Jimbo spoke to the Cardiffian about his music which captures the harsh reality of gang culture, knife crime and mental health issues.
AFTER his friend Malaciah Thomas was stabbed in 2018, James Bowen, 26, from Tiger Bay grieved through music.
Mr Bowen, known as Jimbo, said: “I started releasing music after my friend passed away, and it was to keep his legacy alive.
“I do a lot of my music just to make him proud.”
Jimbo released his first song ‘Mallysworld’ in 2020. The song speaks about Malaciah’s life, death, and Jimbo’s emotional turmoil following the tragedy.
Malaciah, who was from Butetown and had worked at a barber’s and in a call centre, was murdered in Grangetown in 2018, just two days before his 21st birthday.
He was stabbed 18 times after being chased by a gang of four drug dealers who targeted him because his girlfriend was also seeing one of the gang.
Having written music from the age of 15, Jimbo used to rap as a hobby with his friends.
He said: “I never really planned to make a career out of it – I just wanted to release that song. It was to cope with my own mental health and grief, I suppose.
“Malaciah always used to say, “You can make something with that” and it was just to keep his words true that I thought “Yes, I am going to do that.””
The rapper advocates for music as a form of therapy as it saved him from a darker path.
Jimbo said: “You see people on drugs and alcohol, coping with their demons in whatever way. Music was my way.”
He now tries to help others realise the emotionally healing properties of music as a tool for expressing difficult emotions.
Jimbo said: “I try to get them to get behind a booth or make some beats so they don’t end up down that path. It’s a nice coping mechanism.”
Jimbo provides a refreshing take on rap and drill, which can be stereotyped as focusing on crime and drugs.
He described his music and perspective as “drill music that is coming from those same streets, but showing you what it’s actually like, not just promoting a culture that most people are lying about in the first place.
“I’d like to be the person that changes their view on that sort of music.”
Due to the strain on the NHS and mental health charities, access to wellbeing services relies heavily on economic privileges. Professional help is not there for everyone according to Jimbo.
He said: “Whenever I’ve ‘gone off the rails’ it’s always been my people – my friends, the Fewsion group and Jon, or my girlfriend – that have got me out. It’s never been the doctors or Mind.”
Jon Fews, who runs the wellbeing organisation Fewsion, initially discovered Jimbo from a sample of “Mallysworld”.
Mr Fews said: “I don’t think there’s enough mental health help out there. I think if you’re middle-class potentially, and you’ve got a great family and support network behind you and money, there’s lots of help. But for us, there isn’t. Maybe we don’t want to show how weak we are because, in urban communities a lot of the time, showing weakness is not a great way of rolling about your business.”
Jimbo and Mr Fews worked on “Deep Feelings” together, a song that talks about Jimbo navigating his mental health in the wake of Malaciah’s death.
Jimbo said: “After I wrote deep feelings, although it’s a deep song, when I listened to it back, I was feeling really good.
“The feelings changed – they weren’t deep anymore. Music is therapy.”
Jimbo believes that knife crime is getting worse in some parts of Cardiff and thinks that music could help.
“I’ve tried to speak to some producers about getting the younger kids in the studios one night a month so that we can try and tackle what’s going on here.
“There’s no youth groups or anything to get that generation out of the streets and I think that an open studio or even an open mic night would definitely make changes.”
Talking about his next steps as an artist, Jimbo is looking forward to his upcoming project called “From the Tigers”, which pays homage to Tiger Bay where he grew up.
He and Mr Fews are currently looking for interview clips from the community about Tiger Bay and Grangetown to add to the introduction of the album.
Jimbo said: “We want to hear people’s own stories about the Tigers, bringing the community into the project.”
His first gig was set to be on the 4th December in CULTVR Lab, but it was cancelled as the DJ contracted COVID. It will be re-organised but the date is still to be confirmed.
