If you’ve kept up with recent trends in
urban music, you might’ve noticed one genre
coming up again and again.
I’m talking about grime — a British genre
that’s slowly making its way over to the
rest of the world.
Skepta, among other grime artists, was recently
featured on Drake’s More Life.
And Stormzy, whose debut album charted at
No. 1 in the United Kingdom, is set to play
American festivals this summer.
But grime has yet to make its mark outside
the UK.
In fact, it’s often mistaken for garage,
dubstep, or even hip-hop.
And to call it any of those genres really
just misses the point.
Grime celebrates a heritage and sound that’s
very specific to inner-city London, where
it was born.
To understand what that represents, I caught
up with a leading voice on grime.
Excuse the pun, it’s quite grimy in the
club…
And it’s just got this raw — it’s the
most raw form of energy in music that we have
in the UK, in that it feels, at times it can
feel aggressive.
Julie Adenuga is the London DJ on Apple Music’s
Beats 1 Radio.
And she’s from a family with two of grime’s
biggest names — Skepta and JME.
As a radio presenter, she’s been bringing
grime to listeners since her early days on
Rinse.FM, a London-based station that played
a huge part in the rise of the genre in the
early 2000s.
It used to be a pirate radio station that
featured early MCs.
And those people comprise the old guard of
grime.
Their roots can be traced to the UK garage
scene that was heard both at raves and on
popular charts at the time.
Grime evolved out of garage in just a space
where people were like, “We want to be able
to go into a club and hear music and say lyrics
and not have people stop dancing.
We want that vibe to continue.
A good example of that is “Pulse X” by
the Musical Mob, often called the first official
grime track.
The song is at about 140 beats per minute,
which is a favorite tempo for many grime producers.
A lot of the artists in the US that make hip-hop,
or in Canada that make hip-hop — they couldn’t
sit on a grime beat because it’s too fast
for how they would naturally flow.
So for me, a real distinction there is definitely
the speed.
Apart from the tempo, early grime tracks have
something else in common — most of them
came out of the neighborhood of Bow, London.
My name’s Wiley, I come from Bow E3, 07961897033,
I’m so E3.
The whole of E3’s got so much talent, I
hope you see.
That was MC Wiley.
He’s often referred to as the godfather
of grime.
And that neighborhood he’s talking about
— the E3 section of Bow — that neighborhood
held an all-star roster of grime talent, including
grime’s first celebrity:
Boy in da Corner, it came from Dizzee Rascal,
who was an MC, who was quite young at the
time.
It was the first grime album that anyone who
understood what grime was was able to see
in the charts in some way, was able see in
a mainstream way.
Despite the success of the Boy in da Corner,
grime largely remained an underground sound.
It mostly played at parties that sometimes
ran into trouble.
I wouldn’t say there was more trouble in
a grime club than there was in any other club,
you know?
Grime got sort of focused on as the aggressive,
sort of the catalyst, the starter of what
the issues were in within club nights and
nightlife in London.
We had records like Pow! by Lethal B
That was banned in all clubs.
DJs were not allowed to play that song anywhere
in a club because it was seen as something
that would incite a riot of some kind.
That discrimination was later formalized in
the Form 696.
It was a controversial document used by the
London police for risk assessment.
Until 2009, the form required details on the
ethnic makeup of the expected audience in
attendance.
It just felt quite … it was patronizing,
and it felt like grime was being sort-of penalized
and they were taking precautions to beat around
the bush and not directly say, “We just
want to stop these parties from happening
because we feel like they’re dangerous."
Even now, more than a decade later, the police
continue to use that form to target parties.
But shutting down grime events hasn’t kept
the genre from gaining popularity.
In 2015, Kanye West brought an army of MCs
— including Skepta and Stormzy — to the
stage at the BRIT Awards.
For many, the performance was a celebration
of grime.
According to others, the MCs went unnoticed
in the shadow of the American hip-hop star.
But in the end, the fact that the two worlds
came together at a mainstream event says more
about their similarities than their differences.
I hate comparing grime to hip-hop because
I think that’s where the lines get really
blurry.
But one thing that I think stands so strong
between those two genres of music is the fact
that they’re lifestyles now.
They’re not just songs that you hear on
the radio or that you can buy from iTunes.
These are actual communities and lifestyles
that people live.
