When Bashy wore the mask, he was able to see himself more clearly.

The rapper, born Ashley Thomas, was a long way from the London Borough of Brent when the Covid pandemic hit. He was in Los Angeles filming a TV show when the shoot had to be suspended due to lockdown.

Unable to exit the US in case Covid travel restrictions left him without a way to get back and finish his scenes, Bashy found himself alone in an LA apartment.

As with many of us, he passed the time reading books, watching movies and working his way through TV series. Before long, he began to reflect on his life. And then he started to write.

When filming finally wrapped, he returned to England. Arriving at Kensal Rise, in London, by train and transferring onto a bus, Bashy’s facemask left him unrecognisable to his fellow passengers, as he explained in an interview with Joseph JP Patterson earlier this year with Complex UK.

“So no one’s really seeing that it’s me,” he said in that interview. “I’m able to really tap into the environment and take in the ambiance of the area, what it feels like, what it sounds like on those trains, what it sounds like on the bus, what it sounds like on the street, and really dive back into my coming-of-age.”

The experience must have been disorientating for Bashy. In the early days of his rap career, he worked as a London bus driver – but after the release of his debut single Black Boys, fans would mob him wherever he went.

Reflecting on that time in a 2013 interview with Respect, Bashy described Black Boys – a classic of digital TV station Channel U – as an “inspirational song that people could listen to and feel like they could go out and achieve whatever they want”.

His career has embodied this idea. After starting out acting in UK productions he’s gone on to star in big studio productions, including Them, an Amazon Prime horror series about a Black family who moves to an all-white Los Angeles neighbourhood. This is what he was working on when the world shut down.

In his Complex UK interview, he recalls how “a lot of things were happening in the world” at this time – perhaps referencing the murder of George Floyd and the protests which followed – and explains how he was reading Reni Eddo-Lodge’s bestselling book Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race.

Bashy also mentions being contacted by producers Toddla T and PRGRSHN, who both told him that he was an important voice in the culture and that the world needed to hear from him again.

And though he admits to fobbing them off with a promise of working on new material on his return to England, this promise ultimately materialised, leading to Being Poor Is Expensive – Bashy’s his first full-length record in 15 years.

The album is an exhilarating collision of art and life, Bashy’s coming-of-age story, an homage to the place where he was raised, his journey taking him all the way from Harlesden to Hollywood.

On the album’s lead single, Sweet Boys Turned Sour, Bashy evokes a childhood of lovers rock – the romantic form of reggae brought to the UK by the offspring of Caribbean migrants – “before the ends and my poor choice of friends made me vile”.

And as he told the interviewer, it’s these memories of fear and violence that marked his life as a teenager and young man, which came flooding back to him when he started writing during the pandemic.

Because while these experiences may have equipped him to “survive in this Hollywood-esque hyper-realism world,” they also underpinned the fears and insecurities he had to work through ahead of his return to the booth.

In the years since his early pirate radio sets and first mixtapes, the boundaries and borders between grime, rap and UK drill have become blurred.

But from the album’s opening bars it’s evident that, much like many MCs he has inspired, Bashy is comfortable jumping on a range of beats, and across the record he seamlessly moves back and forth between different genres.

Bashy’s social commentary on the past is often mirrored in the sound of the music itself, which is infused with 1970s reggae samples.

Though the album is heavy with stories of London life at the turn of the century, its scale is far greater, stretching back decades and spanning both sides of the Atlantic by way of its distinctive production.

This echoes the ideas of sociologist Paul Gilroy who talks about the Black Atlantic and the ways in which Black lives and Black experiences should be understood as a dynamic, diasporic culture which transcends nationality and geographical borders.

Bashy’s career, both as an actor and a rapper, reflects this – so it’s fitting that on the title track, the backdrop is provided by Jamaican reggae artist Dennis Brown’s 1972 song Let Me Down Easy.

While listening to this song, I was taken back to a different era, a time when the dance had a soundtrack which pre-dated lovers rock. And of course, Let Me Down Easy is a cover of a song originally co-written by US artist Van McCoy of The Hustle fame, an anthem for any Black teenager in ‘70s Britain.

Here, Bashy provides a timely reminder post-pandemic (though, of course, it’s not over yet) of the power of Black musical forms to connect people across space and time.

As he cycles through the past, taking account of his life “twenty years before the films I was doing, winning Oscars,” this familiar sample serves as an anchor to his reminiscence:

I didn’t need the movies to be surrounded by them monsters/
I didn’t need Guy Ritchie to be surrounded by them mobsters/
From NW the same as any other youth, but conscious/
Knowing I was lucky is weighing heavy on my conscience

In such moments, it’s easy to see beyond the bravado and grit of Bashy’s delivery and recognise the ways in which his lyrics speak to the complexity of everyday life, which so often includes trauma and pain, as well as joy.

This is something which can be found across the Black Atlantic flow of musical forms — from dancehall and lovers rock to rap, grime and UK drill – which operate as sites of cultural resistance and spaces of joy, as well as providing modes of belonging.

This joy will no doubt be evident when Bashy takes to the stage at Boxpark Wembley in London this weekend (Saturday 2 November) to perform songs from the album, something which must have seemed impossible when he started to write those early notes at the height of lockdown.

During the pandemic, Black musical expression offered a way for people to articulate changes in material conditions and counter the effects of social isolation, something I explore in my new book, Like Lockdown Never Happened.

The “imagined communities” which formed online around contemporary Black musical expression sustained us in the early days and weeks of the pandemic, giving us a way to alter, even if only for a short time, the prevailing sentiments of sadness and confusion.

The world as we knew it had changed suddenly, and as the social fabric unravelled, many of the activities that joined us together were no longer an option. But by sharing music online, it was possible to reconnect with people outside of our immediate setting.

At the same time, this often gave new meaning to the spaces in which we found ourselves, immersing us in collective experiences, across geographical borders and spanning generations.

Fittingly, many of these ideas crystalise on Made in Britain, a song where Bashy exemplifies how Black popular music provides a unique way of seeing and knowing the world.

Here Bashy pays tribute to his Jamaican grandmother Thelma Stanbury who was part of the Windrush generation and “came out to England cos she thought the pavements were gold”.

This song, based around Back to Africa, a 1976 track by British reggae group Aswad, is an essential moment in the album’s journey, which also articulates an under-acknowledged part of our story.

At a point of generational rupture, where Black histories – in the UK at least – are muted and often fixed in the present, the migration stories of the Caribbean have been folded into a Windrush horror story, as if that is all there is to know or say.

Bashy has done something quite incredible, sonically calling in the past while lyrically narrating the present. In doing so, he reminds us who we are, where we come from, and where we might go.