AGAINST ALL ODDS: GRIME
director's cut version, Spin August 2005
by Simon Reynolds
The first thing that hits you is
the clashing reek of twelve different brands of cheap perfume. The second is
how weird it is to stand in a crowd of teenage girls waving gun-fingers and yelling
“BRRAP BRRAP BRRAP.” The trigger for their frenzy is Crazy Titch, an East
London MC who’s the closest thing the U.K. grime scene has to a heart
throb. He’s hoarsely hollering his anthem “Sing Along” over a bizarre rhythm
made from a chopped-up classical symphony. One 13-year-old black girl stands
stock still, staring at Titch with awe and adoration, intently biting her
fingernail. Everybody else in the auditorium is going mad. When it gets too
rowdy—some heavy-set ruffnecks are crushing girls up against the stage—an
organizer halts the music and grabs the mic: “Settle, boys. There’s girls down
there. They want hugs and kisses.”
Grime is usually seen as bad-boy
music, its blaring bombast and mosh-activating aggression making it the U.K. ’s
counterpart to crunk. Yet the huge number of young females at this show proves
that grime isn’t necessarily synonymous with testosterone. The high proportion
of teenagers present is partly due to the fact that the venue, Stratford
Circus, is an art center, meaning that the entertainment ends at midnight —when most raves are just
getting started. Tonight’s all-star grime bonanza offers a rare opportunity for
under-18s to see in the flesh the MC idols they’ve watched only on Channel U, a
digital/satellite TV station that airs U.K. urban music on an equal footing
with American rap and R&B. It juxtaposes the latest glitzy videos from 50
Cent with shakily choreographed, low-budget promos from local heroes like
Bruza.
Grime events have a reputation for
trouble. The music builds up tension, but offers little scope for release—a
recipe for fights on the dancefloor. And people often bring outside-world
antagonisms into the club. Police are always “locking off” grime parties, which
makes promoters increasingly reluctant to hold them in the first place. At one
point in the night, the host Peaches comes on to report the disappearance of a
cell phone, then delivers an impromptu lecture. “Stop thiefin’! Stop the
armshouse!” she berates, ‘armshouse’ being grime slang for bloodshed. “They’re
locking off grime raves, dancehall bashments—where you gonna go? Country &
western nights?!” Later, she reports that the young lady’s phone has been found
and returned. “Honest black people!” she notes with mock incredulity. “This
will be a newspaper story: BLACK PEOPLE FIND PHONE.” She’s taking the piss out
of stereotypes about ethnic youth, forgetting how quickly she’d jumped to the
assumption that the phone had been stolen.
The specific worry tonight is that
the beef between two rival crews, Roll Deep and Fire Camp—will lead to mayhem.
Although either group could claim the headlining spot, Fire Camp perform much
earlier in the night, so there’s no frictional hand-over of the stage. Later I
learn that Roll Deep were only let onstage once Fire Camp and their vast
entourage had left the building. A couple of days later I ask Lethal Bizzle,
leader of Fire Camp, about his feud with Wiley, the Roll Deep don. “Wiley is
into lyrical battles, he’s done records dissing everyone from Durrty Goodz to
Crazy Titch,” says Bizzle. When Wiley put out a record attacking him, Lethal
took it as a backhanded compliment—a sign that he was an adversary to be
reckoned with. “I was happy, my name was hot. And retaliation was gonna build
up my name even more. Everyone calls him ‘Kylie’ so I got ‘Can’t Get You Out of
My Head’ and dissed Wiley over it. That just put the curtains on him. Cos the
streets said I won.”
Wiley and Lethal are duking it out
on the underground and overground simultaneously. While stoking their hardcore
fanbase with the battle tracks, both hope to seduce the mainstream with
crossover grime albums this summer—Roll Deep’s In At The Deep End and Lethal Bizzle’s solo album Against All Oddz. Bizzle’s ahead at the
moment, having scored grime’s biggest U.K. hit to date with “Pow,” a massive
jolt of sonic adrenaline that even turned some heads in America, getting
airplay from Funkmaster Flex on Hot 97 and talk of Lil Jon protégé Pitbull
versioning the track’s frantic “Forward” riddim for his debut album. But Roll
Deep is more densely stacked with talent, their 15-strong ranks boasting some
of the scene’s finest producers (Wiley, Target, Danny Weed) and MCs (Trim, Flow Dan, Riko, Wiley again).
Still, for all the big noise that
grime has made in the UK mainstream media—Ms. Dynamite and Dizzee Rascal won
the Mercury Prize in successive years and Dizzee appeared on the remake of Band
Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas”—it remains a small scene. Only a few people
within grime can make a living out of it. “There’s not a lot of MCs that are
just MCing and not doing something else,” says Kano , one of the most touted performers on
the scene. The doing “something else,” he hints, could be a day job or it could
be something nefarious—“shottin’ weed,” in some cases. Selling 500 copies of a
12-inch is considered a good result these days, and after production costs,
that would generate less than a thousand pounds profit. When they perform at
raves, most MCs “get paid about 150 pounds, which is not good money,” says Kano . “And there’s less
raves than there was. Clubs don’t want to deal with it. People get banned from
playing certain areas, certain clubs—blacklisted. Cos of what promoters think is going to
happen.”
* * *
The day after the Stratford Circus
festival, Roll Deep divide their energies. One half plays a gig at a trendy hip
hop club in Hoxton, a recently gentrified area of East
London . The other faction stays underground with their regular
Sunday night show on pirate radio station Rinse FM. Although Channel U is increasingly
important, grime’s primary medium remains illegal radio stations. Rinse is
literally an underground operation, its HQ being a former travel agent’s office
in the basement of a nondescript building. Pass through an unremarkable-looking
ante-room (pine floors, shabby sofas serving as a makeshift hospitality lounge)
and you enter the spartan studio. In
addition to turntables and audio equipment, there’s a brightly flashing fruit
machine and a TV tuned to a spycam monitoring people in the street outside (in
case of a raid by OFCOM, the government organization dedicated to stamping out
the pirates). The walls are bare (Rinse FM prides itself on its
professionalism, and graffiti is forbidden) and apart from a few empty
soft-drink containers, the room is incongruously tidy.
Before Roll Deep turn up,
legendary grime MC D Double E does his weekly show. Nearly six-feet tall, but
weighing only 130 pounds, he has elegant, cut-glass features that border on
emaciated. You wonder if the sheer rapidity and intricacy of his flow burns up
all his calories. “I’m gonna start zonin’ out in a minute,” he warns, and
there’s something faintly redolent of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in the way he
stares sightlessly into the middle distance, one hand darting in dainty, air-carving
gestures. Double’s imagery is relentlessly violent—“I’m on the way to stardom /
Anyone test me I will scar dem”—but the vibe he transmits is entranced reverie
rather than menace. Every so often he emits an eerie ululation, what he calls
“the D Double signal”—“Mwui! Mwui!”
After some ads—revenue from these,
plus subscription fees from each crew that has a regular show, keep Rinse FM afloat—Roll Deep take over. The
night before, at Stratford Circus, they made a Roots-like maneuver and performed
a set with a live band, leaving the teenage girls long-faced with boredom,
chins in hands like school kids sitting through morning assembly. Tonight,
yelling into microphones to an invisible audience, Roll Deep are in their true
element. Wiley, dressed in a blue Nike coat, rhymes over a new riddim built by
Target out of an accordion riff, describing himself as “the black 007”. Two new
recruits to the sprawling Roll Deep family dominate the mic’. Skepta, a lean
black youth, pulls his jacket over his head and spits from inside this murky
cocoon. “Draw for the ’chete,” he warns
some nameless adversary. “Bullets fall down like confetti / Make you look like
spaghetti” (presumably served with marinara in this scenario). Syer, a stocky
white kid, launches into a rant about “dutty girls” who “give brains... to every breh in the hood.” There’s a constant nerve-jangling bleeping
of cell phones—‘missed calls’ that assure Roll Deep the faithful are out there
(without the listeners having to pay a phone charge) or texted requests for a
shout-out. “Big up the HMP massive,” intones Trim, a reference to those
listeners detained at one of Her Majesty’s Prisons. “Hang tight the E3 crew.”
E3 is a zip code, or as they call
it in England ,
a postal code. Grime is intensely territorial. The major divisions used to be
between between East London , South
London , and so forth, but the imperative to represent your ’hood
has devolved into a Balkanized welter of mailing districts. “E3’s the big one,” says Bruza, one of the
scene’s most charismatic MCs. “That’s where Roll Deep are mostly from. E3 is
like the Queensbridge of grime, bare talent comes from there. But it’s the same
with my area, E17.” According to Roll Deep’s Target, “If you’re from E3 and I’m
from E15, it’s not like we have to fight or anything. It started with just
biggin’ up East London , and then you want to
big up your exact bit of East London !”
What most of the postal zones have
in common is that they correspond to a large swathe of the East
End that’s not served by the subway system. You can only get there
by car, bus, or the overland railway system that traverses much of London on decrepit,
redbrick Victorian viaducts. This slight diminishment of ease of access to the
area has contributed to its peculiar insularity. It’s also delayed the tide of
gentrification, meaning that the East has remained a largely working-class
area. East London (the heartland of musical
innovation in Britain
since at least the early-’90s emergence of jungle) has a sort of unpretentious,
street-level cosmopolitanism, the result of the area having absorbed wave after
wave of immigration over the last century. First came the Jews, many of them
from Russia .
Then, after the Second World War, migrants arrived from all over the former
British Empire--from the Caribbean, from South Asia (Indians, Pakistanis,
Bangladeshi), and from Africa. Most recently, the alien tongues of East
European asylum seekers have been audible on the streets. From drum’n’bass to
grime, the influence of Jamaica
dominates (most grime MCs cite dancehall and jungle chatters as their primary
influence, rather than American rappers). But the actual variety of ethnic
origins on the grime scene is staggering. At Stratford Circus, Peaches called
out to the audience, asking “anybody here from Nigeria ? Ghana ? How about Antigua ?
Trinidad & Tobago?” Each country triggered a flurry of hands in the air.
Possibly even more crucial than
its multicultural mix, though, may be East London ’s
dreariness, the bleak featurelessness of its landscape. The architecture mixes
shabby old buildings that hark back to the area’s industrial and warehousing
past, with the kind of Brutalist architecture that was fashionable in the 1960s
and 1970s. In some areas, the sky is punctured by ugly slabs of high-rise tower
blocks that formed such a crucial part of punk’s imagery. More common, though,
are smaller, undistinguished three-story blocks of flats, interspersed with
small, melancholy recreational areas. On a sunny day, East
London can look reasonably pleasant. But most of the year English
skies are grey, which means most of the time East London
looks grim. Grim, and yes, grimy.
In between jungle and grime came a
late Nineties sound called UK Garage. You could see garage as an attempt by East London youth to manufacture their own sunshine. One
of the scene’s biggest anthems was called “Spirit of the Sun”. All shiny treble
frequencies (highpitched divas, skittering
snares and fizzy hi-hats), garage streamed out of the pirate airwaves
like aural champagne. The sundrenched Greek island Aiya Napa became the
garage’s scene very own equivalent to Ibiza ,
that raver’s paradise at the other end of the Mediterranean .
Every summer, grime fans still flock out to Napa , but the idea seems wrong somehow.
Because grime is winter music. Cold, brutal, and desolate, it doesn’t seek to
escape or soften its environment. It amplifies the punitive bleakness.
Wiley caught the sunless spirit of
grime with a series of brilliant minimal instrumentals, designed for MCs to
spit over, and themed around ice and snow: “Eskimo,” “Ice Rink,” ad infinitum.
He says the idea came to him during a period when he felt “cold inside as a
person. I might make a warm tune now, ’cause I might not be angry anymore.” Yet
from its shivery synths to its real-world inspiration, his most recent tune
“Morgue” is as chilling as its title. The track is literally the mausoleum of a
dead friendship. “I used to hang around with this boy, Wonder,” Wiley explains,
alluding to one of the scene’s most talented producers. ‘Me and him fell out
’cause of bunglings” [serious arguments]. “Bunglings”--this time with a
girlfriend--inspired the even more desolate “Ground Zero,” which was actually
recorded on that September 11th. “I
realized that was the day when I’d never see that girl again. I felt like my
world came down as well then, just like those buildings.“
But private discord or woe can’t
explain why a whole genre of music takes a sharp turn to the dark and doomy.
Target says that “as things went bad, away from music”—meaning in the outside
world—“the music’s just got darker and darker.” Wiley agrees: “The music
reflects what’s going on in society. Everyone’s so angry at the world, and each
other. And they don’t know why.” Tony Blair’s New Labour government, elected in
1997 after almost two decades of Conservatism, promised a fresh start for Britain . The
economy was booming. It’s still strong, but in 2005, the rewards are mostly
going to the already well-off, young professionals in media, marketing, and
management. As a post-socialist party, Labour no longer even pays lip service
to ideas of wealth redistribution, but instead talks in the bland
neo-conservative language of enabling people to help themselves. The U.K. has become
much closer to America
than Europe , in the sense that people do
believe “anyone can make it,” despite the fact that the social odds are stacked
unfairly. If you don’t make it, it’s your own fault, the result of a deficit of
get-up-and-go.
Grime kids constantly spout this
kind of talk. Target has put out a series of CD/DVD compilations called Aim High, while Bruza’s new single is
called “What You Waiting For”—“a get up off your arse song,” as he puts it. As
well as the culture of enterprise built by Thatcher and maintained by Blair,
these attitudes have been assimilated from American rap. Although virtually
every grime artist stresses that they grew up on the fast-chatting style of
jungle MCs like Shabba and Skibadee,
they have been profoundly influenced by U.S. hip hop: not so much
stylistically but in terms of ambition, a sense of the scope of what can be
achieved. Bad Boy, in particular, was the role model. One of Roll Deep’s
earliest tunes, “Terrible,” starts with a soundbite from P. Diddy: “Sometimes I
don’t think you motherfuckers understand where I’m coming from, where I’m
trying to get to.” Explains Wiley, “Puff
was a big person at the time I made that tune. He had a set-up that everyone
wants to have—own label, clothing line. That’s what I’m doing it for.” The Bad
Boy leitmotif crops up elsewhere in grime. Guesting on a track last year called
“One Wish”, Bruza offered a hilarious rejoinder to Notorious BIG-- “more money
more problems, though?/Forget the problems, GIMME THE MONEY!!!!”. Bruza also
appears on a new tune that remakes the Ma$e smash “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,”
vowing to “hold me head up and keep on movin’ and bruzin’”.
Grime lyrics teems with
expressions of hunger and ambition, drive and dedication. Eight years of New
Labour have not improved options and opportunities significantly for inner city
youth. If they haven’t applied themselves in school, they typically face the
prospect of working in a service sector job, selling things. “I think that’s
why most people in our area have got on it,” says Target, referring to grime and
the dream of making it as an MC or producer. “When they get to eighteen, they
don’t know where they’re going. They’ve
got no money, they didn’t care about school. Where we are from, most people’s
lives are not good. If we didn’t have
music to express our lives, I don’t know what we’d do.”
* * *
As grime’s profile surges to its
highest level yet—major-label albums for Roll Deep, Lethal Bizzle, Kano , and Lady
Sovereign—2005 is turning into a weirdly conflicted moment for grime. For every
motivational tune like Bruza’s “What You Waiting For,” there’s a lyric advising
wannabe MCs to not give up the day job. On the surface, the scene is bursting
with confidence. But U.K. pirate culture has been here before—a host of jungle
artists got signed to album deals, but only Goldie and Roni Size got anywhere
near crossover. 2step garage crossed into the pop mainstream hugely, but didn’t
endure (where’s Artful Dodger now?). Grime too has already had its fair share
of failure—More Fire, Lethal Bizzle’s first group, released a flop album in
2003, as did Wiley.
On the track “Sometimes” from his
debut Home Sweet Home, Kano documents a rare (or
rarely acknowledged) moment of self-doubt: “When I see the fans go mad I think,
‘Why do they like me?’ / There’s about a thousand other boys just like me… I
know I’ve got far / Is it too far to turn back?… Sometimes you’ll see me in a
daydream / Thinking, ‘Can the underground go mainstream?’”
A soft-spoken, somber fellow, Kano is realistic about
grime’s prospects, especially in America . Recently, he got to
support Nas on his U.K.
tour—a big deal for the grime MC, but not for the rap superstar. “Met Nas once,
got a handshake,” Kano
notes wryly. “That was it.” The respect will come, he reckons, when grime acts
start selling records. “Not even over there, but over here, in the U.K. We can’t
just fly into America
and think we can bang with 50 Cent and all them lot! But if they come over here
and see, ‘Oh, you’ve got a little thing going on,’ and it’s selling, they’ll
notice.”
Of all grime’s major stylists, Kano ’s flow seems like
the one most likely to appeal to American hip-hop ears. An admirer of Jay-Z’s
conversational delivery and the laidback West Coast style of Snoop Dogg, Kano sounds smooth and
poised even rapping in quick time. Playing to this slick panache, Home Sweet Home, is front-loaded with
mid-tempo joints. Roll Deep’s debut likewise skimps on uncut grime in favour of
conventional hip hop and novelty tunes. Lethal Bizzle even promises some
grime/rock fusions on his solo debut Against
All Oddz, saying he’s a big fan of Green Day (“I love that “American
Idiot’”) and Nirvana. Terror Danjah, the innovative beatmaker behind Bruza and
the Aftershock label, dreams of one day recording tunes “with Robbie Williams
or Franz Ferdinand.” The gamble with all these tentative moves to court the
mainstream is that grime will lose what it has now. The strategy doesn’t even
seem that sensible: difference sells, and grime is more likely to succeed by
amplifying what’s unique and exotic about it. Lethal B should take heed of the
success of “Pow”—his grimiest, rowdiest tune is the one that’s grabbed the ears
of the world beyond London .
If grime does go pop, the most
likely perpetrator is Lady Sovereign, a 19-year-old white MC. Some scowling
scene purists refuse to take her seriously, partly because she’s from Northwest
London as opposed to East, but mainly because she bypassed pirate radio and
instead made a name for herself through the internet forums where young fans
chit-chat in cell-phone text-speak (e.g. “sov ur buf”). Yet Sovereign has
guested on numerous grime tracks, while her “Cha Ching” is one of the
highlights of the scene-defining Run The Road compilation (the first widely
available in the U.S. ).
Her mic skills are undeniable.
Sovereign’s also a star, something
that’s apparent the minute you clap eyes on her. She keeps me waiting for 90
minutes, staring morosely out of the windows of the fourth-floor Bethnal Green studio
where she and her producer Medasyn work,
taking in the lugubrious vistas of East London ,
the only splash of colour coming from a car dealers called RUDE MERCS. But when
Sov arrives--a tiny ball of colour and rude energy herself--any irritation is
charmed away in an instant. Five-foot-one but only 82 pounds, with hazel eyes
and hair pulled back tightly into a long ponytail, she weirdly reminds me of
Audrey Hepburn—if she’d grown up in a North London
estate listening to ragga and UK
garage, that is.
Lady Sovereign has signed to Island for a four-album deal reputedly worth three-million
pounds (a figure Sov denies, while admitting the true amount was “nice, really
nice”). It’s easy to imagine record-company execs with dollar signs reeling in
their eyes, imagining the spin-offs (video games, a cartoon series, Lady Sov
dolls, a Spice Girls-style movie). When she discusses how her forthcoming debut
album--working title Straight Up Cheeky--
has veered off into “alternative grime,” with influences from ska and punk, you
wonder if her backers are steering her in some kind of Gwen Stefani meets the
Streets direction. But it turns out her dad used to be a punk rocker and she
grew up listening to X-Ray Spex and the Selecter, so the direction is somewhat
organic. And when she plays a couple of tracks from the album, it’s clear the
grime-goes-new-wave notion is inspired. “Tango” and “Public Warning” fizz with
cartoony humor, from Sov’s killer inflections and irreverent lyrics to
Medasyn’s romping beats and arrangements dense with quirky detail.
The 2-Tone echoes aren’t just
cute, they’re appropriate, given how grime echoes the multiracial ethos and
urban-realist approach of bands like the Specials. Eerily, that group has
inspired two new grime tracks, Kode 9’s
eerie remake of “Ghost Town” and Alias’ “Ska,” which samples “Gangsters” then literalizes
the title with gruesome lyrics like “You don’t want fluids leaking out yer body
/ No you don’t.” But Lady Sov’s thing is altogether more lighthearted. “Tango,”
for instance, is a put-down of a former friend who’s overdone the fake tan.
“She was once really pale but now she’s orange,” says Sovereign. “It’s actually
scary.” The title, she explains, comes from a tangerine-colored soda popular in
the U.K.
It was hearing Ms. Dynamite’s
early tracks like “Booo!” on the pirates that really inspired Sovereign to take
MCing seriously. But instead of sparring with the bad boys (like other female
MCs on the scene such as Lady Fury) or move into socially conscious lyrics
(like Dynamite did on her crossover album), Sovereign carved out her own
identity. “I’m not a mean MC, I’m cheeky,” she twinkles, puffing on a cheap
brand of cigarette called Sovereign. Although her first record was called “The
Battle” and she’s just done a limited-circulation EP called Bitchin’,
Sovereign’s rhymes are closer to playground taunts than the ego-maiming verbal
drive-bys other MCs traffic in. Perhaps that’s what galls some grime
gatekeepers, the sense that it is just fun’n’games for “the multi-talented
munchkin” (as Sov dubbed herself on “Cha Ching”), rather than deadly earnest struggle.
The London scene is overflowing with talent. “You
see kids in the street just spitting to themselves,” says Bruza. “One kid’ll be
human beatboxing, and another’ll be spraying his lyrics or clashing another MC.
You see it everywhere, every day.” What’s poignant is that only a few will ever
have a chance of making it. “Everyone is rushing for that one small gap and
there’s that many people trying to get through,” says Terror Danjah. “Everyone
can’t get through that gap, ’cause everyone’s pushing and shoving. That’s life
though, innit?”