Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. Dan Hancox
had vinyl dubplates cut straight from the MiniDisc – without going anywhere near a recording studio.
Mixdowns are usually seen as a crucial stage of the recording process even for the most entry-level producer, where the elements created are refined and balanced out to create a clean and coherent whole – but with grime they sometimes didn’t happen at all, before the tunes were cut to vinyl and released, either as dubplates or for general release to record shops. This applies even to the instrumental frequently cited as the first proper grime tune, Youngstar’s ‘Pulse X’. The spirit of the period echoes the famous punk mantra, ‘Here’s a chord. Here’s another. Here’s a third. Now form a band.’
DJ Logan Sama, for one, was happy enough with the devil-may-care approach to technical proficiency. ‘I don’t give a shit if a record is mastered well or not,’ Sama said to me back in 2006, then a new graduate from the pirate-radio scene to the legit world and new sofas of KISS FM. ‘All I care about is the reaction it gets when I play it in a club. How technically well-made art is doesn’t matter: it’s art. Why would you want to analyse it on its technical merits? It’s not an exam. My white label of “Pulse X” still has the hiss from the AV-out cables from the PlayStation they took it off to record it onto CD, when they took it to master it. You can hear it! The ‘bawm’s are all distorted. That record sold over 10,000 copies; it was fucking massive. Half of So Solid’s first album was produced on Music 2000, they then took it into the studio on a memory card to re-engineer it. That album sold over one million copies. A lot of people loved jungle when it was shit – when the quality of it was shit! Personally I like “jump up” stuff, and if I get that out of a technically well-made record, then cool; if I get that out of a record that’s been made on FruityLoops and not mixed-down properly, so be it.’
Grime’s canon of cult classics is full of music made by producers who were unwilling or unable to do things ‘properly’. One of Ruff Sqwad’s most famous instrumental productions, ‘Functions On The Low’ by XTC, took on a life of its own when, 11 years after its release, Stormzy used it as the instrumental for a freestyle recorded in his local park. That freestyle, ‘Shut Up’, would go on to take the charts by storm and propel him to pop superstardom. XTC is one of many of grime’s ephemeral geniuses1: for most of the crew’s existence, he was barely even in Ruff Sqwad; more just a mate from the area who made a few tunes and spat a few bars, and the older brother to MC Fuda Guy. XTC finished only a handful of tracks, and only ever released one 12 inch of three tracks with ‘Functions’ on the B-side – it just happened to be a masterpiece. It’s a breathtaking five minutes of longing, like a fleeting glimpse of the love of your life disappearing into the Hong Kong night – neon lights seen through a torrent of tears. It’s so heartbreaking, and yet so addictive, so humane, that the moment it stops, you’re desperate to have it back. It took him half an hour to write, on FruityLoops, one morning before college, while the rest of his family were still asleep. He used the computer keyboard in place of an actual keyboard, never got it mastered, rendered the audio file, burned a CD, and took it straight to the vinyl pressing plant.2 And that was that.
Other more prolific producers, like Dexplicit, who made the instrumental ‘Forward Riddim’ that would be used for Lethal Bizzle’s ‘Pow!’, an underground smash and later a Top 10 hit, began writing music on even more basic equipment: a pre-app, pre-internet ‘brick’ of a mobile phone. ‘When I was in secondary school, everyone used to get me to create ringtones of their favourite songs on the old Nokia 3310’s,’ he laughed, when I interviewed him for a piece about ‘sodcasting’, the much-maligned mid-2000s phenomenon where people (usually young teenagers) would play music off their phones on public transport. Grime’s birth coincided with the popularisation of new kinds of cheap, low-end, unsophisticated audio technology. Of course there had been TDK cassettes and home-taping off the radio in previous decades, but the explosion of rapidly evolving mobile-phone technology, mp3 players and cheap ear-bud headphones skewed a lot of listening towards treble-focused audio – a paradox for grime, with its ‘bass culture’ lineage through reggae, jungle and UK garage. I asked Dexplicit if the technological and consumer changes were conditioning how he made tracks. ‘My primary focus is how it’s going to sound on a club system,’ he replied, ‘but I am aware there are sections of the frequency spectrum that won’t be picked up well via iPod headphones, TVs and phones. I make “heavy-bass” music. And listening to a 50–100hz, very low bass on a iPod is like trying to hear ants walking. I’ve always tried to create a balance in my music, and often have “pretty” melodies going on upstairs, the treble, accompanied by a kind of nasty low end.’
Ask 20 different grime fans what they consider to be the first grime tune, and you’ll get, if not 20 different answers, probably about ten: a good half of them will either say ‘Pulse X’, or Wiley’s ‘Eskimo’. I actually carried out this test, entirely unscientifically, on Twitter. Other answers included a smattering of late-garage crew cuts: More Fire Crew’s ‘Oi’ (2001), So Solid Crew singles ‘Dilemma’ and ‘Oh No’ (2000), as well as one shout for Danny Weed’s ‘Creeper’ (2002). Rinse FM founder, grime svengali and long-standing producer Geeneus, who ought to know, maintains that the first grime track is Pay As U Go’s ‘Know We’, the crew’s underground anthem released in 2000. ‘Wiley was the one who was like “we’re going to put the MCs on the songs”, and I was like “MCs on songs, that’s a bit mad innit? No one does that,”’ Geeneus said in 2016. The aggressive tone of the MCs, and the unsettling, urgent momentum of the keyboard riff all mark the track out as grime, but most of all it was the structure which shifted the paradigm: tracks like ‘Know We’ created clearly demarcated space for MCs to fill with complex rhymes – to tell stories and to dominate proceedings, rather than merely accompany an instrumental. They weren’t hosting the rave for the DJ/producer anymore: this was their show. The Pay As U Go MCs brought the track straight from the studio to Rhythm Division on Roman Road, where it was played out at top volume to the two dozen people hanging around there. ‘I was like “What is this music?”’ Geeneus recalled. ‘It was 16 bars, then chorus, 16 bars, a chorus. We just went off on one. Every tune was formatted like that after that. That’s grime! That was the template. And it’s still going now, same format.’3
Youngstar’s ‘Pulse X’, released in January 2002 but on the airwaves for some time before that, offered its own template: it was arranged in functional 8-bar segments, switching quickly and with little variation – which briefly led to ‘8-bar’ as the designated genre name for this new, untested mutant strain of UK garage. The format was vital for grime’s evolution as an MC-led genre, in that they would write lyrics in either 8, 16, 32 or 64 bar sections, with the style varying for each of those lengths. ‘Your 8s are your reload bars,’ Shystie explained to me recently, ‘or it can even just be a 4, repeated twice’: they had to be memorable, crowd-pleasing and catchy – held in reserve for when the DJ brings in a particularly brilliant instrumental. These are your silver bullets, your punchlines, powerful and simple shots of lyrical adrenaline – the bars that could make you underground-famous. 16s and 32s are for your more detailed or thoughtful content, ‘for spraying’, and they need more space to breathe: they’re better suited to slower burning, less sugar-rush hectic instrumentals – but because they’ll take longer, you need to start them at the right time, too, early on in a track, unless you’re confident about continuing them over the hump of two tracks, during the DJ’s blend. Judging the mood, and the rhythm, and anticipating the DJ can be fiendishly difficult, especially when you have to make split-second decisions about switching up the pace while also in the middle of spitting. It requires a pretty remarkable level of mental dexterity, the more you think about it. Eighteen-year-old MC Streema from latter-day Lewisham crew The Square explained the challenge to American podcast Afropop Worldwide: ‘There could be a hype beat coming in, and you’re already spraying a 32, and not really know what 8 to spray … The person listening is going to think, “All right, cool, this beat coming in is gassed, this beat is a hype tune, I want to hear someone do a madness on this,” so if you’re on your own at the [radio] set, it would be good to draw for your 8 … but sometimes it’s better to wait, to get into the beat, to then drop the 8, because it