Inner City Pressure. Dan Hancox
there were musical links from London to West Africa too – genre-hopping producer, singer and MC Donaeo and grime-adjacent rapper Sway were performing big shows in Accra and collaborating with Ghanaian rapper Sarkodie in the late 2000s. Skepta, in particular, made it clear in his most well-known early radio and rave bars, that he was ‘Joseph Junior Adenuga, from Nigeria, not St Lucia – big lips, African hooter’. This didn’t preclude an upbringing in which he obsessed over Ninjaman and Jamaican sound-clash culture, but it coexisted with the West African music he heard at home. By the time I interviewed him for a second time, in 2015, black British youth culture was changing – a diasporic shift in emphasis away from Caribbean dominance had been slowly taking place in the UK. ‘When I was a yute, to be called African was a diss,’ he recalled, sadly. ‘At school the African kids used to lie and say they were Jamaican. So when I first came in the game and I’m saying lyrics like “I make Nigerians proud of their tribal scars/my bars make you push up your chest like bras”, that was a big deal for me.’
Even saying his full name in his lyrics was an act of defiant pride with a very personal context. ‘In school, when a teacher would try and read my name, as soon as she goes to try and say it, I’d be trying to say it first, to stop the embarrassment of her not being able to pronounce it. Eventually I grew up. I remember one day when I was about fifteen, my mum told me, “Junior, your name means something – just because your name isn’t some standard English name.” I remember going back into school and it started to power me up. Bare self-hate vibes was pushed into me as a kid at school, trust me. That’s why it makes me happy to see all these kids today just love Afrobeats, because since the start I’ve been trying to fucking fight this ting, for them to be able to stand up.’ He mentioned ‘Sweet Mother’, his single released in 2007 for Mother’s Day, a reworking of Prince Nico Mbarga’s 1970s hit of the same name, an early pointer to the way black British music might be going next, with Nico’s sweetly sung, Nigerian-accented chorus sitting alongside Skepta’s grimy London beats and MCing.
The ‘Black Atlantic’10 pathways between Africa, Britain, America and the Caribbean have seen cultural exchange, revision and refinement in numerous iterations, but it should be no surprise, given their histories, that black British MC culture has evolved along very different lines to American hip-hop culture. South London rappers Krept and Konan, schoolmates of Stormzy, are situated very much on the rap side of the rap-grime divide, in terms of the slower, hip-hop tempo of their beats and rhymes: and yet, they explained to me, there wasn’t that much of a divide at all – that just as black Britishness embraced its diverse roots, it also produced a family of different, coexisting genres. I’d been sent by the Observer to ask them what separated British microphone culture from its American equivalent. Konan didn’t hesitate in saying that it was essentially ‘everything’ – fairly or not, he viewed American hip-hop culture and identity as monolithic in a way black British culture never was:
‘What’s different? Our accents, our lifestyle, our culture. When we was in America we’d say “Where are you from?” and they’d say “America”. But over here if someone said where are you from you might say “Jamaica”, or “Africa” or something else – maybe “British” and adding something else. We bring different cultures to our music, and different slang, a different way of doing things. And there’s different-sounding beats: in their clubs there’s a lot of just hip-hop, in our clubs you’ll have house, dance, Afrobeats, bashment, you’ve got a blend of styles.’
Jungle was the teenage apprenticeship for the pioneers of grime. They snuck into the raves while still underage just to hear it, persuaded mums and dads to let them go with older brothers or sisters, obsessed about it on pirate radio (usually Hackney’s Kool FM, the leading jungle station), made tapes in their bedrooms and swapped them at school and college, and through that shared community forged friendships that would last into the end of the nineties, to the evolution of 2-step garage and later their own sound. The family tree is robust enough that many of grime’s first wave of MCs started out in music spitting over jungle – it was their first experiences in writing rhymes, performing in a dance. D Double E started out MCing at jungle raves aged only 14. Wiley did too, and Riko Dan. There are recordings now on YouTube of the three of them spitting at jungle’s frenetic tempo – these items themselves a beautiful low-fidelity chronology of the last 20 years of technology and urban music: an illegal and unofficial pirate-radio broadcast, recorded onto a tape cassette, stored in an attic somewhere presumably, and then years later linked up via a cable to a computer, the audio converted to mp3, then uploaded to YouTube. Many of the personnel playing jungle at house parties, raves and on radio in SS (Silver Storm) Crew – the likes of Wiley, Maxwell D and Target – would go on to form seminal garage-into-grime crew Pay As U Go Cartel.
I remember listening to a Ruff Sqwad show on Rinse FM a few years later, in 2005, in which, for the first hour and 45 minutes of their two-hour set, they followed their usual formula: DJ Scholar beginning with a few US R&B and hip-hop (vocal) tracks, followed by half an hour of the biggest grime vocal tracks of the day, and then around the hour mark, switching to brand new grime dubplates and instrumentals, for the gathered MCs to spit their bars over. And then, for the final 15 minutes, the MCs, still only around the age of 20, MCs who would have been about ten when jungle was in its prime, switched up the pace for a final, hectic flurry of junglist ske-be-de-bi spitting. The overwhelming sensation you get from listening to them passing the mic to have a go is just sheer, infectious joy, as they fall about laughing.
The affection most of grime’s foundational figures have for jungle, then and now, is something to behold. Grime may have come directly from UK garage, and have mutated from it, but its creators speak of jungle like a first love, or a first high, an experience that will be refined, but in some wistful sense, never bettered. ‘Jungle,’ Wiley sighed fondly, when I interviewed him for the fifth time, in 2016. ‘That’s my favourite. You know jungle, it’s the only genre that didn’t get exploited? Because the people weren’t dumb – they just didn’t care! A few went to labels, got money, and realised, “You know what? Majors are a waste of time – I was earning more money on the white label.” They learned that trick, very early. But then it wasn’t an MC-led thing, from the point of the business. It is in the rave, but when it came to the records it wasn’t MC-led; it was more producer-controlled. So that’s why they wasn’t gassed [carried away].’ The implication is that the purity and community of the underground scene were never sullied by the ego of MCs-turned-superstars – never capitalised on unduly by the suits from the industry, or the biggest names from the scene.
For Skepta, his musical youth had been primarily ‘reggae in abundance’ – the likes of Barrington Levy, Gregory Isaacs and Half Pint – and that was followed by an instinctive and deep-rooted sense of connection, or ownership, to the frenetic ragga jungle playing out of cars and pirate radio stations in nineties Tottenham. ‘When I first heard jungle, I understood it immediately,’ he recalled in 2015, as we sat parked in his car in Palmers Green, his eyes glazing over with stoned awe. ‘To make something this bless sound this hype was just sick. I think it resonated with me because of the reggae basslines, but also because I’m British and I’m around dancey music – in Europe our ears are set towards like, high synthy sounds and fast speeds. We’re accustomed to that.’
It’s not a controversial point that deep in its spirit, jungle is grime’s true antecedent. Its aesthetics – a hard, scowling, dark side that is counterpointed by ludic, transcendent expressions of joy – were essential to the mutation of UK garage as it became grime. ‘Coming from jungle, you’re always going to be a little more into the darker stuff,’ recalled Troy ‘A Plus’ Miller, describing the garage days as a kind of stylistic interregnum. ‘Even though you like the light and the happy – you and your crew out in a rave, all the girls are here, we’re all having a nice time – you’re still going to lean towards things that are a bit darker.’
A Plus’s friend and founder of Rinse FM, Geeneus, is unequivocal about the power of that junglist passion; that passion would lead them to a collective mistake that would help change the course of British music. He told a podcast in 2016 about the influential UK garage instrumental ‘Cape Fear’, a welcome (re)turn to the dark side, which the Pay As U Go MCs could spit over with the speed and aggression of jungle lyricism. It wasn’t the