Jianbo seems like the kind of guy who can sort anything. And, if he can’t, he certainly knows someone who can. A singular gold tooth catches the light as he speaks with his distinct mixture of South London slang and big ideas – this time, explaining how ‘the ends’ affect the psychology of grief. You see, Jianbo has today transitioned from shelling down grime sets to something a little more intimate with the release of debut album, Everything for the Family – a heartwrenching ode to his best friend, Dom, who passed away last year. But, as I sat down with the Chinese-Vietnamese-British rapper in a newly-gentrified Camberwell coffee shop, I was surprised to learn that Jianbo’s story was almost never heard.

Jianbo has always had a knack for storytelling. He proudly recalls how he received 100 per cent in his drama GCSE, but when his teacher personally requested that he pursue drama at A-Level, his response was no, because he didn’t know kung-fu. “I know it sounds crazy but, as a kid, I really felt like that,” he explains, laughing with the security of hindsight. “Nobody, apart from Benedict Wong who looked like me had made it as an actor. I felt the same about rapping – even though I was rapping from young, I was always the ‘Asian rapper’, always trying to blend in. As a kid, I thought it was insurmountable. Rapping wasn’t a possible reality for me.”

Jianbo left school, became a sound technician in the film industry, and even had a stint managing indie-folk outfit Spang Sisters, but his passion never left him. Throughout his teens and early 20s, Jianbo would secretly record hundreds of songs – fully-fledged tracks that, to this day, remain hidden on his private SoundCloud profile. Then, the turning point came with Covid.

“I couldn’t shake this feeling that I should do music,” Jiambo recalls. “But Covid was a racist arse time to be Chinese – like, man would cross the road when they saw me. I’d been chatting to this one brother in the music industry who was going to help me release my first EP. Then, after two weeks of not replying, I remember getting a message from him saying, ‘In today’s climate, where we don’t really feel it’s a space for you anymore.’ It made me hate myself. I was like, ‘Fuck music, fuck this, fuck everyone’.”

It might have been blatant racism, but it also turned out to be just the push Jianbo needed. “I was like, ‘Listen, if it’s so fucking inescapable that I’m Asian, Chinese-Vietnamese, whatever, then I can’t hide from it. Maybe I’ve just got to go full throttle with it.’” Released in July 2020, his debut track “S.H.A.O.L.I.N” immediately turned heads. Subsequent releases, “Jianbo Express”, “Mongkok Madness” and “Chinatown Alley” leaned further into this identity, illustrating his tales of street-level skullduggery with movie-quality music videos celebrating London’s East Asian diaspora. It might seem obvious now, but Jianbo was quite literally the first UK rapper to wear their Asian heritage so proudly. 

But Jianbo isn’t just filling a gap in British popular culture, he’s paving it over for good. “It’s funny, but one of my biggest influences is actually J Hus,” says Jianbo, with a laugh. “In my school, it was always cool to be Caribbean, whereas the African-British identity was more of a fight. J Hus was one of the first people to make being African actively cool, he was using the lingo and referencing [his heritage] in such a poignant way. I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I can make it cool to even people that aren’t Asian’. Yeah, I want to make Asian kids feel cool, but I also want to change perceptions as well, you know?”

Today’s release is a powerful vindication of this artistry that almost never came to be. Drawing together South London collaborators and close friends of both Jianbo and his late friend Dom – including The Square alumni Hilts, Black Country, New Road drummer Charlie Wayne and vocalist India blue – Everything for the Family sits much closer to jazz than it does to grime. The lead single “Cradle 2 The Sky” even forgoes drums altogether. Jianbo no longer needs to justify his place in the scene – he’s now making music built to last a lifetime, and to mourn the ones who didn’t get that chance.

Below, Jianbo dives deeper into the personal stories behind five of his tracks. 

“CHINATOWN TROUBLE”

Jianbo: “This was a really pure moment. ‘Chinatown Trouble’ was truly a product of friendship because it arrived on the coattails of a bit of internet hype. I managed to get a bit of funding from a friend to take this to the next level. The DOP was like my best friend, set design was my ex-girlfriend, and we just wanted to make an anime continuation of ‘Chinatown Alley’. 

“We got all the costumes together, we had the Subarus out, we borrowed a bunch of imitation firearms, and we shot the driving scene, which is probably the most iconic scene in ‘Chinatown Trouble’. I’d have been happy to tell you that we had all the right licensing to do that, but we just didn’t. Usually, when you mount a camera to a car, you have a guy called a grip to do it. Here, I was the grip. We rented this suction thing off fucking Fat Llama, put the camera which was worth like one hundred grand on a suped-up fucking Subaru, and I remember as soon as the engine started, I thought, ‘This is a terrible idea. Nothing’s insured, we’ve got mandem flying about on motorbikes with imitation firearms, and there’s a line forming behind us in the Limehouse Link tunnel. I should never do this ever again’. 

“At the same time, nothing bad happened and it ended up being such a pivotal piece in my career. Now, my favourite thing about that video is that, if you watch it right to the end, there’s a huge UFO that flies through. It’s an Easter Egg. Anyone who’s reading this, you gotta go check it.”

“SUYA” 

Jianbo: “Namani was in Tokyo doing an internship for Sabukaru magazine, and I just happened to be out in Tokyo at the same time filming a documentary for a project I can’t talk about. My friend Kimi was like, ‘Come out for dinner.’ So, I popped down. We spent the whole evening chatting, and then right at the end of dinner, Namani goes: ‘Are you Jianbo?’ And I was like, ‘Are you Namani?’

“I never really make tunes with people I don’t know, but there was just something about Namani. We went to the studio, built this little fucking prison spliff, literally smoked it in three seconds, and smacked out “Suya” in like three hours, stayed there all night, and then, for the next 48 hours, me and Namani just had the time of our lives.

“What I really like about “Suya” in particular is that it’s the most fun song on the album. My boy had just died three weeks [before] and I already had this trip to Tokyo planned, so it was a real distraction. It was so pure.”

“EXHALE FEAT. INDIA BLUE”

Jianbo: “I love ‘Exhale’ because it’s a mesh of various people in my life. The guitar loop comes from Dom – when Dom’s mum gave me his old guitar pedal, there were some loops saved on it. It’s him from beyond the grave. I got Hilts to patch it on, I got Vvilhelm from Ebisoda, as my engineer to do some rotation, I got Charlie Wayne from Black Country, New Road to do the drums and India Blue, who’s a really good friend of both mine and Dom’s back in the day, to sing on the tune. Believe it or not, we all spent three months in India together when we were 19. 

“Making this song is so meaningful to me because earlier in my career, I always wanted to make songs with people who were already established artists. This time around, it was more about cultivating a safe space to make something as cathartic for India as it was for me, you know? In truth, it may be the only song I ever get with Dom.”

“CRADLE 2 THE SKY”

Jianbo: “I did ‘Cradle 2 The Sky’ with Skydaddy, who’s been one of my closest friends in the last ten years. We have a very unlikely friendship. He used to be in a band called Spang Sisters, and I met them on a random night out. They gave me their SoundCloud and I went back, listened, and I was like, ‘This is so sick!’ That indie sleaze, like Mac DeMarco era of bands just wasn’t really my thing but I just loved Spang Sisters and, somewhere along the line, I ended up becoming their manager. Now, they got millions of plays on Spotify and the band ended up splitting up, but we all still have love for each other. 

“Me and Skydaddy were trying to make a tune together for a long time but, as you can probably imagine, someone who makes folk music and Jianbo isn’t exactly the easiest combination. The day we made ’Cradle 2 The Sky’, I was feeling quite down. I said to the trombone player Charlie Keen: ‘What do you usually do when you feel bad?’ and he was like, ‘Just make music’. It was like flashing lights in my head – ‘Obviously, you just use music!’ So, we made that tune then and there in Skydaddy’s bedroom, one man on guitar, one man on trombone, and me on the mic. I love performing it live. Every time we do it, the beat stops, the 808s stop, and we pull up a full band.”

“EVERYTHING FOR THE FAMILY”

Jianbo: “‘Everything for the Family’ is probably my favourite song of them all. In the stages of grief, I made this when it still felt quite fresh. It’s got quite an ends-y mentality – like, when you chat to certain man about things that should make them sad, instead it just makes them angry, you know what I mean? That’s how I felt at the time. I was still a bit enraged by the grief. I feel like I get to express so much emotion when I perform it. Hilts produced the tune, and we have a back-to-back where we outline the feeling of the moment together. It’s a conversation between us, but it’s also just a conversation with myself. He wrote his part in a way that helped me express my narrative. 

“We did a really special video for it when we were on tour in Tokyo, definitely the biggest budget video I’ve ever done. It was a special time which sums up the whole feeling of the project. It’s the title track: ‘everything I did and everything I do moving forward is for my family’. I don’t mean just my blood family, but they count too. Dom was my chosen family. The sentiment of this is loyalty, brotherhood, determination. You gotta do this for the people that love you and you love them.”

Everything for the Family is out now.