Inner City Pressure

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 London English). There is a minority of grime MCs who use what’s known as a ‘yardie flow’, a proudly Jamaican, often ragga-influenced, gruff, patois-heavy delivery, but a more musical one too – and some, like Riko Dan, who switch in and out of cockney and yardie as they feel the rhythm demands. Meeting cheerful Pay As U Go MC Maxwell D in a pub in Peckham recently, he lists off the MCs who would deliver ‘that extra bashment, yard vibe’ in the grime scene: ‘There’s Riko Dan, myself, Jamakabi, Flow Dan, Armour, Doctor, Durrty Goodz, God’s Gift … but the top MCs in grime were not dancehall, people like Wiley and Dizzee. My style, the dancehall reggae style, grime doesn’t sit on it, the way it’s meant to, because it’s an English way. It actually helped me develop another style, because I started doing less of the bashment style and more of the English style, because I realised the kids, the black kids, weren’t really in tune with their culture no more, it was like an English culture. In my opinion even garage was more dancehall-orientated than grime, it was still rootified. But when grime came along, Dizzee and Wiley, they changed the lyrical style.’ He barks an impression of Dizzee’s halting, staccato flow: ‘“Take that Nokia! Get that, what!” It was like rap, but an English vibe.’

While the roots of grime’s vocal style and a great deal of its slang and idioms travelled across the Atlantic with the Windrush migrants, it’s a telling part of grime’s unique flavour that its accent is so often London English – especially as ‘UK hip-hop’ (a genre in itself, distinct from grime) has often borrowed not just the genre tropes – turntablism, a fetishisation of ‘realness’ and roots – from the United States, but its accent too.9 ‘I thought it would be heavy to sound English,’ Dizzee Rascal told Sound on Sound magazine in 2004. ‘I listen to a lot of US hip-hop, and I know that is how they talk in real life, but a lot of UK hip-hop doesn’t do that. My influences are from jungle, and many of those artists still keep their English accent, and I respected that.’

Indeed, some of Dizzee’s biggest early singles, tracks like ‘Fix Up, Look Sharp’, ‘Stand Up Tall’ and ‘Jus’ A Rascal’ were not only the grimier precursors to hits like ‘Bonkers’, that made him Britain’s first black pop superstar, but in their boisterous, playful style, they also reproduced a kind of east London barrow-boy charisma, even perhaps music hall in its sensibility. How many Top 20 hits can claim to have opened with a battle-cry of ‘Oiiiiii!’ and a Carry On-style cackle? Too few, certainly. Dizzee’s delivery was so English, in fact, that it actually tripped him up on the road to international success. When he toured the US for the first time in 2004, appearing on Los Angeles’ famous rap station Power 106 with DJ Felli Fel, he spat his yelping, double-time flow over classic US rap beats from Brooklyn’s M.O.P. All was well until the end of the slot, when, chatting with Felli Fel on air, there was a telling obstacle: the DJ could literally not understand Dizzee’s accent. He asked Dizzee to repeat the name of his debut album no fewer than three times in a row. Eventually Dizzee, sounding slightly exasperated, just spelled it out: ‘B-O-Y …’

First-wave grime MC Bruza, also from east London, is the name that first comes to mind for ‘cockney grime’: for his especially boisterous delivery, frequent use of cockney rhyming slang, and proud claim that he is ‘brutal and British’. And then there are the white MCs: crews like OT Crew, from Barking, created what you could call ‘geezer grime’ – MCs like Syer B and Dogzilla, repping ‘Barking and Dogenham’, had some underground success with tunes charting their heartfelt quests for the finer things in life: ‘Where’s All The Beer?’ and ‘Where’s The Money?’. Dogzilla is one of those overlooked first-wave MCs who may not be to everyone’s taste, but he is evidence that, in the early days, distinctive voices, flows and vocal styles abounded on pirate radio. Dogzilla flipped the MC’s typical self-aggrandisement to a new level of lyrical honesty, too: ‘I’m obese, white, I smoke too much, I’m a bum, I’m a drunk … I live on strictly takeaways … I like girls in PVC, I support West Ham, UFC … here’s my fat white arse, I bet it makes you laugh.’ The pinnacle of white-boy geezer grime was a track called ‘Straight Cockney’ by an MC called Phenomenon, who it seems no one has heard of since, but whose legend lives on with over a million views on YouTube, where comments mock him to this day.

US rap has had numerous discussions of the phenomenon of the ‘wigga’, and the disproportionate media prominence and industry support given, Elvis Presley-style, to white rappers from Vanilla Ice to Eminem, by an at best cynical and at worst racist music industry. But grime has seen relatively little discussion of racial tension or cultural appropriation. It might be that the genre’s long languishing on the underground meant that, if you were a white DJ or MC taking part in the scene, your participation was implicitly understood to be out of authentic love for the music, rather than calculated profiteering or co-option – the same goes for Mr Wong, a much-loved first-wave MC and producer, the self-described ‘rude boy Chinese wigga’. It might be that the relative lack of racial segregation in Britain’s council estates and poorer areas, compared to the black ghettoised geography of ‘the projects’ in America’s big cities, had something to do with making race less of an issue. It might simply be that – while the likes of Geeneus and Slimzee were instrumental from day one – the biggest talents and crossover stars produced in grime’s early days, for several years, were all black British: Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Kano, Shystie, Lethal Bizzle. With the exception of Lady Sovereign in 2005 – always a bit of an outsider to the scene in any case – and some years later, Devlin, the few white MCs weren’t the ones getting record deals.

There is something utopian in grime’s collectivist origins, of ‘kids hanging out together making something they enjoy’, as Jammer described it to me recently, and this is a rich part of its musical roots too. Academic Jeremy Gilbert has said that the relative weakness of neo-Nazi street thugs in British cities in the nineties, while such groups were on the rise elsewhere in Europe, owes a lot to the ‘cosmopolitan hybridity’ blooming (and booming) out of the speaker stacks and pirate-radio aerials where hardcore, jungle and UK garage were created. State-led multiculturalism takes the form of abstract government initiatives and directives, more progressive school curricula and better community and arts funding – and these things are all essential, and should be done right – but in terms of creating a more harmonious society, its impact looks fairly tepid compared to what young, working-class people of different ethnic backgrounds cooked up together on London’s council estates. In fact, to tweak James Meek’s pessimism about our class-riven, divided city, where the ingredients are laid out side by side, not touching, not mixing, perhaps the solitary demographic where multiculturalism is an organic, lived experience, rather than an idealised illusion, is in young, working-class communities where schools, youth clubs, estates and later workplaces make a shared and convivial culture not just realistic, but the unforced reality.

‘I was one of the only white kids on my estate growing up,’ recalled Nyke from white UK garage and grime duo Milkymans (humorously named, they explain, by a Caribbean bouncer, surprised to see them at a mostly black nightclub). ‘The Irish community had moved out, and me and Nikki grew up in the Afro-Caribbean communities in Peckham and Stockwell – so I lived between Ghanaians and Jamaicans; if I couldn’t smell fufu, I could hear Capleton blasting. My radiator used to shake off the wall! And even if I didn’t know what some of the artists meant, in a kind of black culture context, I was still feeling the vibrations of the music from young. I remember I used to wash my mum’s car, and I’d be blaring Kool FM – if I think back to it now, I’m lucky it was a noisy estate, because I love jungle, but that was noise. Like that was not easy listening.’ He laughed. ‘But when you’re a 13- to 14-year-old obnoxious, rebellious kid, that’s all you want to hear. It’s kinda the equivalent of someone listening to really dark heavy metal. That was our version of that.’

As with punk’s extensive late-seventies love affair with reggae, and the ‘two tone’ ska of the early 1980s, jungle saw urban multiculturalism manifested in youthful conviviality. It channelled a mixture of cultural influences into a novel, fiercely experimental form, created by a rich ethnic mix of producers, DJs and promoters, and enjoyed by a similarly diverse assembly of ravers. It transcended the difference in junglists’ backgrounds, but it did not forget those origins – something you can hear in the music, with soul and ragga samples and fierce basslines high in the mix.

In a 1994 BBC jungle documentary, UK Apache, the MC behind the superlative jungle anthem ‘Original Nuttah’, highlighted the power these styles had in forging a sense of belonging for second- or third-generation immigrants. Growing up as a working-class child of an Indian-South African mother and Iraqi father in Tooting in the 1970s and 80s, when the National Front were a menacing presence on the streets of south London, Apache made friends with kids of Jamaican heritage and went to reggae sound-system dances with them in some of the same estates in Battersea from which So Solid Crew would later emerge. He told the BBC documentary crew:

‘Jungle, because it’s from England, I can really relate to it, it’s important to me because I’m born here. I’m from England, and London, and nobody can tell me I’m not from here. Once I was ashamed of being British, but it’s like the jungle’s drawn me back into my roots, where I’m from. Although my parents are – I’m half Arab, half Asian, African – I can relate to those countries only up to a point. When I talk to my children, I say, “You’re born in England, be proud of it,” and don’t let nobody tell you different, no BNP or anything like that.’

There is another key cultural lineage to grime that is too easily overlooked. Long before Afrobeats (with an ‘s’) and its rap, R&B and bashment hybrids made their way into popular consciousness in the UK, the children of African migrants to the UK, in particular from Ghana and Nigeria, were making grime, and slipping in references to this heritage. Among others, Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder and Lethal Bizzle all have Ghanaian parents; 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 way things were done in UK garage. ‘I was the last person to get involved in [UK garage], because I loved jungle so much,’ he recalled. ‘We started getting involved in it, but we was bringing along what we learned from jungle into the garage. But we got it completely wrong. And because we got it completely wrong, we ended up with grime. We thought we was making garage: getting garage beats like Cape Fear, and putting MCs on them, and they were spitting their heart out.’ On other occasions, to fit the Bow boys’ lingering passion for super-fast jungle with the contemporary 140bpm sound of 2-step, Slimzee would play Mampi Swift’s jungle track ‘Jaws’ at the wrong speed, at 33 instead of 45rpm, and the MCs would spit on it.

They had, Geeneus continued, ‘railroaded’ the UK garage scene ‘into something completely different. Where they’re bubbling along having a nice time in the party, looking nice, we’ve come in with tracksuits on, spitting lyrics everywhere, MCs everywhere, me and Slimzee just DJing for the MCs really.’11

As summaries of UK garage go, ‘bubbling along having a nice time in the party’ is pretty spot-on. The subject matter of the tunes – love, sex and relationships – narrated in smooth, soulful vocals from an even balance of male and female singers, reflected a much more grown-up, stylish swagger and refinement than had been seen in the wild days of British rave music previously, from acid house through jungle and drum ’n’ bass. It was as if, with the nineties drawing to a close, rave itself was moving beyond adolescent zeal and striving for a kind of adulthood. Garage as a form did not begin in the UK, but the US, and as Simon Reynolds records in Energy Flash, to begin with, in the mid-nineties, garage in the UK had ‘slavishly’ followed US production style. Then the junglists ‘entered the fray’, and created a ‘distinctly British hybrid strain that merged house’s slinky panache with jungle’s rude-bwoy exuberance’. The UK underground brought that edge, even as it was swapping a tracksuit for smart shoes and an ironed shirt.

Indeed, maturity was reflected in the aspirational dress codes in UK garage clubs, where shirts and shoes (no trainers!) would often be a compulsory component of the door policy, and where the narcotics of choice were champagne and cocaine – even while the music’s primary creators and ravers were from the same humble inner London backgrounds as the junglists before them, and the grime kids who would follow. No hats no hoods! Only two school children may enter the rave at any one time.

It’s a tension that was a rich seam for British underground dance music more than once: the wicked and the divine, the debonair and the scuzzy, rubbing up against one another. In the first two years of the millennium, UK garage was being stretched in two directions at once – a process which is always likely to make something break in the middle. On the one hand, the poppy, commercial end was thriving, and producing numerous hits: singer-MCs like Craig David, Ms Dynamite and Daniel Bedingfield became stars, and tunes like Sweet Female Attitude’s ‘Flowers’ and DJ Luck and MC Neat’s ‘With A Little Bit Of Luck’ were ubiquitous.