A rap duo whose lyrics include “banging on a bitch because I’m a gangster bitch, I’m gangbanging on the strip on some gangster shit” might not seem the obvious partner for a family-friendly cake brand, but McVitie’s appointment of Pete & Bas to perform an original brand song (online) for Jaffa Cakes might just be a masterstroke.
The rap duo is made up of Peter Bowditch and Basil Bellgrave – both of whom are in their mid-70s – who since their arrival on the drill scene in 2017 have sparked constant questions about who and what they really are. Much like the sweet treat about which they have now released a song.
The internet is full of theories – the basis of which is that surely two OAPs can’t rap lyrics so filthy and so well for it not to be an elaborate hoax. Some conspiracies suggest the two old chaps are just lip-syncing, Milli Vanilli-style, to raps performed by another duo, Nine & Dex (the similarities in flow are too close to be coincidence), with some claiming Dex is Bas’s grandson.
Meanwhile, is their professed criminal past accurate? Or all part of the illusion? It’s a rap-based rabbit hole that has swallowed some web detectives whole.
The Jaffa Cake track features far from their best bars – among them “Who cares if it lives in a tin or what shopping aisle you found it in?” and “it’s a cakey sort, it’s even been proved in a public court”.
But it’s a fun effort with a multi-layered meta-ness that perfectly fits the brand’s ‘is it or isn’t it’ campaigning of recent years.
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