Russell didn’t consider this a radical shift: he’d always seen himself as a creative person who had sidestepped into an executive role, letting artistic intuition drive corporate decisions. When I visited London, he spent most of the week working on his début album. But he no longer maintains daily oversight of the company, and has begun devoting himself almost entirely to producing music of his own. Russell took control of XL, which started as a niche dance label, in 1994, and he remains its top executive. But if your musical teen-age education is Rakim you can’t not be listening to the words.” There’s other types of music people grab upon where you don’t really need to listen to the lyrics. “This is what you get from being a teen-age rap fan. “Lyrics are such a fundamental part of my listening,” Russell told me later. But as the tracks played he began offering criticisms veiled as encouragement: “The drums are pretty wrong-in a good way” “It takes some balls to do that.” Whenever Russell heard something that he liked, he nodded thoughtfully. In the studio, “New Gen” began playing, and it was filled with such sonic collisions: knotted slang from various Caribbean enclaves around London had been infused with the slow-rolling drums and sinuous bass of Atlanta hip-hop. He collected imports of rap records from New York, and followed the “mongrel British hybrid” sounds of garage, jungle, and drum ’n’ bass, seeing firsthand that local music scenes could have a global reach. As a teen-ager, he spent weekends combing through record shops, launching pirate radio stations, and promoting his own parties-“putting on clubs,” as he called it. Russell grew up in a northern suburb of London, and did some sprawling himself. He spoke with a chirpy, welcoming intensity. “Everyone at the label is quite used to ‘Cut it down, cut it down-short, short, short,’ ” Russell said, after a moment’s consideration. She was determined to capture the sounds of a diverse movement. Such editing, she continued, would trivialize months of work. “I don’t want to just pick the ten best songs,” she said. Subtly, she asked Russell for permission to reject the advice. Some of them had suggested shortening it. As he slipped off a pair of tan Nikes and swivelled in his chair, Simionescu-Marin informed him that she’d already played “New Gen” for others at XL. Russell, a forty-five-year-old with a slight frame and boyish features, was dressed in an olive long-sleeved shirt, thick violet socks, and the kind of yarn bracelets that a sensitive high schooler might wear. She had titled the compilation “New Gen,” after her radio show. When Russell first met her, he recalled to me, they “talked about the idea that you don’t want to sit around in music waiting for permission-waiting for someone to give you the right excuse.” He was eager to hear the results of her foraging. XL executives were planning to release a compilation of the material, and, struck by her entrepreneurial spirit, they had offered her an artists-and-repertoire job, which involves scouting for new talent.
A radio host and a concert promoter, she had spent much of 2016 recording budding rappers around London. Simionescu-Marin, an energetic twenty-two-year-old, was dressed in a black sweatsuit. They traded gossip about Zayn Malik’s departure from One Direction while a studio manager served egg sandwiches, and a sound engineer cued up track files on a large console. to Vampire Weekend to Adele, and on this drizzly August morning he had come to hear some music that Simionescu-Marin wanted to play for him. Russell is known for signing distinctive and driven young artists, from M.I.A. Richard Russell, the head of XL Recordings, walked into a small recording studio in West London and found a woman named Caroline Simionescu-Marin sitting, cross-legged, atop a rack of audio equipment. Russell says that XL has a roster of musicians with “uncompromising vision.” Illustration by Craig & Karl
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