Flu Game

If you were a kid in the ’90s, you wanted to be like Mike. If you were an adult, you also did, really. Michael Jordan and his perennial NBA champion Chicago Bulls were not just the sport’s star attractions throughout the 1990s—the team’s swagger, intensity, and glamour helped marry basketball and hip-hop cultures in a way not seen before. And while Jordan may not have been in total thrall to rap, its artists have been immortalizing MJ in countless rhymes since he began putting down iconic moments.

And none more so than Jordan’s notorious “flu game.” Playing through ill health—possibly due to hotel-room pizza the night before, possibly due to any number of conspiracy theories floated through the years—he dragged Chicago past the Utah Jazz in a crucial fifth game of the 1997 NBA Finals. It was a herculean effort that captured his frankly terrifying will to win and work ethic. UK rapper AJ Tracey was three when Jordan was putting up 38 points at the Delta Center in June 1997. But, thanks in part to 2020’s The Last Dance documentary reestablishing and relitigating the Jordan legend, Tracey presents his second album in homage to the GOAT. “I’m a workaholic,” Tracey tells Apple Music. “I’ll be honest, I get in trouble from everyone around me because I can’t turn off. But I’m not turning off for a week, because up until I was 22, obviously it was hard times. No bread, no ambitions, no anything. So for these years that I’ve got right now, while I’m young and healthy and can record, I’m just going to keep doing my thing.”

Emerging from Ladbroke Grove, West London, with a flurry of pirate radio and viral successes, Tracey found himself at grime 2.0’s vanguard by the mid-2010s. His versatility stood out: This was an artist comfortable expressing himself over uncompromising drill beats, intelligent lyrically with pop-culture references and savvy in allowing big hooks to decorate potential hits. 2017’s Secure the Bag! EP crystallized his appeal, and “Butterflies” with Not3s in 2018 provided a first genuine UK hit single, before a self-titled debut album (and its summer-owning garage throwback “Ladbroke Grove”) ensured 2019 was very much Tracey’s year. For album two, Tracey flexes a further evolved skill set, and draws inspiration from East Coast rap titans that emerged and ran alongside the Bulls in the ’90s. “Nothing but 50 Cent, DMX—rest in peace—and Mobb Deep,” he says. “It was nothing but those three while I was making this album.”

Executive produced by elite London beatmaker Nyge, it’s a dominant showing—with irresistible braggadocio (“Taxman on my back, he see my figures gettin’ hazy/When I go Selfridges, the gyaldem treat me like I’m Swayze” in “Anxious”) and gleaming hooks roaming efficiently with laser-guided accuracy. Genre boundaries, however, are largely ignored here, with Tracey the album’s sole constant. Fortunately, everything in his orbit benefits from his all-star charisma. The NBA references land authentically, there’s a Jordan-esque obsession to avenge perceived slights, and there still aren’t many artists painting pictures of modern Britain with more imagination, flair, or humor. Plus, we hear concrete signs of lyrical maturation: See his melodic ode to the come-up “Little More Love” in particular. “I’m just trying to make music, because I love music, and to spread the sounds,” he says. "I sat down like, ‘OK, these are my hits.’ This is the sound that people really like, and I could have gone with that, but that's lazy. I thought, ‘Forget all that, I'm going to go for new sounds, and a completely different approach.’”

Despite the admirable diversification, there’s also—perhaps inevitably considering the sunshine successes of “Butterflies,” “Ladbroke Grove,” and 2020’s Mabel collaboration “West Ten”—a bespoke bid to claim the impending post-pandemic season. “I’ve had the summer hit twice already,” he says. “But now England’s opening up again, my fans needed something.” That something is likely “Summertime Shootout,” a bouncy victory lap that links AJ with T-Pain. “He's the Auto-Tune legend, and we all grew up listening to him,” he says. “I had to do it.”