Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. Dan Hancox
of language altogether – although this has its own history too. Simon Reynolds, describing pirate-radio MC patter in the early nineties, points to the sensual thrill of hearing ‘an arsenal of non-verbal, incantatory techniques, bringing spoken language closer to the state of music: intonation, syncopation, alliteration, internal rhyme, slurring, rolling of ‘r’s, stuttering of consonants, twisting and stretching of vowels, comic accents, onomatopoeia.’4 It’s a legacy carried down the continuum of pirate sounds into grime’s cast of players – especially in the early years when their faces weren’t so well known, and MCs had to make their voices stand out on crowded pirate sets, with familiar bars but also stylistic tics, accents and affectations. Like characters in computer games, most MCs developed their own overblown catchphrases to help identify themselves, bat signals beaming from the pirate transmitters into the night sky over Bow. Scratchy had his self-described ‘warrior charge’ (‘brreee brreee!’), Jammer a range of absurd and playful nonsense poetry (‘are you dhaaaaaaauum?!’ [dumb] ‘Seckk-kulllll – draw for the neckk-kulll’), Jme the comically over-pronounced ‘Serious!’ and ‘Shhhhut Yuh Mouth’, and in a category of his own was Flirta D, whose extraordinary rhythmic sound effects and imitations took in computer-game noises, explosions, snatches of sweetly sung R&B, jungle-style trilling and more – somewhere between scatting, beat-boxing and a malfunctioning sample pack.
We’ve already heard about D Double E and his ‘D Double sig-a-nal’, the immediately recognisable announcement of his arrival, like a music hall performer peering his head around the side of the curtain, before stepping out onto the stage. Written non-phonetically, in standard English, it looks camp and comical – ‘Ooh! Ooh! It’s me, me!’ (where, we might ask, is D Double E’s washboard?) – but it’s spread out over about seven or eight syllables, a visceral vocal exorcism from somewhere deep in the lungs. ‘That’s very original – never heard that from another individual,’ runs another old-school D Double bar, in meta commentary on his own idiosyncrasy. ‘At raves, sometimes I don’t even have to MC,’ he told the Guardian in 2004. ‘I just go on stage and hear the echoes coming out the crowd. It’s a deep signal.’
Skepta (pirate radio catchphrase: ‘Go on then, go on then!’), by contrast, very deliberately chose the most clear-voiced, discernible flow he could – ‘put me up against gimmick, sound effect or skippy-flow man,’5 he taunted (and I’ll merk all three of them). On diss tracks ‘Swag MC Burial’ and ‘The End’, he took on several rival MCs in sequence, mocking them by imitating their flows and quoting their catchphrases. A pre-planned live MC clash on Logan Sama’s KISS FM show in 2007,6 with Skepta facing down the super-fast skippy flow and ‘technical’ lyricism of Ghetts, highlights an interesting tension between different styles of MCing. Speaking about himself in the third person, Skepta goes after Ghetts’ technique specifically: ‘Skepta how did you kill him like that, when he’s skipping all over the riddim like that? You will never hear me spitting like that … I like the basic shit, I don’t like too many words in a sentence,’ he announces. Skepta is punk trashing prog rock: why is long and convoluted inherently better? ‘Go on then, spit a 32-bar lyric, I’ll rustle up an 8-bar lyric, to dun your lyric,’ he tells Ghetts, dismissing his crew The Movement’s fondness for complex lyricism, punning and wordplay. He castigates this kind of borrowing from US hip-hop (and Kano) – it’s foreign, and intrinsically inauthentic for a London grime MC: ‘I make the best grime music: some man run up in the booth and lose it, start spitting like Dipset, D Block and G Unit/Kano brought a new flow to the game, now I look around: 10 million MCs in the grime scene want to use it/It’s my job to make them look stupid.’ The counterpoint is put by a fan in the YouTube comments on the audio clip, who prefers Ghetts and his crew: ‘Skepta just has basic one-line flows.’
For all grime’s non-verbal and semi-verbal vocal dynamism, the significant break in the tradition of rave-based British MC culture was the grime generation’s turn away from the functional role of (party or radio) host towards storytelling. And as the MCs developed their voices, producers began their own world-building, too – sketching out new rules, and changing the entire emotional register of what had gone before. (Significantly, in the beginning, there was a huge overlap; in fact the overwhelming majority of MCs have recorded and released at least one instrumental record as producers, at some point.)
Alongside transitional darker garage instrumentals by the likes of So Solid Crew, in 2001 and 2002 there were also beats being made that sounded like nothing that had gone before.
After learning the drums as a child, experimenting with copying his dad’s reggae jams on the keyboard, and dabbling – quite excellently – with making the sweetest of straight-up vocal UK garage on ‘Nicole’s Groove’, under the pseudonym Phaze One, Wiley moved on to making his own sound. Geeneus and Slimzee had bought a Korg Triton, a new synthesiser that went on sale in 1999, a piece of equipment that would become synonymous with the quintessential grime sound, and Wiley would pop around and use it. In the first years of the 2000s, he created a sound, ‘eskibeat’ or ‘eskimo’, that was characterised by its sparse arrangements, futuristic, icy cold synths, devastating basslines and awkward, off-kilter rhythms. Like UK garage before it, it was generally 140 beats per minute – the consistency was important for DJs to be able to mix records seamlessly. (Dubstep and grime producer Plastician is not the only one to have observed that FruityLoops’ default tempo is set to 140bpm, which ‘may have a lot to answer for’.) But the world it conjured – the same city, from a totally different perspective – had a completely different atmosphere.
In this crucible moment, around 2002–03, the taxonomy of what would become ‘grime’ was greatly contested – and even debated on one of Wiley’s first label-released singles, ‘Wot Do U Call It?’. (‘Garage? Urban? 2 Step?’ he speculates derisively, without providing a definitive answer.) Eskibeat quickly became a one-man sonic empire, a distinctive sound all branded with an arctic theme: the track titles from that era include Ice Rink, Igloo, Ice Pole, Blizzard, Ice Cream Man, Snowman, Frostbite, Freeze, Colder and Morgue. ‘Sometimes I just feel cold hearted,’ he said in 2003, by way of explanation. ‘I felt cold at that time, towards my family, towards everyone. That’s why I used those names … I am a nice person but sometimes I switch off and I’m just cold. I feel angry and cold.’7 The narcotically-enhanced, loved-up bliss of the eighties and nineties rave predecessors, and the giddy utopian place-making that made raves ‘temporary autonomous zones’ had been wiped off the map. Wiley offered another explanation in 2005, which pegged the claustrophobia, emotional dislocation and rage of his and his peers’ music to the city around him: ‘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,’ he told American magazine Spin. ‘As things went bad, away from music, the music’s just got darker and darker.’8
‘Eskimo’ was the first of his eski-oeuvre, the most game-changing, and the most enduring: a few minimal drum skirmishes, some artificial synth stabs, and the sound of a hollow metal pole rolling around a construction yard. Docklands after the docks, and before Canary Wharf – just a wasteland – but maybe with a hint of the bankers’ blocks’ futuristic glint, too. During the Pay As U Go school tour, they would play ‘Eskimo’ as an instrumental bed, and the kids would come up and freestyle over them. ‘The kids were going mad over that beat,’ Maxwell D recalled – this alien soundtrack was appropriate to the mood of the age. Its sheer newness is startling, and unsettling: it is easily situated in the context of millenarian anxiety, with all the apocalyptic fears that had accompanied that mystical calendar change, made worse by an ambient sense of dread about the new era that lay ahead. The frosty wastelands and open space reaching out ahead in the twenty-first century provoked a kind of psychic agoraphobia, triggered by the seismic jolt of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and the rush to war that followed, with the growing likelihood of unavoidable climate catastrophe ahead. Wiley wrote one of his formative eskimo tracks, ‘Ground Zero’, on the day of the attacks. ‘Imagine travelling through the streets, through all that dust. I want