Grime is perhaps the most important British musical movement since Britpop.
An electronic music formed from equal parts 2-Step Garage, Jungle and Hip-Hop,
when it emerged in the early 2000s it was exciting, innovative and entirely the UK’s
own thing. Grime had existed before Dizzee Rascal, though
yet to be named as such, but he was the one that brought it to the
masses. His debut single, the jittering grime bounce
of “I Luv U” burst the teenager onto the national scene.
Fizzing with his energetic yelp, it was what Simon Reynolds’ would later describe as
‘Grime’s “Anarchy In the UK”’; and the scene would soon follow in Dizzee
Rascal’s 140BPM sub-low footsteps. But how did this come about?
This is New British Canon and this is the story of “I Luv U.”
Dizzee Rascal was born Dylan Mills in 1984, and grew up in a tower block in the economically
deprived East London neighbourhood of Bow. Within spitting distance of the late-stage
Capitalist paradise of Canary Wharf, Mills grew up acutely aware that there were
limited means for getting out of his postcode of E3,
even fewer that were legitimate. Separate from his friends, his early listening
choices stemmed from reading Kerrang! magazine, the likes of Nirvana, Iron Maiden
and Guns N’ Roses forming his adolescent mind, before later discovering jungle through his
neighbour, DJ Target. But soon the allure of the mic called to him.
Adopting the moniker Dizzee Rascal. from about the age of 15, he dove into rapping,
practising in his bedroom and throughout the local areas’ youth centres.
He’d embraced the 16 and 32 bar flows of his friends and collided it with the rapid-fire
style of jungle MCs like General Levy.
Unlike a lot of British MCs at the time Dizzee never tried to disguise that he was from London.
“I thought it would be heavy to sound English. 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.”
At the time, the dominant sound on commercial stations like Kiss FM and in London’s clubs
was Garage, an evolution of UK dance music, heavy on aspirational
lyricism, sung vocals and smooth R’NB flavour.
As it attained pop status, it had bloated itself on champagne and lost its connection with the streets;
and what Dizzee and his fellow East London MCs were doing opposed Garage’s excesses.
“It was a bit more of bougie thing, UK garage. Even though it started with real street persons,
as it crossed over, it got a bit more fancy. A kid like me would have turned up in a hoodie
and some trainers and that’s not what they wanted.
They saw us as trouble even though garage and drum 'n' bass had its own trouble.
We just looked like obvious trouble.” Whereas with Garage the DJs and producers
had been the focus, certain collectives like So Solid Crew and Pay As U Go Cartel
were bringing the MC to the fore,
and had been going darker and more aggressive with the sound. Instrumentals like Youngstar’s “Pulse X”
and Wiley from Pay As Go Cartel’s “Eskimo”
were taking the bass lower, the synths colder and the whole thing a lot grimier.
It started niche, but would gather followers. Early progress was made via London-based pirate
radio stations like Deja Vu and Rinse FM, where hungry young MCs like D Double E, Crazy
Titch and Dizzee would battle for dominance with elastic flows and piercing wit;
trading the mic after every 16 bars.
As he rapped in his spare time, the education system proved an issue for Dizzee,
having been expelled from three schools for assorted misbehaviour.
One teacher even had the audacity to call him “a rascal,” a verbiage he claimed
for his own. His last chance was Langdon Park in Poplar,
where he soon got excluded from all his classes apart from music.
Clearly Dizzee’s passion, his teacher Tim Smith allowed him to just sit in the corner
with music software Cubase and produce his own rudimentary tracks.
“He really believed in me. Then I realised “fuckitt” and I’d go
in the back room every day because all I cared about was music.
I kept making tunes: if you hear these tunes [now]
they’re just advanced versions of the tunes that are still in the computer in school.”
By 2002 after finishing school and starting and dropping out of a college music course,
he soon became a member of Wiley’s new collective, Roll Deep.
Dizzee can be heard supplying the hook and a verse on their track “Bounce.”
In East London people knew his voice, but he needed a calling card, a proper solo
single to raise him beyond neighbour fame.
A few months after his exit from college, Dizzee Rascal wrote “I Luv U” at the South
London studio of his soon-to-be producer and manager Cage.
A lot of Dizzee’s time was spent sourcing some of the most abrasive sounds possible
to implement into his riddims, whether that be from drum machine chips, sound
libraries or even the Playstation’s Music 2000 software.
“I was always fucking about with some weird noise.
All the samples were just lined up on the keyboard, I never used an MPC [Midi Production
Centre], so each key is a different sample. Those times I would usually start with the
drums. ‘I Luv U’, I definitely started with the
drums and then built around it.” The drums-in-question were the most industrial
fucked-up sounding boom-claps, with no consideration for 4/4 time,
adjoined with the dirtiest synth bass Dizzee could get his hands on.
For all its shit-starting allure as the track that legitimised Grime,
”I Luv U” only took Dizzee half an hour to create.
For the track Dizzee had been inspired by Drrty South Hip Hop group Three 6 Mafia and
associated act Hypnotize Camp Posse, their tempos were more akin to the 140BPM
East London tempos that he was used to.
But the call-response element of “I Luv U” was taken from a couple of songs in particular.
“The actual structure of it was trying to emulate ‘Is That Your Chick?’ and ‘What’s Your Fantasy,’
those boy-girl call-and-response tracks that came out around the same time.
I actually wrote the lyrics to ‘Is That Your Chick?’;
I didn’t have instrumentals. If you listen to the strings on ‘I Luv U,’
that was me trying to do the strings on ‘What’s Your Fantasy?’”
“I Luv U” opens with ominous synths and an increasingly robotic and cut up sample
of its eponymous phrase,
strongly implying a looming nightmare.
And in a way it is, the song tackles an unexpected pregnancy
and the anxiety, blamethrowing and denial involved.
Like a lot of the Dizzee’s verses, it was inspired by what he was seeing around him,
documenting at eye-level the kitchen-sink grime of his neighbourhood.
“Bare people were getting pregnant around me in the manor, getme? Bare girls were getting breeded up.
I thought it was funny because it could have happened to me. We joke about them mad things.”
What was revolutionary with the track wasn’t so much what Dizzee was saying, but how he was saying it.
As well as his oh-so English accent, he was slotting in East London slang at a furious
pace to create something almost impenetrable to
those otherside the East London niche.
The female vocal was also interesting, just as dismissive and done-with their supposed
paramour as Dizzee was.
Needing a female rapper but not knowing any, he persuaded a local girl called Jeanine Jacques to feature on track,
much to her initial hesitance and confusion. “When she heard it, obviously she was like,
What the fuck is this…? No one had heard anything like that before.
Imagine hearing that beat for the first time. I showed her the lyrics and how to say it
and she killed it!”
“I Luv U” was initially released as a white label through Dizzee’s own label Dirtee
Stank to pirate radio in the summer of 2002. While its relentless flow and abrasive sonics
would take a while to get the East London scene onboard,
it became a calling card for the young MC and labels started appearing trying to sign him.
After discussions with various major labels
that wanted him to sand down his edges,
he was eventually snapped up by XL Recordings, home of The Prodigy and The White Stripes.
“I Luv U” was then officially issued by his new label in May 2003,
and became one of the first proper grime tracks to reach the UK Top 30.
By this point though Dizzee had recorded his debut album and was ready to take on the world.
Boy in Da Corner was released in July 2003. The same week, while performing with Roll
Deep Crew in Ayia Napa in Cyprus, Dizzee was stabbed six times.
Rumours still surround the incident, and it seems to be the outcome of a scuffle with
So Solid Crew, that Wiley may or may not have provoked.
Nearly dying in the attack, Dizzee left the Roll Deep Crew in the aftermath, sick of the
small-minded in-fighting of the scene.
A month later Dizzee released “Fix Up Look Sharp” as a single.
While “I Luv U” was doing well on the pirate airwaves, it wasn’t getting any love
from national radio, and especially Tim Westwood and his BBC Radio
1 Rap Show. “Fix Up Look Sharp” was Dizzee’s attempt
to capture the DJ’s ear with its Old School hip hop beats and elastic flows.
“I remember someone said it on my estate, when we were joking around, “fix up, look
sharp.” And it made me laugh on the spot, and it always
stuck with me.”
Perhaps the most traditionally hip hop song on Boy in Da Corner, it utilises Billy Squier’s
“The Big Beat” as its template,
a beat that had been used by everyone.
Lyrically it mixes comedic lines with references to ultra violence,
and features perhaps the line that he will always be remembered for:
“Fix Up Look Sharp” improved on “I Luv U”’s chart performance by reaching number 17 in the UK Charts,
and the album got to number 23.
For what was an underground movement, heard only by the London-based few,
Dizzee Rascal was pushing this “grimey garage” into the mainstream.
Further proof of the nineteen year old’s ascent was when Boy in Da Corner won the Mercury Music Prize in September 2003.
Up against the likes of Radiohead and Coldplay, his win, the year after Ms Dynamite’s win for A Little Deeper,
furthered the idea that Britain had way more to offer than simply guitar music.
Dizzee though was more than a bit confused by the award and what it meant
Despite Dizzee’s confusion with this new found critical acclaim, labels soon came for
those making the same sub-low sounds as him. Lethal B from More Fire Crew was one of the
first, snapped up by the Virgin’s Relentless imprint,
home of garage mainstays So Solid Crew, Ms Dynamite and Artful Dodger.
Through this deal, Lethal B managed an “East London Sound” Number 11 hit single in July
2004 with “Pow”.
Wiley had already been signed to XL in a joint deal with Dizzee and his “Wot Do U Call It?” single pontificated
on what the East London Sound should indeed be called.
Wiley in an act of self-aggrandising preferred “Eski-beat” named after his influential
instrumental “Eskimo.” But it wouldn’t be long until Grime became
the de facto term. Soon artists from all across London like Kano,
Tinchy Stryder, Skepta, JME and Ghetts would follow on with the sound.
By this point though, Dizzee had gone beyond Grime.
While his follow up 2004’s Showtime and parts of 2007’s Maths + English were Grime,
by 2010 Dizzee was a pop star. Now with four number one singles, having played
the Olympics opening ceremony as well as collaborations with Calvin Harris,
Robbie Williams, Shakira and James Corden, he had truly broken out of his old neighbourhood.
Recently on Raskit and E3 AF he’s gone back to his roots.
But as an influence on the next generation, it all comes down to his debut,
the “Anarchy in the UK” of Grime. A reaction against the state of UK Garage
that spawned its own genre in opposition. In 2020 with artists like Stormzy, AJ Tracey
and Dave breaking through further, Grime is no longer of niche appeal.
And it all started with those three magic words.
["I Luv U"]
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