You’ve never had a first-world problem quite like this. “Sprinter”, by Dave and Central Cee, is named after a model of Mercedes van that can accommodate up to 15 passengers – they simply have too many groupies to fit in a regular car, you see. But if finding a big enough vehicle to cart around all your adoring hangers-on isn’t a problem that troubles most people, it’s a problem it seems we wish we had. “Sprinter” was the most streamed song on Spotify in the UK this year; overall, it’s now sitting pretty at more than half a billion plays on the platform.
It was also number one in Britain for 10 straight weeks, from mid-June to mid-August. These are more than your average song-of-the-summer numbers. These are Whitney Houston numbers. Ten weeks at number one matches “I Will Always Love You”, and only a handful of songs have ever done more. In fact, no other full-fat rap hit (Drake’s “One Dance” is more of a crooner, really) has ever had 10 weeks at the top.
Why does everyone love “Sprinter”? The simple answer is escapism. Britain isn’t exactly dripping in prosperity right now. Nothing works. Everyone’s broke. Everyone, that is, apart from two young, flashy MCs who can ball out on our behalf. And they’re giddy with excitement about it. “We ain’t got generational wealth.” Central Cee raps. “It’s only a year that I’ve had these millions.” The video takes in Monaco’s yacht-choked port, a villa in the south of France – where, as per an Instagram post from the co-producer, the song was at least partially recorded – as well as a London high street, and a grand marble staircase packed with their friends and admirers.
“Sprinter” is named after a vehicle; it’s also a synonym for running. The artwork is of a vintage red Ferrari being craned on (or off) a yacht in Monaco. The symbolism is straightforward: these guys are going places. We get that exoticism from the very start, with a patter of languid, flamenco-flavoured guitar before the rapping begins. Beyond the guitar, there’s bass, drums and very little else – the point of the production is to not get in the way of two big personalities.
The duo’s tag-team raps are what this song is all about. They ad-lib over each other’s verses and split the chorus between them. It seems a genuine, rather than marketing-driven, collaboration – Central Cee first teased “Sprinter” in March by posting a screenshot of his text messages with Dave – and their palpable chemistry makes the usual rap boasts about money and women come from a place of collective abundance, rather than individualistic, zero-sum competition.
This is what drives the song’s success on TikTok, where it racked up 900,000 “creations” in two months. The meme was for duos to act out the chorus, taking one rapper each. It’s all a bit tongue-in-cheek – people draw moustaches and beards on themselves with marker pen, and fashion fake bling out of tinfoil – but fits with the song’s fraternal spirit. For Dave and Central Cee, it isn’t lonely at the top.
“Sprinter” comes at an interesting point in both artists’ careers. For Central Cee, it’s further confirmation of his status as a commercial juggernaut. In 2022, he became the first UK rapper to achieve a billion Spotify streams in a single year, in part due to his monster TikTok hit “Doja” – but “Sprinter” was his first actual number one.
For Dave, it shows he can’t be damned with faint praise as a “thoughtful” rapper. Both his studio albums, though excellent in parts, had a tendency to lapse into the kind of over-intricate narratives that get broadsheet newspaper critics excited, but don’t always make for good songs. On “Sprinter”, though, he delivers first-class punchline after punchline: “pistol came on an Irish ferry, let go and it sound like a tap dance”; “heard one of my tings dating P Diddy/ need twenty per cent of whatever she bags”; “heard that girl is a gold digger, it can’t be true if she dated you.”
Jon Caramanica, a New York Times pop critic and host of the Popcast podcast, named “Sprinter” his favourite song of the year. It’s the tune he “listened to the most or among the most” in 2023, he says. “It just reminded me of a great rap team-up from the 90s or 2000s.” No UK rap song has had as much impact stateside since the early days of Dizzee Rascal. “Everyone in a place that I go out to,” as well as everyone who might shop at the sophisticated streetwear label Aimé Leon Dore, “knows this song.”
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This partly comes from the infrastructure of modern music – streaming has helped to globalise music by removing the need for physical distribution. “What does it even mean to be a British song right now?” Caramanica asks. “Sprinter” made it to Spotify’s all-conquering Rap Caviar playlist, so it was readily accessible for a US audience. Ultimately, it’s a “global song”. Dave and Central Cee are established and at ease with themselves enough that they “don’t feel beholden to an old idea of what ‘British rappers’ are supposed to sound like”.
“Global song” it might be, but it comes from a certain place. “I got too many gyal, too many-many gyal,” Central Cee raps at the end of the chorus. This might not mean much to the kids on TikTok, but it’s a sly reference to “Too Many Man”, the riotous 2009 grime hit from Boy Better Know, which laments the over-abundance of men in a nightclub. You’re listening to a monument to UK rap’s maturation and global success, then Central Cee suddenly takes you back to an early-2000s disco in provincial England.
That’s what “Sprinter” does which old-school grime couldn’t do, and which the suspect chart-chasers from grime MCs – Wiley’s “Heatwave”, Chip’s “Oopsy Daisy” – couldn’t do either: it works commercially without sacrificing personality. If nothing else is going right on this rainy island, at least the soundtrack does us proud.
