face-to-face with an older brother that’s younger than me”. 

In ‘Cradle of Civilisation’—a homage to his mother’s home city of Baghdad—the personal and the political fuse together. Lowkey reflects on the tragedies faced by Iraqi people, from Saddam Hussein to the American occupation, and expresses gratitude for never personally experiencing these atrocities. At the same time, he incorporates an element of melancholy at being divorced from his Motherland. In a sentiment all too familiar to children of immigrants, he calls himself an “immigrant Englishman amongst Arabs and an / Arab amongst Englishmen”. 

Listening to the album a decade after its release, what struck me most was how much of it still resonated, particularly ‘Dear England’ and ‘Obama Nation’. In 2011 the UK Conservative Party were still in their first year of power and United States’ President Barack Obama was approaching the end of his first term. Ten years on, the Conservatives remain in power and Joe Biden, the Vice-President in the Obama administration, is now president himself. ‘Dear England’ is a letter to the nation following the 2011 riots, in which Lowkey addresses police brutality as an institutional problem “way bigger than Mark Duggan”, whose murder was a catalyst to these protests. Now in 2021, the scale of police violence against citizens is only just starting to be covered by the mainstream press. In ‘Obama Nation’, Lowkey points out that American imperialism prevails irrespective of who, or which political party, is in power. Lowkey relays how so many thought things were “instantly gonna change” in 2008 once President Obama was elected—a similar sentiment to the response when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump in 2020. However, Obama’s election did not make a substantial difference, or at least not for the lives devastated by the United States’ foreign policy, as outlined in this track. 

Lowkey's political philosophy still resonates with listeners. To mark the ten year anniversary of Soundtrack to the Struggle, Lowkey toured the UK performing the album in its entirety for the first time. The show sold out across the country. A committed activist, Lowkey continues campaigning for social justice in the UK and globally, inspiring others along the way. Long live the Struggle.