Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. Dan Hancox
does so brilliantly, telling sincere and evocative stories about his youth in his childhood home, 69 Manor Road in Plaistow, E15. On ‘T-Shirt Weather In The Manor’, Kano vividly describes multigenerational summer barbecues where the kids are listening to UK garage titans MJ Cole and Heartless Crew, and ‘the olders want some [reggae singer] Dennis Brown’, a prelapsarian community idyll, before fame, beefs and adulthood came along and complicated everything.
That kinship was formed, in part, out of marginality. Crazy Titch says he knew brothers Mak 10 and Marcus Nasty when they were children because ‘there was like three black families in Plaistow when I was growing up, and theirs was one of them’.2 In parts of inner London with more substantial black communities, grime’s originators were bound through pre-internet social networks formed by geography and background, by a sense of being marginalised by poverty, or racism. ‘It was a nice little community here,’ Kano recalled, smiling, in a short documentary accompanying Made in the Manor. ‘There was definitely a feeling that we weren’t supposed to be shit, or have shit, or become anything great. An underlying attitude that people grow up with, from around here.’3 Those narrow horizons enforced by poverty keep people down, but they bind people together, too – and when the kids at those barbecues started making music, by themselves, for each other, those bonds provided the foundations for something powerful, and lasting.
Sometimes grime’s ancestral links didn’t become apparent till years later. Footsie recently told his dad who Wiley’s dad was, and he responded that they’d played together as children. ‘I was there with Will, running around as kids, I just don’t really remember it.’4
Sitting in a pub beer garden in Bethnal Green in 2017 with Roony Keefe, creator of the seminal Risky Roadz DVD series, he told a story about Devlin, who he first filmed for his DVD in 2006, when he was a teenage MC from Barking, still only 16:
‘I’ve known Devs all these years but … my dad went to this funeral last year, and he was talking to one of his old mates there, and he said, “Oh, how’s your boy?”, and he said, “Yeah all right, still doing the music.” My dad was like, “Oh yeah, what music does he do?” Turns out my dad grew up with Devlin’s dad in Hackney, they’ve been mates all these years. But we didn’t know that until last year. It’s a really tight-knit kind of thing.’ Devlin wrote lyrics to describe this story of their dads drinking together in their favourite Hackney pub, before its gentrification-makeover, in a freestyle for Keefe’s YouTube channel: ‘Oi Roony, do me a favour and let ’em all know we’ve been around from day: like mine and your old mans, down the Kenton pub before it sold grub, just beer and grams. Funny how it all turns out … damn.’5
Wiley would watch his dad’s VHS copies of famous Jamaican sound-clash events like Sting, where rival sound-systems (with a team of engineers, hosts and selectors) would compete by offering up their biggest dubplates – also known as dubs, or white labels, because the vinyl was freshly cut from a new recording, and specially made for the occasion, rather than released to the general public by a record company. These did not have a sleeve or any artwork, just the naked simplicity of the record, its title inscribed on the white label in marker pen.
‘I sometimes heard my dad listening to Sugar Hill and the Gang,’ Wiley recalled in 2016, ‘[there was] some American rap. But it was minimal compared to all the reggae.’
Wiley had already learned to play the drums, and began to try and copy some of his dad’s reggae jams, using a Yamaha CX5, ‘the one with the big stick-in cartridge thing on top. I would go on there and see if I could play what he had just been playing.’ Reggae suffused the general atmosphere that the grime generation grew up in, tracing direct ancestral links from Britain’s pre-acid house reggae culture, some of it imported from the Caribbean, some of it created by black Britons. South London grime and dancehall MC Doctor – known for his ‘yardie flow’ – was managed by one of London’s most famous sound-systems, Saxon. Dreadlocked grime icon Jammer – a stalwart behind the scenes, a pioneering producer and a zany presence on the mic – grew up in a house immersed in this culture: his parents ran the ELRICS (East London Rastafarian Information and Community Services), which helps Rastafarians with housing, and incorporates work with young people (Jammer himself has spoken at schools and colleges, and been involved in their mentoring programmes). Iconic black British dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah was a family friend. The connections go on: Spyro’s dad is St Lucian reggae singer Nereus Joseph, Scorcher’s dad is jungle MC Mad P from early nineties crew Top Buzz.
It’s not just a family connection, or an abstract component of the musical bloodline: grime echoes its Jamaican reggae heritage in its structure, in its tropes, in its slang, in the way it’s performed, and stylistically: particularly harking back to the ‘fast chat’ reggae style of the likes of Smiley Culture, a black British MC who made it into the charts two decades before Dizzee Rascal did the same. Grime is a direct product of Caribbean sound-system culture. The legacy is more implicit than explicit a lot of the time, but it’s there in so much of what is integral to grime: in the dubplate white label culture of exclusive new tracks, in the competition of rival sound-systems or crews, in the MC responding live to the selector or DJ’s choices of instrumental tracks, or riddims. It is there in the song structures, in the sense they often do not have clearly demarcated structures: rather than the verse-bridge-chorus-verse architecture of the traditional three-minute pop song, MCs begin their careers ‘riding the riddim’, usually a steady tempo from beginning to end, that only changes when the next one is faded in.
Academic Nabeel Zuberi makes the point that MCs are middle points between the music and the audience – they have to ride the rhythm but also ‘conduct the choir’ on the dancefloor, and move the crowd to respond. In this sense the MC’s voice is ‘a social voice that includes the voice of others’, Zuberi writes.6 The performance function is more complex than simply, ‘I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen’.
There’s a unique and productive cultural tension at the heart of grime that comes directly from its inner-London geography, of working-class cultures from the African and Caribbean diasporas intermingling with working-class London slang and culture, rubbing up against each other, borrowing, collaborating and adapting freely and fruitfully. It’s a tension familiar to fans of 1980s British reggae, where the duality is referred to as ‘Cockney and Yardie’, taken from Peter Metro and Dominic’s 1987 tune of the same name. In this song white reggae MC Dominic, born in west London, and black MC Peter Metro, born in Kingston (Jamaica, not Surrey), trade and translate slang from Jamaica (‘yardie’) and east London (‘cockney’).7 Smiley Culture’s 1984 single ‘Cockney Translation’ had performed the same ludic act of cultural elaboration, and become a surprise hit.
Grime has often been described as dazzlingly innovative, alien, groundbreaking, avant-garde, and it is all those things; one factor which explains its newness, perhaps, is not just the individual and collective daring of its creators, but the exact point at which it arrived: in a new millennium, from mostly second- or third-generation black Britons who were just estranged enough from their cultural roots in the Caribbean, or Africa, or both, and far enough along the lineage of unique British dance styles – acid house, jungle, drum ’n’ bass, UK garage – that they could draw from them all, while never being too in thrall to any of them. Just the right amount of respect for what had gone before, and just the right amount of healthy disregard for it, too – a mingling of conflicting and cooperating identities.8 ‘This is something new for your ears,’ runs the chorus of Roll Deep’s 2007 track ‘Something New’, ‘you ain’t heard beats or spitters like this: no American accents, straight English.’
Grime lyrics and vernacular – grime grammar, even – draws on a wide range of roots and influences, but Caribbean English is unsurprisingly prominent, along with grime’s own neologisms, cockney rhyming slang and other pieces of what is known to linguists as MLE (Multicultural