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Everything you need to know about why Ikea’s Christmas ad is a big deal can be summarised in one word: grime. The Swedish furniture monolith has drawn on the genre that has given us Stormzy at Glastonbury, two Mercury music prize winners, #Alexfromglasto and a 21st-century cultural earthquake that continues to reverberate through the mainstream.
The central conceit of the ad is simple: a modern (read: young, mixed-ethnicity, good-looking, inoffensive) family, sitting about in their home being modern, good-looking and generally inoffensive. The mum looks around and realises how shabby her surroundings are. Suddenly, all manner of kitsch and very un-Ikea ornaments come to life and start spitting bars about how clapped-out the flat is, in grime star D Double E’s unmistakable warbling couplets.
First up, what kind of Christmas miracle had to have taken place for Ikea to work out that a relatively underground grime legend was the key to Christmas cheer in 2019? We’re talking about the same Ikea that appears to know so little about black culture that it managed to serve up Jamaican rice and peas with green garden peas earlier this year – a gaffe so profound it led to an official apology. Yet now the Swedish meatball giant has somehow managed to enlist one of the most credible grime delegates, all in the service of selling flat‑pack furniture.
It shouldn’t work, but it does. And it all hinges on the very simple fact that D Double E – ironically captured in fake, animated ornaments – is very real indeed. That’s because grime is a genre that exudes analogue authenticity in a digital age. Much of grime’s appeal, particularly for anyone born after the birth of the internet, is that it feels tangible and abrasive and credible. We live in an age of on-screen, online influencers sponsored by businesses that desperately need attention. We’ve become so used to celebrity endorsements that we don’t even flinch when millionaire celebs turn up in ad breaks, selling us coffee or shampoo or mortgages or whatever.
In this bleak climate, the celebrity with integrity becomes something of a rare find. D Double E, with his beyond-the-mainstream notoriety, offers a credibility that hits like oxygen those of us who have been suffocated by commercialism. In short, D Double E is the grime fan favourite. He’s a renowned MC hailing from grime’s spiritual home of east London: Newham, to be specific. By putting D Double E at the forefront, Ikea has given the grimy underground a dazzling spotlight it’s impossible not to cheer for, inviting everyone to the party.
In recent years we’ve seen the Christmas ad become a perennial feature of the season: it’s all about eliciting genuine emotions from consumers at a very superficial time of year. Retailer John Lewis has made an artform of the so-called love note approach, designed to make us warm and fuzzy enough to reach for our wallet/click “add to basket”/blubber uncontrollably. But D Double E beats a cute penguin, generous child, or young Elton John at his first piano hands down. The quirkiness, the witticisms, the reload-baiting one-liners, the slightly abrasive edge – all the things that gave grime enough fizz to bubble out of the streets of east London into the palace (Wiley’s MBE), the ballot box (#Grime4Corbyn), the Glastonbury mainstage (Stormzy), and now, it would seem, the TV screens of middle England. Grime has arrived.
The irony here is that for all the warmth of D Double E’s persona and the grimy furnace in which he was forged (not to mention the hearty social media backslaps and fire emojis he’s been getting since the advert debuted), Ikea is kind of, well, cold. It’s a company that sells a lifestyle and a dream and delivers cardboard boxes. In a cynical world, this whole moment is just another win for commercialisation, able to convert nostalgia, idiosyncrasy and everything in between into glittering profit.
And in terms of race politics, is it just another chapter in the same old appropriation story? The advert riffs on the timeless appeal of marginalised black culture in the mainstream gaze. Just think of every advert you’ve seen employing an overt hip-hop soundtrack, or some kind of “cool” black stereotype.
But no. Watching the ad for the nth time and hearing my kids repeat “budubup-bup”, I feel like I can allow myself a little flutter of joy. For me, it’s not actually about Ikea, or the ad, or even Christmas. D Double E has done the thing that we must truly celebrate – he’s eclipsed the machine and brought grime to the masses. And that might just be the biggest gift of all.
• Jeffrey Boakye is the author of Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials, and the Meaning of Grime
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