A few years ago, when Kanye West was in one of those particularly voluble periods – before his Fathers4Justice phase, after his Taylor Swift obsession, sometime around his Trumpian fling – he liked to insist that hip hop had become the new rock n’ roll. 

“We culture,” he said on Radio 1. “We the new rock stars and I’m the biggest of all of them.” When he headlined Glastonbury in 2015, he described himself as “the world’s greatest living rock star.”

With its punk origins, outsized personalities and now cultural dominance, hip hop has long been more rock n’ roll than rock n’ roll is.

There was something missing, though. Hip hop had its classic songs and pioneers; it had political clout and sold out stadiums. But there was one head-to-head it always dominated: the dodderers. 

The Rolling Stones, the Who, Eagles, Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Paul McCartney, Chrissie Hynde, Queen, AC/DC, Kiss, Guns N’ Roses, Robert Plant, Debbie Harry, Bon Jovi, Elton John, Sting, Rod Stewart… Look across rock concert schedules and there’s more clean-living septuagenarians than at the midweek opening of a reasonably priced garden centre café.

The “ageing rocker” had become a cultural trope, but the “ageing rapper”? Nobody was entirely sure how that would look – or sound.