Plan B: Ill Manors.

Intelligent. Talents. Influential. Relevant. Driven. Aware. There are few people that manage to have all of these virtues in their weaponary, but one man that really epitomises all of these is Ben Drew, aka Plan B. I've written before about Plan B when he did a TED talk. Yes, a rapper from East London, with a number one album and Ivor Novello awards to boot, doing a TED talk, and a very good one at that. From all of the words I threw up at the beginning, the most important one is relevant. Genuinely relevant to the youth of today, that can't be bought and that can't be under-estimated.



There is a reason to all this Plan-B adoration, he has just made a film to coincide with his latest album, Ill Manors. The rapper has described the film as "the hip-hop musical version of Crash", adding: "But I don't want to call it a musical, because none of the actors start singing or dancing or anything. It's quite serious. It's just part of the films are narrated by music. If you can imagine my first record but with visuals… parts are just like a normal film, others are told by kind of music video storytelling." (NME)



The film like brutal and heavy-going, but you can see that there is a reason behind the violence, sex and drugs. Plan B endeavours to look at the motivations and reasons behing the actions, every action has a reaction. And that was very much the topic of his TED talk, not to condemn the youth for their actions, but to understand what led to them and how we can prevent that. I've got a feeling that this film and album could be a really important for Plan B and British youth culture. It's a protest, it's a experiment, it's a explanation and just as importantly, it looks like it's genuinely good. But most of all, it's relevant.