Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. Dan Hancox
yardie as they feel the rhythm demands. Meeting cheerful Pay As U Go MC Maxwell D in a pub in Peckham recently, he lists off the MCs who would deliver ‘that extra bashment, yard vibe’ in the grime scene: ‘There’s Riko Dan, myself, Jamakabi, Flow Dan, Armour, Doctor, Durrty Goodz, God’s Gift … but the top MCs in grime were not dancehall, people like Wiley and Dizzee. My style, the dancehall reggae style, grime doesn’t sit on it, the way it’s meant to, because it’s an English way. It actually helped me develop another style, because I started doing less of the bashment style and more of the English style, because I realised the kids, the black kids, weren’t really in tune with their culture no more, it was like an English culture. In my opinion even garage was more dancehall-orientated than grime, it was still rootified. But when grime came along, Dizzee and Wiley, they changed the lyrical style.’ He barks an impression of Dizzee’s halting, staccato flow: ‘“Take that Nokia! Get that, what!” It was like rap, but an English vibe.’
While the roots of grime’s vocal style and a great deal of its slang and idioms travelled across the Atlantic with the Windrush migrants, it’s a telling part of grime’s unique flavour that its accent is so often London English – especially as ‘UK hip-hop’ (a genre in itself, distinct from grime) has often borrowed not just the genre tropes – turntablism, a fetishisation of ‘realness’ and roots – from the United States, but its accent too.9 ‘I thought it would be heavy to sound English,’ Dizzee Rascal told Sound on Sound magazine in 2004. ‘I listen to a lot of US hip-hop, and I know that is how they talk in real life, but a lot of UK hip-hop doesn’t do that. My influences are from jungle, and many of those artists still keep their English accent, and I respected that.’
Indeed, some of Dizzee’s biggest early singles, tracks like ‘Fix Up, Look Sharp’, ‘Stand Up Tall’ and ‘Jus’ A Rascal’ were not only the grimier precursors to hits like ‘Bonkers’, that made him Britain’s first black pop superstar, but in their boisterous, playful style, they also reproduced a kind of east London barrow-boy charisma, even perhaps music hall in its sensibility. How many Top 20 hits can claim to have opened with a battle-cry of ‘Oiiiiii!’ and a Carry On-style cackle? Too few, certainly. Dizzee’s delivery was so English, in fact, that it actually tripped him up on the road to international success. When he toured the US for the first time in 2004, appearing on Los Angeles’ famous rap station Power 106 with DJ Felli Fel, he spat his yelping, double-time flow over classic US rap beats from Brooklyn’s M.O.P. All was well until the end of the slot, when, chatting with Felli Fel on air, there was a telling obstacle: the DJ could literally not understand Dizzee’s accent. He asked Dizzee to repeat the name of his debut album no fewer than three times in a row. Eventually Dizzee, sounding slightly exasperated, just spelled it out: ‘B-O-Y …’
First-wave grime MC Bruza, also from east London, is the name that first comes to mind for ‘cockney grime’: for his especially boisterous delivery, frequent use of cockney rhyming slang, and proud claim that he is ‘brutal and British’. And then there are the white MCs: crews like OT Crew, from Barking, created what you could call ‘geezer grime’ – MCs like Syer B and Dogzilla, repping ‘Barking and Dogenham’, had some underground success with tunes charting their heartfelt quests for the finer things in life: ‘Where’s All The Beer?’ and ‘Where’s The Money?’. Dogzilla is one of those overlooked first-wave MCs who may not be to everyone’s taste, but he is evidence that, in the early days, distinctive voices, flows and vocal styles abounded on pirate radio. Dogzilla flipped the MC’s typical self-aggrandisement to a new level of lyrical honesty, too: ‘I’m obese, white, I smoke too much, I’m a bum, I’m a drunk … I live on strictly takeaways … I like girls in PVC, I support West Ham, UFC … here’s my fat white arse, I bet it makes you laugh.’ The pinnacle of white-boy geezer grime was a track called ‘Straight Cockney’ by an MC called Phenomenon, who it seems no one has heard of since, but whose legend lives on with over a million views on YouTube, where comments mock him to this day.
US rap has had numerous discussions of the phenomenon of the ‘wigga’, and the disproportionate media prominence and industry support given, Elvis Presley-style, to white rappers from Vanilla Ice to Eminem, by an at best cynical and at worst racist music industry. But grime has seen relatively little discussion of racial tension or cultural appropriation. It might be that the genre’s long languishing on the underground meant that, if you were a white DJ or MC taking part in the scene, your participation was implicitly understood to be out of authentic love for the music, rather than calculated profiteering or co-option – the same goes for Mr Wong, a much-loved first-wave MC and producer, the self-described ‘rude boy Chinese wigga’. It might be that the relative lack of racial segregation in Britain’s council estates and poorer areas, compared to the black ghettoised geography of ‘the projects’ in America’s big cities, had something to do with making race less of an issue. It might simply be that – while the likes of Geeneus and Slimzee were instrumental from day one – the biggest talents and crossover stars produced in grime’s early days, for several years, were all black British: Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Kano, Shystie, Lethal Bizzle. With the exception of Lady Sovereign in 2005 – always a bit of an outsider to the scene in any case – and some years later, Devlin, the few white MCs weren’t the ones getting record deals.
There is something utopian in grime’s collectivist origins, of ‘kids hanging out together making something they enjoy’, as Jammer described it to me recently, and this is a rich part of its musical roots too. Academic Jeremy Gilbert has said that the relative weakness of neo-Nazi street thugs in British cities in the nineties, while such groups were on the rise elsewhere in Europe, owes a lot to the ‘cosmopolitan hybridity’ blooming (and booming) out of the speaker stacks and pirate-radio aerials where hardcore, jungle and UK garage were created. State-led multiculturalism takes the form of abstract government initiatives and directives, more progressive school curricula and better community and arts funding – and these things are all essential, and should be done right – but in terms of creating a more harmonious society, its impact looks fairly tepid compared to what young, working-class people of different ethnic backgrounds cooked up together on London’s council estates. In fact, to tweak James Meek’s pessimism about our class-riven, divided city, where the ingredients are laid out side by side, not touching, not mixing, perhaps the solitary demographic where multiculturalism is an organic, lived experience, rather than an idealised illusion, is in young, working-class communities where schools, youth clubs, estates and later workplaces make a shared and convivial culture not just realistic, but the unforced reality.
‘I was one of the only white kids on my estate growing up,’ recalled Nyke from white UK garage and grime duo Milkymans (humorously named, they explain, by a Caribbean bouncer, surprised to see them at a mostly black nightclub). ‘The Irish community had moved out, and me and Nikki grew up in the Afro-Caribbean communities in Peckham and Stockwell – so I lived between Ghanaians and Jamaicans; if I couldn’t smell fufu, I could hear Capleton blasting. My radiator used to shake off the wall! And even if I didn’t know what some of the artists meant, in a kind of black culture context, I was still feeling the vibrations of the music from young. I remember I used to wash my mum’s car, and I’d be blaring Kool FM – if I think back to it now, I’m lucky it was a noisy estate, because I love jungle, but that was noise. Like that was not easy listening.’ He laughed. ‘But when you’re a 13- to 14-year-old obnoxious, rebellious kid, that’s all you want to hear. It’s kinda the equivalent of someone listening to really dark heavy metal. That was our version of that.’
As with punk’s extensive late-seventies love affair with reggae, and the ‘two tone’ ska of the early 1980s, jungle saw urban multiculturalism manifested in youthful conviviality. It channelled a mixture of cultural influences into a novel, fiercely experimental form, created by a rich ethnic mix of producers, DJs and promoters, and enjoyed by a similarly diverse assembly of ravers. It transcended the difference in junglists’ backgrounds, but it did not forget those origins – something you can hear in the music, with soul and ragga samples and fierce basslines high in the mix.
In a 1994 BBC jungle documentary, UK Apache, the MC behind the superlative jungle anthem ‘Original Nuttah’, highlighted the power these styles had in forging a sense of belonging for