Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. Dan Hancox
its early days grime really was a scene, with its own institutions and infrastructure, friendships and rivalries, independent record labels and shops, as well as the pirate stations. It was also a community, in which the (mostly teenage) MCs and DJs all knew each other: if not from school, from youth clubs or just from hanging around the local area, then through ‘doing music’. Their rejection by the older, more refined, aspirational and grown-up UK garage scene forged a unique camaraderie, and drove the music to new heights of innovation – the competitive bravado forcing MCs to keep writing new, bolder, better lyrics.
Like all pirate stations, Deja Vu FM is by definition illegal, and its secret studio location has been moved regularly to escape the Department for Trade and Industry. In summer 2003, it’s in a grotty whitewashed box room – one window boarded up with chipboard, another blocked out with a bin bag – up on the rooftop of the same building that housed the notorious EQ Club, where numerous seminal UK garage nights took place. ‘Deja was the maddest one,’ MC Shystie says. ‘Because the studio was on a rooftop, and the roof literally had no edge: so if you take one wrong move, you’re dead. We should not have been up there! Because it would be late at night, and dark – so if someone gets pushed, or someone trips and falls back, they’re going to fall off that fucking roof and die. It’s mad when you look back at it now: nowadays the radio stations all look like how 1Xtra looks, all nice and shit – and they’re all in flipping Shoreditch.’
When Conflict was filmed, the geographical horizons were as narrow as the sonic ones were wide: ‘That’s where I’m from, Bow E3,’ Wiley boasts into the Deja Vu mic at one point. ‘I’m like the 38 bus, because I never turn up!’ he continues, shouting out north-east London’s least reliable bus service. This closed-world intensity, bordering on claustrophobia, vibrates outwards from the crowded little Deja Vu studio, in the MCs’ clamour for a turn on the microphone.
The Conflict video is grime at the point of its creative eruption – still unnamed, but undeniably alive – as the futuristic mutations of UK garage’s slinky charm settled into the shape of an explosive new genre. This was the exact moment when the effusive charisma and hype of the MCs began to take over the show. Prior to that, anyone with a mic in their hand was first of all answerable to the beat, to the producer-DJ auteur, and pirate radio was all about ‘rolling out’ the instrumentals – building a steady, if restless momentum. The MC was a performer, and a host: a master of ceremonies, but also, in the parasitic sense, possessed by those pioneering early grime beats and their subdivisions – Wiley’s ‘eskimo’, Jon E Cash’s ‘sublow’ – all of them summoning a kind of macabre, horror-show minimalism.
There’s D Double E, the lanky, cheeky fans’ favourite, also known as the Newham General, not in military fatigues tonight but shrouded in a black boxer’s hoodie, with a skippy, idiosyncratic flow and his own verbal audio-logo, ‘the D Double signal’, which is not easily transcribed, but sounds something like: ‘Ooooerhhhhhh, ooooerhhhhhh – it’s muuuuweee, muuuuuweee.’ There’s Maxwell D, who in his early twenties has already been to hell and back, survived an upbringing of domestic violence, sheltered accommodation, hostels and foster care, been on TV – on Crimewatch – gone to jail for armed robbery, come out, become a major UK garage MC and a major drug dealer (at the same time), had hits and gone back on primetime TV, but as a pop star. There’s Lady Fury, unmoved by being – as she often was – the only woman in a room full of jostling male egos, getting plaudits for her ferocity: ‘I don’t give head, but I give headbutts,’ she spits, and the record playing underneath, ‘Ho’ by Dizzee Rascal, is wheeled back as her male peers throw their hands up. ‘Dun no I represent for the ladies,’ she says, as the stuttering gunshots of the instrumental start up again. There’s Tinchy Stryder, still in school, expounding the strange wisdom of youth, ‘brand new energy, same old Stryder,’ he spits, like he’s been doing this for years – he has – clutching the microphone with both hands like his life depends on it. And then there’s Wiley, the godfather of grime, whose manic enthusiasm and hilarious non-sequiturs suddenly give way to moments of sublime clarity, like when he captures the whole bizarre and uniquely skittish practice of grime MCing: ‘I’m futuristic, quantum leaping/there’s no defeating E3 tiger/see me creep on the riddim like a spider/kill them with a 16-liner.’ Grime ‘spitting’ is twice the speed of US-style rap: typically, you had just 16 bars to show your skills (or 21 seconds, in So Solid Crew’s case), before passing the mic to the next MC – it is the most thrilling, exhausting, ADHD onslaught of a genre: a tension headache you can dance to. Andy Warhol’s generation should count themselves lucky they got fifteen entire minutes to make an impact. But for all the idiosyncratic talents, they’re in it together. The powerful conviviality and kinship in a genre where lyrical threats of violence are one of the primary means of communication may be surprising, but it’s there all the same – a chain created between artists every time the mic is passed from one MC to the next.
As the energy of the set mounts, Crazy Titch is bopping with cartoonish energy, his face screwed up at the sheer meanness of the track playing underneath, his blitzkrieg of bars including the lyric, ‘Draw for me, you’ll be on the Ten O’Clock News.’ Only three years later, he actually was on the Ten O’Clock News, when he was charged with murder: a moment when grime’s casual lyrical brutality was horribly borne out in reality. ‘When Titch came in, I could feel there was an edge,’ Troy Miller says. ‘He changed the dynamics of the room. Everything got a bit more serious, whereas it was all fun and banter before.’
Throughout the Conflict video Dizzee’s voice has that lean, straining, high-pitched teenager’s tone, altogether gone from his songs now that his throat’s been fleshed out by success, and time. He is visibly defensive, an outsider even among his peers, the boy in the corner of the room, just as he was at school. Titch is much less guarded, happily lost in the music, grinning when he passes the mic to Dizzee, nodding his head to his rival’s bars, adding a cheerful ‘what!’ to Dizzee’s lyrics in choral emphasis.
There’s no sense of a fight in the offing for the first, enthralling 35 minutes of the video – it explodes from absolutely nowhere. Dizzee asks for the mic, is refused by Titch, who is still in full flow, and somehow in a split second the two of them are yelling at each other and squaring up, fingers are pointed, and the music underneath cuts out abruptly, like in a spaghetti western; the card tables are flipped over, the piano stops playing and the saloon doors are left swinging in the breeze.
Wiley and Maxwell D are immediately in between the two young MCs – the elder statesmen who’ve seen this kind of bullshit before, and seen it get out of hand before. Wiley takes charge, the man who has always behaved like he cares more for the scene’s collective success than his own. (‘What’s the highlight of your career so far?’ Wiley was asked in 2017. ‘Skepta making it.’ ‘No, your highlight,’ the interviewer pressed. Wiley wouldn’t change track: ‘Skepta. I took him from a DJ to an MC.’1) He holds them back, instructing them to ‘seckle, seckle’, his eyes darting all around the room as other MCs move in to either help or hinder the rapprochement. Dizzee and Titch are pulled apart still shouting at each other, and everyone spills out onto the rooftop from the TARDIS-like studio, silhouetted against the dark blue east London gloaming, as friends attempt to calm them down.
‘Don’t hold him back, don’t hold him back,’ Dizzee yelps, as the struggle to defuse the anger continues. He was still so young at this point – still barking his anger out, straining passionately, defensively, hungry both on the mic and in the fight with Titch. ‘I’M NOT A MOOK, I don’t know what they told you but I’m not a mook!’ he yells repeatedly at an equally aggressive Titch. He’s scowling, livid – determined to defend his reputation. No one seems to agree on the etymology of ‘mook’ here (it might be a throwback to Scorsese’s Mean Streets), but it’s clear from the rage in Dizzee’s eyes, and in his voice, that he’s not one, right?
The clash looks serious, and is taken seriously by all the others present on the rooftop – and it was soon followed up by diss tracks from each MC to the other. As menacing as they both look when they’re screaming at each other, the scrap is underscored by grime’s quintessential, frequently comic tendency to the melodramatic.