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.