26 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
one equation,” Cunningham said, “what
would it be?” He supplied the answer
himself: “The-difference-of-squares
identity.”
Toward the end of the session, Cun-
ningham handed Jed a tube of some-
thing called “brain balm.”
“It smells like essential oils,” Jed said,
smearing it on his lips.
“Spearmint-forward,” Cunningham
noted.
“I’ve used the tea, like, once or twice,”
Jed said. “I’m not much of a tea guy.”
A visitor asked Cunningham about
his own SAT score. “If you look at my
academic achievements,” he said, “it’s
a fair bet that my score is pretty strong.
But a mentor once told me, ‘Under no
conditions do you ever tell a client.’”
He went on, “So it’s professional best
practice just to say, ‘I score well into the
ninety-ninth percentile. I’ll help you
do it, too.’”
—Charles Bethea
1
LONDONPOSTCARD
HOMECOMING
K
ano, the British rapper, ended a na-
tional tour last month with an un-
usual home-town performance: appear-
ing at London’s Royal Albert Hall, an
august venue better known for present-
ing classical music than for hosting grime
artists. Grime, the musical genre that
combines electronic dance beats with
jungle and reggae influences, accompa-
nied by fast, virtuoso rapping in distinc-
tively British cadences, originated in East
London, in the early two-thousands.
Kano, whose real name is Kane Robin-
son, and who grew up in the neighbor-
hood of East Ham, was there when the
genre was born. It has been almost fifteen
years since his first album, “Home Sweet
Home,” won a handful of best-newcomer
awards. He’d been on the stage of Royal
Albert Hall once before, in 2006, sup-
porting Jay-Z in the venue’s first-ever
hip-hop concert. “I remembered that
night forever, and I always wanted to go
back there and perform once, for my-
self,” he said the other day. “It’s been a
goal of mine for a minute.”
for potential—I wanted to establish that
he wasn’t quote-unquote on road,” Rob-
inson said. “Everyone is always, like,
‘Where were the parents when this hap-
pened?’ But the moment a kid leaves the
house—it’s not the parents’ fault.”
Robinson was raised by his mother,
who immigrated to London from Ja-
maica. The last song on “Hoodies All
Summer,” “SYM,” alludes to the Wind-
rush scandal, in which Jamaican immi-
grants who have lived legally in Britain
for decades have been threatened with
deportation: “Let’s talk about the day
the wind was rushed up on the shore/They
promised us so much and then they left
us to be poor.” The song ends with an
appeal for unity: “If we don’t hold each
other down, we won’t make it.” “It’s, like,
those little reminders of the country we
are actually in,” Robinson said. Through-
out the years, his treatment of his birth-
place has sometimes been more tender,
if no less clear-eyed: in “This is England,”
from 2016, he speaks of “jellied eels, pie
and mash, two pints of that pride on tap”
while telling listeners that “you could be
a villain or a victim.” When he performed
the song at Royal Albert Hall, the gilded
balconies were shaking as more than five
thousand Londoners lustily sang along.
“Everybody has flaws, and every coun-
try has flaws,” Robinson said, finishing
his coffee. “But you can still love some-
thing even though you know it’s been
so wrong before, and sometimes is now,
and probably will be again.”
—Rebecca Mead
Kano
Now thirty-four, Robinson has de-
veloped a second career as an actor: he
is one of the stars of “Top Boy,” a drama
series on Netflix. Set in and around a
housing project in the London borough
of Hackney, the show is a reboot of a
British show that ran for two seasons,
in 2011 and 2013, and was created by
Ronan Bennett, the Irish screenwriter
and novelist. For an American audience
accustomed to British imports like
“Downton Abbey” or “The Crown,” the
language of “Top Boy” might take some
getting used to: the script is liberally
sprinkled with instances of “bruv,” “allow
it,” “innit,” and “wagwan.” Stefan, a young
teen, says, of his history teacher, “He
thinks he’s bare funny.” “Yeah, ‘bare,’
meaning ‘a lot,’” Robinson explained.
“It’s a flip on the actual, because ‘my
fridge is bare’ means it’s fucking empty.”
Revived in part with the enthusias-
tic endorsement of a Canadian fan by
the name of Drake, the show has been
compared to “The Wire.” Robinson, who
plays Sully, one of the show’s principal
drug dealers, is an aficionado of the David
Simon show: in one of his recent songs,
he raps, “Used to be a Barksdale man,
but now I fuck with Marlo,” a reference
to two of the lead characters in “The
Wire.” But the comparison is not en-
tirely apt, he explained over coffee at an
Italian restaurant in the leafy fringes of
London, where he now lives. “‘The Wire’
was from a police perspective—in terms
of the streets and that, it was probably
like, thirty per cent,” he said. “‘Top Boy’
is really from the perspective of the
quote-unquote criminal. It’s getting into
the mind of these people and why they
do what they do. It’s bigger than just
‘Woke up and wanted to be bad one
day.’ No one wants to be doing this. They
feel they have to be doing this. Why do
people feel this is their only option?”
Robinson just released his sixth
album, “Hoodies All Summer,” a foren-
sic examination of the state of the na-
tion in which neither Boris nor Brexit
is mentioned.“Trouble,” a standout track,
is a mournful, nuanced exploration of
knife crime and its origins. In lieu of a
music video, he made a seventeen-min-
ute film dramatizing a teen-ager’s lov-
ing home—he’s playing the piano while
his mother cooks—then his harrowing
murder when he’s sent out to buy gro-
ceries. “For me, the piano is a metaphor
