The two rappers who are massive ‘Peaky Blinders’ fans: “Such a great bloke”
Peaky Blinders is a quintessentially Brummie TV show, with England’s second city of Birmingham playing a central role to its exploits. But its audience is truly global, with lots of different people identifying with it. The hip-hop community, specifically, has its reasons for loving it.
Peaky Blinders, to boil it down, is a show about gang culture. The Peaky Blinders, the gang at the centre of the show, were a real group that operated in the late 19th and early 20th century, while the themes the programme touches upon are universal: family, power, loyalty.
The show’s creator, Steven Knight, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2024, where he reflected upon the show’s global reach. He claims to have started to understand that following a meeting with a famous figure, who claimed it reminded him of his own life. That person was Snoop Dogg, who has also recently revealed his admiration for one English actor in particular.
Snoop, famously, was once involved in the LA gang scene, so, as he apparently told Knight, he identified very clearly with the struggles of the characters in Peaky Blinders. Despite being of a different time and place, their lives were similar.
According to Knight, Snoop said Peaky Blinders “reminded him of how he got involved in gang culture.” This, he claimed, was a bit of a revelation, which helped him to understand how his show was “pretty universal.”
Snoop, who was smoking at the time, naturally, apparently started to tell Knight about his life, which was a “really interesting” experience for the screenwriter. The parallels with his show were glaring.
“It was all about family keeping you in,” he explained, “and escaping from family to do the bad stuff, and then the family relocating their emotions and loyalties to follow you, and then escaping again.”
Knight was very fond of Snoop, describing him as “such a great bloke” who was “so nice to talk to.” But it wasn’t just Snoop who saw something in Peaky Blinders’ depiction of gang culture, as another megastar rapper also reached out to him. About two years after first meeting Snoop, A$AP Rocky was in touch.
“I honestly didn’t know who he was,” Knight admitted, in a clip recently posted by Mashable. “When I said something to one of my kids, they said, ‘What?! You’ve got to meet him.’”
Following the advice of his kids, Knight invited Rocky to meet him and, when they were together, Rocky, too, told him how much he identified with his programme. “He loves the show,” Knight claimed, “and, again, he was saying in Harlem, people connect with it.”