Diving into Alex Turner’s love affair with rap and hip-hop
From the moment that the Arctic Monkeys released their debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, frontman Alex Turner claimed his place as one of the biggest names in indie music, a position he still hasn’t relinquished almost two decades later.
After the band’s debut became the quickest-selling debut in British history, the Sheffield-born outfit thrived amidst a new wave of love for indie rock in the UK. With their 2013 release, AM, they expanded their audience further afield, receiving a Grammy nomination and going platinum in the US.
Turner secured his status as an indie-rock darling through a foray into film soundtracking when he wrote the music for the 2010 coming-of-age Submarine, as well as through his widely publicised and romanticised relationship with Alexa Chung. His entire persona endeared him to a growing number of alternative kids across the internet. But before he was an indie hero, a teenage Turner had a short love affair with rap music.
Rap might not be the genre we’d usually associated with the frontman, but long before Turner was playing guitar for kids in Doc Martens, he was listening to the likes of OutKast and Eminem. In an interview with Pitchfork, he picked out Roots Manuva’s 2001 album Run Come Save Me as the record to soundtrack his 15th year.
Turner shared: “I just got my guitar when I was 15, but there wasn’t a lot of guitar music in my world then. I’m sure there were great bands at the time, but they just didn’t make it to our little village 20 minutes outside Sheffield.” Just two years before they formed one of the biggest guitar bands of all time, he recalls that they were all, “into hip-hop in a big way”.
He reminisces on the influence of the subculture on their style at the time: “We would wear caps and shit, and our trousers definitely fit a lot less snug than they do now.” In fact, drummer Matt Helders used to shave Turner’s head in his kitchen, leaving two stripes: “Then the gap in between those stripes came down and went through my eyebrow. That’s the weirdest haircut I’ve ever had.” It’s an image that seems a far cry from the suited, slick-haired Turner we know now.
Turner recalls listening to OutKast, Eminem, and the Wu-Tang Clan, but he connected most with Roots Manuva’s record “because he was talking about quite mundane things with a bit of a stoned slant. Also, at that age, I wanted to have my own thing that other people might not have heard about.”
Though he had moved onto guitar-based rock by the age of 20, both in what he was listening to and making, it’s clear to see how elements of his love affair with Roots Manuva might have influenced Turner’s future songwriting. Arctic Monkeys have often endeared themselves to audiences by writing about the mundanity of British life, finding a loyal crowd who want to feel a part of something different.