Fresh from having his #1 album cancelled by Gervais-beseechers Mogwai…

[Video][Website]
[4.56]

Oliver Maier: Boring. I don’t think anyone was trying to cancel Skepta in the first place, but neither he nor slowthai bring anything worth getting excited — let alone offended — about to the cookie cutter beat. A clickbait title for two dud verses.
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Juana Giaimo: It’s funny how men only now are critiquing cancel culture (they even gave it a name!) but seemed to have no problem when Janet Jackson or M.I.A. were cancelled, to name just two examples, for things that actually didn’t hurt anyone at all. It makes me think the criticism isn’t about morality itself, but at whom morality is being pointed. Indeed, the lyrics of “Cancelled” don’t offer arguments, but just say: “How are you going to cancel me?” Oh, what a very male thing to say, right?
[3]

Andrew Karpan: A weak slowthai track and an even weaker Skepta one, “Cancelled” is a rumination on status which concedes that the contradictions of capital make institutional rebellion an empty gesture. Skepta’s “How you gonna cancel me? / Twenty awards on the mantelpiece / Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury” is pretty on the money, though it’s depressing to see the culturally valuable work of critique reduced to a blunt and, therefore, impotent tool. Someone’s blogging has to matter, though I suppose I’m biased. Still, when slowthai put on something of an old-Kanye bit at an awards show last February — the NME Awards, named after a magazine that that’s barely a blog now and where the highest prize is a ceremonial middle finger — it didn’t mean anything, and when he profusely apologized a day later, it still didn’t. Fine! I can barely remember most of last February either.
[5]

Samson Savill de Jong: You wouldn’t know it from the video, but the song only just manages to crack two minutes. Both men get one set of 16 each, repeat the hook a couple of times and that’s your lot. The beat work is pretty nice, the rapping is pretty inoffensive — ironic given the title of the song — but I wasn’t blown away by any of it. Disappointing given the calibre of MCs these two purport to be.
[5]

John Seroff: slowthai’s name is on the label and the by-turns sinuous and menacing hook evokes Timbaland and DJ Paul. But the real star of this two-minute bonbon is Skepta, who pops off a rat-a-tat 16 bars that name-checks Jodorowsky and The Fugees and blasts out the muscular dare of a chorus that holds this brief, rewarding exercise together.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: I can listen to Skepta rap all day long, and slowthai — who nearly seems like a guest on his own single, ceding the spotlight to his grime forefather — is stronger than usual here. Once the bass kicks in, it’s over for me.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: A lilting flute beckons the crunching drums as vamp Skepta gently explains his continuous rule, while a shaking synth gong beckons vamp thai. He stumbles in with the lurching bass drums and skidding snares in his boxers, before Skep snatches the bass and hangs it, using it to devastate the zombies behind you. Then thai bites into your neck.
[6]

Alfred Soto: If you’ve spent years climbing ever closer to the center of power, you have little incentive to question, much less dismantle the ladder. You accept the assumptions because without those assumptions your ascension wouldn’t have happened. To listen to Skepta lend his talent and prestige to this depressing reading of the male market registers as soul death. You sell records, dudes — if you worry about “cancel culture,” then keep your most repugnant thoughts about women to yourself as much as your hands. It’s that simple. 
[2]

Scott Mildenhall: Is there a sympathetic view to take on this flimsy manifestation of misplaced entitlement? Maybe. This is not the same as when an obscenely well-paid national newspaper columnist with a spouse at the heart of government does much the same thing (though it is grist to their mill). There remains A Conversation To Be Had on the difference between the two, but this song does nothing to start it. Insofar as it even had to exist, that’s a shame; the bigger one is that the word is not “Ignored”.
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