Inner City Pressure

Grime’s canon of cult classics is full of music made by producers who were unwilling or unable to do things ‘properly’. One of Ruff Sqwad’s most famous instrumental productions, ‘Functions On The Low’ by XTC, took on a life of its own when, 11 years after its release, Stormzy used it as the instrumental for a freestyle recorded in his local park. That freestyle, ‘Shut Up’, would go on to take the charts by storm and propel him to pop superstardom. XTC is one of many of grime’s ephemeral geniuses2: for most of the crew’s existence, he was barely even in Ruff Sqwad; more just a mate from the area who made a few tunes and spat a few bars, and the older brother to MC Fuda Guy. XTC finished only a handful of tracks, and only ever released one 12 inch of three tracks with ‘Functions’ on the B-side – it just happened to be a masterpiece. It’s a breathtaking five minutes of longing, like a fleeting glimpse of the love of your life disappearing into the Hong Kong night – neon lights seen through a torrent of tears. It’s so heartbreaking, and yet so addictive, so humane, that the moment it stops, you’re desperate to have it back. It took him half an hour to write, on FruityLoops, one morning before college, while the rest of his family were still asleep. He used the computer keyboard in place of an actual keyboard, never got it mastered, rendered the audio file, burned a CD, and took it straight to the vinyl pressing plant.3 And that was that.

Other more prolific producers, like Dexplicit, who made the instrumental ‘Forward Riddim’ that would be used for Lethal Bizzle’s ‘Pow!’, an underground smash and later a Top 10 hit, began writing music on even more basic equipment: a pre-app, pre-internet ‘brick’ of a mobile phone. ‘When I was in secondary school, everyone used to get me to create ringtones of their favourite songs on the old Nokia 3310’s,’ he laughed, when I interviewed him for a piece about ‘sodcasting’, the much-maligned mid-2000s phenomenon where people (usually young teenagers) would play music off their phones on public transport. Grime’s birth coincided with the popularisation of new kinds of cheap, low-end, unsophisticated audio technology. Of course there had been TDK cassettes and home-taping off the radio in previous decades, but the explosion of rapidly evolving mobile-phone technology, mp3 players and cheap ear-bud headphones skewed a lot of listening towards treble-focused audio – a paradox for grime, with its ‘bass culture’ lineage through reggae, jungle and UK garage. I asked Dexplicit if the technological and consumer changes were conditioning how he made tracks. ‘My primary focus is how it’s going to sound on a club system,’ he replied, ‘but I am aware there are sections of the frequency spectrum that won’t be picked up well via iPod headphones, TVs and phones. I make “heavy-bass” music. And listening to a 50–100hz, very low bass on a iPod is like trying to hear ants walking. I’ve always tried to create a balance in my music, and often have “pretty” melodies going on upstairs, the treble, accompanied by a kind of nasty low end.’

Ask 20 different grime fans what they consider to be the first grime tune, and you’ll get, if not 20 different answers, probably about ten: a good half of them will either say ‘Pulse X’, or Wiley’s ‘Eskimo’. I actually carried out this test, entirely unscientifically, on Twitter. Other answers included a smattering of late-garage crew cuts: More Fire Crew’s ‘Oi’ (2001), So Solid Crew singles ‘Dilemma’ and ‘Oh No’ (2000), as well as one shout for Danny Weed’s ‘Creeper’ (2002). Rinse FM founder, grime svengali and long-standing producer Geeneus, who ought to know, maintains that the first grime track is Pay As U Go’s ‘Know We’, the crew’s underground anthem released in 2000. ‘Wiley was the one who was like “we’re going to put the MCs on the songs”, and I was like “MCs on songs, that’s a bit mad innit? No one does that,”’ Geeneus said in 2016. The aggressive tone of the MCs, and the unsettling, urgent momentum of the keyboard riff all mark the track out as grime, but most of all it was the structure which shifted the paradigm: tracks like ‘Know We’ created clearly demarcated space for MCs to fill with complex rhymes – to tell stories and to dominate proceedings, rather than merely accompany an instrumental. They weren’t hosting the rave for the DJ/producer anymore: this was their show. The Pay As U Go MCs brought the track straight from the studio to Rhythm Division on Roman Road, where it was played out at top volume to the two dozen people hanging around there. ‘I was like “What is this music?”’ Geeneus recalled. ‘It was 16 bars, then chorus, 16 bars, a chorus. We just went off on one. Every tune was formatted like that after that. That’s grime! That was the template. And it’s still going now, same format.’4

Youngstar’s ‘Pulse X’, released in January 2002 but on the airwaves for some time before that, offered its own template: it was arranged in functional 8-bar segments, switching quickly and with little variation – which briefly led to ‘8-bar’ as the designated genre name for this new, untested mutant strain of UK garage. The format was vital for grime’s evolution as an MC-led genre, in that they would write lyrics in either 8, 16, 32 or 64 bar sections, with the style varying for each of those lengths. ‘Your 8s are your reload bars,’ Shystie explained to me recently, ‘or it can even just be a 4, repeated twice’: they had to be memorable, crowd-pleasing and catchy – held in reserve for when the DJ brings in a particularly brilliant instrumental. These are your silver bullets, your punchlines, powerful and simple shots of lyrical adrenaline – the bars that could make you underground-famous. 16s and 32s are for your more detailed or thoughtful content, ‘for spraying’, and they need more space to breathe: they’re better suited to slower burning, less sugar-rush hectic instrumentals – but because they’ll take longer, you need to start them at the right time, too, early on in a track, unless you’re confident about continuing them over the hump of two tracks, during the DJ’s blend. Judging the mood, and the rhythm, and anticipating the DJ can be fiendishly difficult, especially when you have to make split-second decisions about switching up the pace while also in the middle of spitting. It requires a pretty remarkable level of mental dexterity, the more you think about it. Eighteen-year-old MC Streema from latter-day Lewisham crew The Square explained the challenge to American podcast Afropop Worldwide: ‘There could be a hype beat coming in, and you’re already spraying a 32, and not really know what 8 to spray … The person listening is going to think, “All right, cool, this beat coming in is gassed, this beat is a hype tune, I want to hear someone do a madness on this,” so if you’re on your own at the [radio] set, it would be good to draw for your 8 … but sometimes it’s better to wait, to get into the beat, to then drop the 8, because it doesn’t always work instantly as the beat comes in.’

It’s an under-explored facet of grime’s playful theatricality that as well as a canny knack for inventing its own slang and idiolects, often the MCs would push the boundaries of language altogether – although this has its own history too. Simon Reynolds, describing pirate-radio MC patter in the early nineties, points to the sensual thrill of hearing ‘an arsenal of non-verbal, incantatory techniques, bringing spoken language closer to the state of music: intonation, syncopation, alliteration, internal rhyme, slurring, rolling of ‘r’s, stuttering of consonants, twisting and stretching of vowels, comic accents, onomatopoeia.’5 It’s a legacy carried down the continuum of pirate sounds into grime’s cast of players – especially in the early years when their faces weren’t so well known, and MCs had to make their voices stand out on crowded pirate sets, with familiar bars but also stylistic tics, accents and affectations. Like characters in computer games, most MCs developed their own overblown catchphrases to help identify themselves, bat signals beaming from the pirate transmitters into the night sky over Bow. Scratchy had his self-described ‘warrior charge’ (‘brreee brreee!’), Jammer a range of absurd and playful nonsense poetry (‘are you dhaaaaaaauum?!’ [dumb] ‘Seckk-kulllll – draw for the neckk-kulll’), Jme the comically over-pronounced ‘Serious!’ and ‘Shhhhut Yuh Mouth’, and in a category of his own was Flirta D, whose extraordinary rhythmic sound effects and imitations took in computer-game noises, explosions, snatches of sweetly sung R&B, jungle-style trilling and more – somewhere between scatting, beat-boxing and a malfunctioning sample pack.

We’ve already heard about D Double E and his ‘D Double sig-a-nal’, the immediately recognisable announcement of his arrival, like a music hall performer peering his head around the side of the curtain, before stepping out onto the stage. Written non-phonetically, in standard English, it looks camp and comical – ‘Ooh! Ooh! It’s me, me!’ (where, we might ask, is D Double E’s washboard?) – but it’s spread out over about seven or eight syllables, a visceral vocal exorcism from somewhere deep in the lungs. ‘That’s very original – never heard that from another individual,’ runs another old-school D Double bar, in meta commentary on his own idiosyncrasy. ‘At raves, sometimes I don’t even have to MC,’ he told the Guardian in 2004. ‘I just go on stage and hear the echoes coming out the crowd. It’s a deep signal.’

Skepta (pirate radio catchphrase: ‘Go on then, go on then!’), by contrast, very deliberately chose the most clear-voiced, discernible flow he could – ‘put me up against gimmick, sound effect or skippy-flow man,’6 he taunted (and I’ll merk all three of them). On diss tracks ‘Swag MC Burial’ and ‘The End’, he took on several rival MCs in sequence, mocking them by imitating their flows and quoting their catchphrases. A pre-planned live MC clash on Logan Sama’s KISS FM show in 2007,7 with Skepta facing down the super-fast skippy flow and ‘technical’ lyricism of Ghetts, highlights an interesting tension between different styles of MCing. Speaking about himself in the third person, Skepta goes after Ghetts’ technique specifically: ‘Skepta how did you kill him like that, when he’s skipping all over the riddim like that? You will never hear me spitting like that … I like the basic shit, I don’t like too many words in a sentence,’ he announces. Skepta is punk trashing prog rock: why is long and convoluted inherently better? ‘Go on then, spit a 32-bar lyric, I’ll rustle up an 8-bar lyric, to dun your lyric,’ he tells Ghetts, dismissing his crew The Movement’s fondness for complex lyricism, punning and wordplay. He castigates this kind of borrowing from US hip-hop (and Kano) – it’s foreign, and intrinsically inauthentic for a London grime MC: ‘I make the best grime music: some man run up in the booth and lose it, start spitting like Dipset, D Block and G Unit/Kano brought a new flow to the game, now I look around: 10 million MCs in the grime scene want to use it/It’s my job to make them look stupid.’ The counterpoint is put by a fan in the YouTube comments on the audio clip, who prefers Ghetts and his crew: ‘Skepta just has basic one-line flows.’

For all grime’s non-verbal and semi-verbal vocal dynamism, the significant break in the tradition of rave-based British MC culture was the grime generation’s turn away from the functional role of (party or radio) host towards storytelling. And as the MCs developed their voices, producers began their own world-building, too – sketching out new rules, and changing the entire emotional register of what had gone before. (Significantly, in the beginning, there was a huge overlap; in fact the overwhelming majority of MCs have recorded and released at least one instrumental record as producers, at some point.)

Alongside transitional darker garage instrumentals by the likes of So Solid Crew, in 2001 and 2002 there were also beats being made that sounded like nothing that had gone before.

After learning the drums as a child, experimenting with copying his dad’s reggae jams on the keyboard, and dabbling – quite excellently – with making the sweetest of straight-up vocal UK garage on ‘Nicole’s Groove’, under the pseudonym Phaze One, Wiley moved on to making his own sound. Geeneus and Slimzee had bought a Korg Triton, a new synthesiser that went on sale in 1999, a piece of equipment that would become synonymous with the quintessential grime sound, and Wiley would pop around and use it. In the first years of the 2000s, he created a sound, ‘eskibeat’ or ‘eskimo’, that was characterised by its sparse arrangements, futuristic, icy cold synths, devastating basslines and awkward, off-kilter rhythms. Like UK garage before it, it was generally 140 beats per minute – the consistency was important for DJs to be able to mix records seamlessly. (Dubstep and grime producer Plastician is not the only one to have observed that FruityLoops’ default tempo is set to 140bpm, which ‘may have a lot to answer for’.) But the world it conjured – the same city, from a totally different perspective – had a completely different atmosphere.

In this crucible moment, around 2002–03, the taxonomy of what would become ‘grime’ was greatly contested – and even debated on one of Wiley’s first label-released singles, ‘Wot Do U Call It?’. (‘Garage? Urban? 2 Step?’ he speculates derisively, without providing a definitive answer.) Eskibeat quickly became a one-man sonic empire, a distinctive sound all branded with an arctic theme: the track titles from that era include Ice Rink, Igloo, Ice Pole, Blizzard, Ice Cream Man, Snowman, Frostbite, Freeze, Colder and Morgue. ‘Sometimes I just feel cold hearted,’ he said in 2003, by way of explanation. ‘I felt cold at that time, towards my family, towards everyone. That’s why I used those names … I am a nice person but sometimes I switch off and I’m just cold. I feel angry and cold.’8 The narcotically-enhanced, loved-up bliss of the eighties and nineties rave predecessors, and the giddy utopian place-making that made raves ‘temporary autonomous zones’ had been wiped off the map. Wiley offered another explanation in 2005, which pegged the claustrophobia, emotional dislocation and rage of his and his peers’ music to the city around him: ‘The music reflects what’s going on in society. Everyone’s so angry at the world and each other. And they don’t know why,’ he told American magazine Spin. ‘As things went bad, away from music, the music’s just got darker and darker.’9

‘Eskimo’ was the first of his eski-oeuvre, the most game-changing, and the most enduring: a few minimal drum skirmishes, some artificial synth stabs, and the sound of a hollow metal pole rolling around a construction yard. Docklands after the docks, and before Canary Wharf – just a wasteland – but maybe with a hint of the bankers’ blocks’ futuristic glint, too. During the Pay As U Go school tour, they would play ‘Eskimo’ as an instrumental bed, and the kids would come up and freestyle over them. ‘The kids were going mad over that beat,’ Maxwell D recalled – this alien soundtrack was appropriate to the mood of the age. Its sheer newness is startling, and unsettling: it is easily situated in the context of millenarian anxiety, with all the apocalyptic fears that had accompanied that mystical calendar change, made worse by an ambient sense of dread about the new era that lay ahead. The frosty wastelands and open space reaching out ahead in the twenty-first century provoked a kind of psychic agoraphobia, triggered by the seismic jolt of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and the rush to war that followed, with the growing likelihood of unavoidable climate catastrophe ahead. Wiley wrote one of his formative eskimo tracks, ‘Ground Zero’, on the day of the attacks. ‘Imagine travelling through the streets, through all that dust. I want [Americans] to understand that I understand. I felt it,’ he told Martin Clark in 2003. ‘If we were in West End and the BT tower fell down and we were on that street. The fear – you can’t imagine the fear that would be in someone. “Am I going to die? Am I going to live?” Your heart would pop out of your chest. I’ve had that feeling: where you feel like death.’10

There is a case for saying that grime’s sonics are grounded in the material experience of east London life, that grime sounds like its environment; as Hattie Collins says in the documentary Open Mic11 – producers sample snippets of police sirens and gunshots, and perhaps in some of its clanking metallic sounds we can hear the heavy security gates on council flat front doors closing. But beyond this quotidian, literal testament to urban claustrophobia and noise pollution, is a sense that a historic rupture is happening, and that is audible in the music. You can hear it in some of Dizzee’s instinctive ad-libs on radio sets and Sidewinder mixes with DJ Slimzee in the 2001–03 period, his off-the-cuff reactions to the year zero tunes being faded in by his DJ: ‘two thousand and slew … this is the new ice age’, ‘playing all these end of the world beats … all these tunes sound like judgement day’, ‘this is divine intervention stupid … now we’re going to start getting space age’. Embracing those unknown frontiers was a mark of pride for the grime generation: ‘Millennium time!’ one of the Diamond Click MCs announces as the tectonic bass drops on Jammer’s 2003 classic ‘Don’t Ya Know’ – millennium time for those brave enough to be ready for it, even though ‘nuff man still stuck in 1990s’.12

There is a kind of shlocky horror show melodrama to many of grime’s formative instrumentals, often reflected in the naming as well as the sonics: Danny Weed’s seminal and irresistible ‘Creeper’, a kind of prancing Halloween ghoul lurking in the shadows, Target’s ‘Poltergeist’, tracks by Macabre Unit, or Terror Danjah’s work, tracks like ‘Creepy Crawler’ and ‘Gremlin’, stamped with his trademark sinister chuckle. The same goes for much of the sublow sound of west London’s Jon E Cash and his crew Black Ops, where, on ‘Spanish Fly’, a 1950s B-movie quality is granted by an unnerving tickle of Spanish guitar, before the glowering bassline kicks in. Other pioneering producers like Waifer and Young Dot created maximal, militaristic instrumental assaults, turning strings, hiccups and other sound effects into deadly weapons – anthems like the former’s ‘Grime’ and the latter’s ‘Bazooka VIP’ left little space for the MC; or at the very least, demanded a huge effort and big lungs to keep up.

What is unnerving and uncanny and which differentiates grime’s sonics from darker garage, is the sheer alien newness of the bass sound (dark bass was not invented by grime, as any junglist will tell you) and frequently off-kilter arrangements, all jolts, awkward gaps and juddering surprises. Wiley’s eskimo creations were perhaps the pinnacle of this: taken to the extreme on his ‘devil mixes’. These were remixes of tracks like ‘Eskimo’, ‘Colder’ and ‘Avalanche’ made even more sinister by stripping the drums out, inspired partly by the dub versions his dad’s reggae sound system had created, but so named because they ‘sounded evil’. As if to highlight the ungodly power they had, the devil mixes sold really well, and Wiley used the proceeds to buy a car, which he then crashed. Convinced that his creations were cursed and too powerful to control, he insisted on calling them ‘bass mixes’ after that.

Before it hardened down into the fabric, Jammer, Dizzee, Danny Weed and Wiley drew another strain of futurism into this creatively molten moment: what’s come to be known as sinogrime, a glitch of Chinese instrumentation in grime’s normally stable sonic geography (the UK and Jamaica, with a bit of US rap swagger, house from Chicago and syncopation from West Africa). Grime’s instinctive (and functional) tech-positivity is what always helped it feel like sonic futurism incarnate: rejecting the organic clutter of live instrumentation in favour of empty space, dehumanised synths and cyborg basslines. I was unlucky enough to see Roll Deep play a one-off show with a live band at the Stratford Rex in 2005, and it was all kinds of wrong – the wholesome twang of the live bass guitar the antithesis to grime’s aesthetic (let us not even deign to discuss Ed Sheeran’s strumming collaborations with grime MCs). Grime is situated in the future aesthetically, and perhaps embedded in sinogrime’s Chinese elements is a sort of intuition about where the future lies, geopolitically. In looking east beyond the blinking light of One Canada Square, sinogrime producers were offering a kind of accidental socio-political prophecy, taking grime’s acquisitive tendencies and sending them east on a journey beyond Britain’s pre-2008 bubble.

Following the history of slum clearances, Luftwaffe bombing, empty warehouses and managed decline, by the early 2000s east London had become the archetype of the post-industrial city. The future had gone to China, and grime instinctively followed. You can hear it in the delicate sino scales on Dizzee’s ‘Do It’, a minor lament, as the rough and tough drums try and put a brave face on the poignant instrumentation and deeply depressive lyrics (‘Feds don’t understand us, adults don’t understand us, no one understands us’, he mumbles, forlorn, on the intro13). On the stunning ‘I Luv U Remix’, what might be a MIDI (digitised) version of a guzheng or guqin – Chinese stringed instruments – is used to play out a light but intensely melodic bed for the MCs’ heartfelt lyrical sketches, accompanied only by the sparest, subtlest snatches of bass and drum. Wiley and Danny Weed’s ‘Blue Rizla’, Jammer’s ‘Weed Man’, and Kode9’s ‘Sinogrime Minimix’ are all in this category. Of course, there is a direct influence from the staple teenage boy’s cultural diet of Wu Tang Clan, kung-fu movies, and video games like Mortal Kombat: indeed one of Dizzee’s best teenage productions, ‘Street Fighter’, was lifted directly from the game’s theme tune.

Another pinnacle of emotive sinogrime built this connection in a more direct way. Watching a video of the 1993 Jet Li film Twin Warriors with his dad, Jammer was struck by the heartstrings-tugging theme music, in particular one ear-worm of a snippet. He was determined to sample it, and after playing around with TV leads and Scart plugs, he managed to wire the VHS to his mixing desk. ‘It came straight off the VHS,’ he told me, justifiably proud of his teenage ingenuity. ‘That’s why it sounds so grainy – but it kind of adds to the emotional power of it. Now music’s very digital and very focused, and cleaner – but in those days, that’s what you had to do, to improvise to build the sound you wanted, and it was rougher, but had a lot of heart too. Like a lot of the records I made at that time, it was emotional, orchestral stuff – when that underground sound was flourishing.’ The MCs didn’t miss an opportunity to respond to the emotional vulnerabilities in the instrumental, ‘Chinaman’, built around a beautiful, elegiac flute loop – there’s a clip from Deja Vu in 2003 of MC Stormin spitting: ‘Where do I go from here? Shed a little tear for my friend that I lost this year, back in the day we used to go everywhere/Same things that make you love make you cry, everybody that you seem to love seems to die.’14 ‘Chinaman’ became the instrumental to Sharky Major’s ‘This Ain’t A Game’ – the perfect partner for Sharky’s soul-searching lyrics. ‘I feel like I’m not as good as people say I am, I know I can spit ten times better than I’ve ever done – see me rise with the morning sun,’15 he pleads. He’s surrounded by criminals, cops and people who’ve ‘never seen a day’s work’, and the dream of ‘superstar status’ is his only possible option. He never did get there, or even very close, but he did make one of the greatest reflective grime tunes of all time.

Swept up in the creative ferment of the early millennium, other young producers who had grown up on jungle and UK garage started making music that sounded nothing like them. Skepta’s first release, more than a year before he ever picked up the mic, was a reworking of ‘Pulse X’ and ‘Eskimo’, released in 2002 on Wiley’s label as ‘Pulse Eskimo’. It’s an utterly ferocious instrumental track, and accompanied by an appropriately grimy conception story. It was built with Music 2000 on the PlayStation One (at this stage Skepta and his brother Jme were even making beats using the game Mario Paint) – and before Wiley signed it up, Skepta was playing it on his show on a pirate-radio station in Tottenham, Heat 96.6 FM. ‘I gave it to a few DJs in the hope they’d start playing it,’ Skepta recalled, ‘and one of them, I don’t know if it was Mac 10 from Nasty Crew, or Karnage from Roll Deep, well they played it at Sidewinder, and when they played it, on the drop, someone started letting off gunshots in the dance.’ Chaos ensued, mercifully no one was injured – and ever since, the tune has been known by the nickname Gunshot Riddim. It’s an appropriate testament to the sheer power of a grime instrumental.