Inner City Pressure. Dan Hancox
characterise the inner London that is being rapidly dismantled: a series of social-housing ghettoes, holding back the people living in them – held back not because they are poor, but because they are surrounded by other people who are poor. They’re a bad influence on each other. Bring in the middle classes, and everyone will learn from one another, and thrive. The problem with all this, the deception buried in the rhetoric, is that urban regeneration is almost always a zero-sum game: for some people to ‘come back’ to the inner city, others have to leave.
A decade later, I asked a leading property developer whether building blocks of luxury flats in previously poor inner-city areas was the essence of gentrification. ‘Hopefully we are getting blended communities,’ he replied. ‘In the poor parts of London where we’ve been working in the past, they have been – and I use this term politely – but they have been social enclaves. No one buys homes there, because your money will probably depreciate. But that’s changing. It’s not gentrification, it’s just becoming a more balanced community.’15
In one sense, New Labour and grime should have been allies from the start. The elevation and intermingling of culture and business was integral to the Urban Renaissance strategy: regenerated, modernised cities would be created in part by monetising art and culture. The nature of work was changing faster in London than anywhere else in the country, as the last of the factories disappeared. Following the flag-draped nineties nonsense around ‘Cool Britannia’ that was synonymous with the early years of New Labour, their Cultural Manifesto for the 1997 election was called ‘Create The Future’. ‘Creativity’ became a crucial signifier of Blair’s entire political project, and the New Labour vision of modernity.16 Treating culture as a business connected New Labour to their Thatcherite predecessors, and this ‘creative’ enterprise culture was bound up with urban regeneration, in part by stimulating tourism. As Britain’s de-industrialisation rapidly continued, New Labour was determined to ‘modernise’ everything – from the Labour Party itself, to the NHS, to the workforce, to architecture – and free the party from its electoral reliance on the industrial working class, ‘a class rapidly disappearing into the thin air of the knowledge economy’, as Robert Hewison put it in Cultural Capital.
‘Most of us make our money from thin air,’ wrote Charles Leadbetter, a friend of Mandelson and Blair, capturing the spirit of the times – as music switched from heavy pieces of wax and shiny plastic discs to the intangibles of mp3s, and capitalism moved on from buying physical products with coins and notes to buying and selling complex, abstract ‘financial products’ like collateralised debt obligations, futures and derivatives. By 2007, the character Jez in the sitcom Peep Show would be summing it up in more day-to-day language: ‘I’m a creative. We don’t make steam engines out of pig iron in this country anymore, yeah? We hang out, we fuck around on the PlayStation, we have some Ben & Jerry’s, that’s how everyone makes their money now.’17
But even while New Labour were placing culture and creativity on a pedestal and garlanding it with £50 notes, other government changes were making it harder than ever for working-class people to develop careers out of their creative impulses and talents. In March 1998, changes to unemployment benefits that came in with the New Deal made it much harder for artists to live on the dole while honing and improving their craft – a part of the welfare state that had historically been a lifeline for working-class musicians. The NME ran a cover story about the threat to grassroots music, arts and culture these changes posed, with the banner, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ Inside, Jarvis Cocker recounted that, without the dole during the eighties, Pulp never would have made it as far as the nineties, and their vastly better and more popular albums. There were countless other musicians, artists and writers like him. Free education, a strong welfare state and affordable housing had given working-class creativity the space to breathe in the post-war years. For New Labour, it was too much like a hand-out: money for nothing.
The grime kids went without those state subsidies – but still never succumbed to the rampant individualism of their neighbours in Canary Wharf, or their political masters. For all that we should celebrate their independent, DIY spirit and sheer self-motivated perseverance – teenagers with nothing, making something more dazzling and millennial-modern than anyone could ever have imagined – they did so with the help of youth clubs, school teachers, and a collective, communitarian spirit that was being pummelled by a government determined to dismantle it, in the name of remaking the inner city.
Notting Hill Carnival, 1999
TWO
The irony of grime being derided as antisocial by its critics – all that clatter, hostility and bad attitude – is that it has always been community music: invented and developed collectively and collaboratively, by people whose lives and roots are deeply entwined, and who made music because it was the sociable thing to do. Community can mean a lot of different things, but whichever way you draw the diagram, grime emerged from a spider’s web of intergenerational influences, schoolmates, neighbours, friends, family, and people who knew people – from school, from the estate, from the local area.
The more you dig into its past, the more you realise grime’s social networks precede the music entirely, not just by years but by generations. Grime is black music (even if it’s not always made by black people), and its roots spread across London, and the world. While east London has for centuries been one of the most multicultural parts of the country, and a first port of call for new arrivals, the generation of Caribbean migrants who began arriving in Britain after the Empire Windrush docked in the Thames in 1948 tended to settle in Notting Hill in the west, and Brixton in the south. But with east London depopulating rapidly in the post-war decades, owing to decay, bombing, slum clearances and degeneration, housing became relatively cheap. Manufacturing jobs in places like the Dagenham Ford car plant, and Tate and Lyle, Unilever and ITT around the docks, encouraged newly arriving Caribbean nationals, now British citizens, to look to the east.
In the tightly bound geography of working-class inner London of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, many of the grime kids’ parents, and in some cases grandparents, knew each other before the kids even arrived – and as a result some of east London’s most important foundational MCs actually played together as children. D Double E’s dad went to school with Jammer’s dad. Jammer’s dad and Footsie’s dad were at Sunday school together. Footsie’s dad was in a reggae band in the 1980s with Wiley’s dad, and taught young Richard Cowie Jr how to play the drums.
‘We’ve known each other before before,’ Footsie says.1 A ridiculous number of MCs, DJs, producers and key behind-the-scenes figures met as children, at school or a playscheme; or playing football, or in someone’s aunt’s house, or at a party, or night fishing in the Hertford Union Canal, between Wiley’s estate and Victoria Park. Roll Deep’s first paid job was working for Wiley’s dad’s patty factory (they were subsequently fired when Richard Cowie Sr caught them having a food fight). ‘It’s so deep,’ Footsie continued. ‘Sometimes I think I’m not doing nothing special, other than carrying on what was already done.’
Grime’s lineage is suffused with this sense of kinship that precedes any sense of desire to make music – of being mates first, and lyrical sparring partners second. It’s easy to romanticise, but not easy to romanticise well: Kano’s nostalgic 2016 album which signalled his return to grime, Made in the Manor, 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