Cold

Album: Gang Signs & Prayer (2017)
Charted: 21
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Songfacts®:

  • This track contains Stormzy's favorite lyric from Gang Signs & Prayer. He explained to Beats 1's Julie Adenuga:

    "There's a lyric from Cold, 'All my young black kings rise up man this is our year', and I was just like, I'm happy to be in the position where I've been blessed and I've progressed and I'm now someone that a few people know and I can say that. That is what it's about, I'm on this platform now and I'm saying 'Yo, it's not just me. Rise up, everyone can do this'. That what I always bang one about because I think it's such a facade.

    I don't know where it comes from, whether its systematical or political but there's so many youth out there who would look at myself or look at Captain or Skepta and think 'Oh my god' or they'll look at a businessman or look at a man with a Rolls Royce or a man with 50 houses and they'll think 'oh my god, how do you get there?'

    That is so dead because you can. In their head it's like 'oh my god, no you can't.' It's sick and we respect it because those people have worked hard but you can definitely do that. I don't know where people have been gassed to think that they can't do it and it's so far-fetched. It's not far-fetched and it's there. Everything I've achieved I always thought it looked far-fetched, so now something like a Grammy is not far-fetched. It's there, why can't I?"
  • Stormzy told The Fader this song was a turning point for him, "because I figured out how to approach grime differently. He added: "It isn't a political 'conscious rap' song - it's a bubbly, fun, vibrant grime track. But with that one message, it becomes bigger than a song, it becomes bigger than me."

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