Читать книгу Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime - Dan Hancox - Страница 17

If it takes a village to raise a child, it definitely takes a village to raise a scene. It’s one of the fallacies of the bedroom-producer trope in grime’s origin story, that a wild and pioneering auteur creativity was born out of solitude. Grime was created in bedrooms – but not alone, or in isolation: it didn’t allow for eccentric hermits, because the London it came from didn’t either: boroughs of densely populated flats on densely populated estates, where a tower block is itself a kind of vertical community, and both in it and around it, everyone knows everyone’s business – and their bars. The inner-city kids who came up through jungle and UK garage in the nineties learned how to DJ it, how to MC on it and how to dance to it together.

When they were ready to make their own sound, they taught each other, vibed off each other, and absorbed each other’s ideas and idioms, hanging out in vital if unglamorous hubs like Limehouse basketball court and Jammer’s parents’ basement. Shystie only started to write lyrics because her friends at sixth-form college pushed her to. ‘They taught me how to put words together, which instrumentals to spit over, and I’d spit in front of them. There was no YouTube, no Twitter, no SoundCloud, there was nothing – instead it was word of mouth: it was about getting big in your own area, your friends bigging you up, practising at sixth form with them – then you have other local schools, they would kind of support you too, because you’re seeing them on the way home; you’re building up your local fanbase, really. I started performing locally at parties, and my name got around more. I’d do little local raves, and it just spiralled and domino-effected and spread like wildfire. Those practice hours were so important man – I put in so many hours, it’s not a joke.’

School outside of classroom hours was instrumental – it was a key location, a vital node in the network, in an embryonic scene populated largely by teenagers and exclusively by under-25s, where local connections were everything. In a sense, it might be said to be the last truly local scene: these were the final years before social media and web 2.0 collapsed distances between strangers, and forged brand new kinds of instant networks across geographical boundaries. In grime’s formative years, it was the people who you knew from the area – neighbours, schoolmates, brothers and sisters – that created the platform on which a scene was built. Crews like Ruff Sqwad were formed through school in the first place, and MC practice took place in a group, in the playground – after school, during lunch break, whenever there was time. There’s a reason all those hood videos and ‘freestyles’ show the MCs with their crew and their mates gathered around them, whooping and popping gunfingers: because that’s how the bars are written, refined, practised and improved to begin with: it’s not so much a gathering for a performance, to camera, as an – albeit slightly exaggerated – mirror on the day-to-day reality of where the music comes from.

The story of grime in east London in particular is a dense family tree of friendships that initially preceded music, and then as the protagonists’ teenage years proceeded, developed because of it. When I asked Target about the lineage that led him to Wiley, and the rest of Roll Deep, it went back to primary school: by the age of ten, they were playing with the vinyl decks in Wiley’s dad’s flat in Bow, ten minutes from Target’s childhood home. ‘We literally didn’t leave the bedroom all weekend, we were just playing on these decks. We couldn’t mix or anything, but we were just having the best time ever.’ By the final year of primary school they’d formed a new jack swing meets rap group called Cross Colours, inspired by Kriss Kross and Snoop Dogg, and Wiley’s dad was taking them to meet an A&R.

By the mid-nineties, still only in their mid-teens, they were already veterans, and Target and Wiley formed SS (Silver Storm) Crew with Breeze, Maxwell D and others. They would hang out on Limehouse basketball court and practise their jungle bars, or go to each other’s houses to record tapes, streaming up the stairs of Slimzee’s mum’s house, where Geeneus and Slimzee were for a while broadcasting Rinse FM, illicitly – the authorities didn’t know, and nor did Slimzee’s mum. ‘She kept saying to me, “What’s going on up there?” Them times I was only young, so they didn’t really want me to go out – it weren’t a bad area, but … things was going on, you know? So they’d rather me stay in, than go out, taking drugs and all that stuff.’

More than one MC or DJ has recounted that, as much as grime would soon lyrically reflect the trials and tribulations of petty crime, drug dealing and violence, many of their parents supported their teenage musical experiments for the very reason that, if they were all making a ruckus in the bedroom, they weren’t out on the street getting up to no good. Tinchy Stryder’s older brother was a DJ and had turntables in the bedroom they shared in the Crossways Estate. ‘We all used to come back to my mum’s house and practise there. I’m always grateful to my mum and dad, because I don’t know if many people would’ve let loads of boys come in the house and make that noise,’ he laughed. ‘Because grime ain’t nothing calm, and it wasn’t a big house.’ So much was developed in childhood bedrooms with hand-me-down decks, or even less. In Shystie’s case, her mic skills were developed as a teenager with a karaoke machine and a £9.99 microphone from Argos.

That neighbourhood scene in the nineties thrived via word of mouth, pirate-radio broadcasts, and one critical performance arena: ‘The root of all this grime business, of grime MCing, was house parties,’ Wiley said to me in 2016, while recording The Godfather, his eleventh album (or fortieth, if you count all the mixtapes). ‘Proper house parties, with a proper system, all across Bow and Newham when we were teenagers. We’d go and jump on the mic, and clash each other.’ SS Crew would get invited to perform at any house parties around E3; they’d be walking around Bow carrying their decks and boxes of records.

‘That was the first taste of when you get that energy back from the crowd,’ Target recalled. ‘We couldn’t believe it, like, “Whoa, this is sick!” At that stage we didn’t ever think we could get paid, there was no future plan: just the excitement of participating. It was a sense of community, definitely, it was. At the time we wouldn’t have used words like that, but that’s what it was. We were all from the same area, loads of us were into music, DJing or MCing, and when Rinse started we actually had a base, and the chance to be heard by people who didn’t already know us. Going on Rinse and having a text from say, Stacey in East Ham, felt incredible – it was like going international. It was like having your track go Top 10 in Spain or something, it was that exciting.’

As London’s millennium wheel first began to turn, the sun began to set on UK garage, its glossy pop moment cast in shadow. The younger generation of MCs and DJs had had years of training on the mic and on the decks, but if they were being pushed out by their elders, the response was to turn their outcast status into something they could be proud of and control. Before it had acquired a genre name, grime’s young talents, those too young or too angry to feel UK garage was theirs, began creating a new sound, riffing on some of that weirder, darker garage, the kind with broken beats instead of 2-step’s shuffle and swing: the kind that was too awkwardly shaped to wear designer-label shirts and smart shoes to the club. They would eventually overwhelm British pop, doing so with the barest minimum of equipment, and in most cases with almost no formal musical training. They taught themselves and each other, and used software like Napster, Kazaa and Limewire to downloaded illegal ‘cracked’ versions of simple music production software like FruityLoops Studio. To begin with, that was the closest grime’s pioneers would come to a studio.

Grime, in its first years, sounded as if it had crash-landed in the present with no past, and no future – a time-travelling experiment gone horribly, fascinatingly wrong; a broken flux capacitor glowing amidst the smouldering wreckage, a neon light pulsing in the mist. While on one side of the A13, Canary Wharf’s tenants enriched themselves to dizzying new heights, the sounds emanating from the tower blocks barely a mile away declaimed through the airwaves that there was more than one east London. There was an alien futurism to a lot of the computer-generated aesthetics – the reason why some of the bleeps and bloops sounded like noises made by spaceships from computer games was because they were in fact made on games consoles: most famously a piece of software for the first PlayStation, called Music 2000. A lot of So Solid Crew’s first album was built on this very elementary software; as was Dizzee’s ‘Stand Up Tall’. Producers like Jme and Smasher made their first tunes on it, recorded them to MiniDisc, and then had vinyl dubplates cut straight from the MiniDisc – without going anywhere near a recording studio.

Mixdowns are usually seen as a crucial stage of the recording process even for the most entry-level producer, where the elements created are refined and balanced out to create a clean and coherent whole – but with grime they sometimes didn’t happen at all, before the tunes were cut to vinyl and released, either as dubplates or for general release to record shops. This applies even to the instrumental frequently cited as the first proper grime tune, Youngstar’s ‘Pulse X’. The spirit of the period echoes the famous punk mantra, ‘Here’s a chord. Here’s another. Here’s a third. Now form a band.’

DJ Logan Sama, for one, was happy enough with the devil-may-care approach to technical proficiency. ‘I don’t give a shit if a record is mastered well or not,’ Sama said to me back in 2006, then a new graduate from the pirate-radio scene to the legit world and new sofas of KISS FM. ‘All I care about is the reaction it gets when I play it in a club. How technically well-made art is doesn’t matter: it’s art. Why would you want to analyse it on its technical merits? It’s not an exam. My white label of “Pulse X” still has the hiss from the AV-out cables from the PlayStation they took it off to record it onto CD, when they took it to master it. You can hear it! The ‘bawm’s are all distorted. That record sold over 10,000 copies; it was fucking massive. Half of So Solid’s first album was produced on Music 2000, they then took it into the studio on a memory card to re-engineer it. That album sold over one million copies. A lot of people loved jungle when it was shit – when the quality of it was shit! Personally I like “jump up” stuff, and if I get that out of a technically well-made record, then cool; if I get that out of a record that’s been made on FruityLoops and not mixed-down properly, so be it.’

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 geniuses1: 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.2 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.’3

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.’4 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,’5 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 2007,6 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.’7 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.’8

‘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.’9

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 Mic10 – 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’.11

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 intro12). 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.’13 ‘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,’14 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.

While these new creations were honed by more experienced former junglists like Wiley and Geeneus, a younger generation, still in their mid-teens, were just starting out with making music, developing the new sound and their mic skills in schools and youth clubs. Grime as a genre, and a scene, was built on an astonishing level of youthful autonomy and self-sufficiency – but for all its entrepreneurial, DIY vigour and self-starting rhetoric, the state played a little-noticed role in some of its earliest developments. For one thing, there was the youth clubs. Dizzee describes an informal circuit of them as his apprenticeship on the mic, ‘going from youth club to youth club, it started there’ – they would travel to youth clubs in Canning Town (east London), Deptford (south-east) and further east to Beckton, Kano’s local. It was at Lincoln Arches youth club in Bow (long since closed down), part of the Lincoln North Estate, where Wiley, Dizzee, Nasty Crew and Ruff Sqwad among others would hang out, play table tennis and pool, and then sometimes be allowed to have raves, where they’d practise spitting over garage and proto-grime. ‘Friday night after school you’d think, “Yes, I need to go to the Linc, I need to go clubbing, I need to impress everyone and the girls there,”’ Tinchy Stryder recalled a few years later.

Another youth club, across the other side of Canary Wharf in the Isle of Dogs, was responsible for financing Ruff Sqwad’s first ever release, the squalling, punky ‘Tings In Boots’. ‘Obviously you needed money to put out a song, and we were still in school. Jeff and Jo, who ran that youth club on the Isle of Dogs, they were sort of the unsung heroes of grime,’ Rapid said. ‘They saw our talents, they sort of managed us, they thought yeah we’ll put a couple of hundred quid into actually bringing this out.’ Other times they’d pool their dinner money to fund their early vinyl releases. And the elders on the nascent local scene were always there to help them too, with advice, practical hands-on tips and financial support: ‘When we got further down the line with our productions, we used to go down to Jammer’s basement and give him the parts, I remember he was like, “Raps, Dirt, your tunes are banging, but you have to get mixdowns,” and we were like, “What’s that?” We didn’t know what that was! We were like “What do you do?” – by then he was already well into making grime and releasing records. From people like Jammer and Wiley we got a lot of energy around then.’

And then there was school, as a meeting point for practice, socialising and developing musical skills. Shystie’s transformative experience, taking her from hobbyist MC with a 9–5 job she hated, was the decision to study sound engineering at FE College, ‘[where] I realised: I could really do this!’ – after a whirlwind year, she signed to Polydor, and didn’t go back for the second year of the course. The most famous example of the importance of school comes from Dizzee Rascal’s teacher Tim Smith, who garnered some press attention after Boy in da Corner won the Mercury Prize in 2003; the story resonated as a redemptive one, of the singular faith of a mentor who refused to abandon hope – Dizzee had been expelled from two secondary schools already, and was placed at Langdon Park in Poplar, where Tim Smith was Head of Arts; he gave him the space to get on with his music, even after he had been expelled from all his other classes. Sent home from school one day for misbehaviour, angry and frustrated, Dizzee wrote some of his most well-known rave bars: ‘lyrical tank, box an MC like my name was Frank/going on dirty, going on stank.’15 ‘You could vent, I think that’s why I loved MCing,’ he told Radio 1 recently. The school was, like most state comprehensives, chronically short of resources, and the music department’s PCs had been donated by Morgan Stanley, and some of the other major banking corporations in Canary Wharf – via the LDDC, in fact.

On Dizzee’s first day, Smith left him to his own devices, sitting at a PC playing with Cubase. ‘After about 20 minutes, one of the pair of teachers said, “You’ve got to come over and see this.” Most kids are happy to have got a few bars down, but he had already zoomed ahead. He could quickly get information down, but what was most unusual was he would then spend a lot of time refining it – a lot of youngsters wanted to create music, but weren’t as interested in total refinement of a sound. He could string quite a complex rhythmic pattern together, in 20 to 30 minutes, but then be quite happy to spend a week refining and editing.’ On Monday evenings after school, a drop-in session funded by Tower Hamlets Summer University gave him a further opportunity to work on beats; Smith loaned Dizzee Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams CDs, minimalist composers and favourites of his – there was some connection there, in the use of space, he thought. (Hyperdub founder and musical and academic polymath Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman once said of dubstep that you should ‘dance to the gaps’, a sonic architecture which was shared with some of the more sparse early grime instrumentals, when neither had ‘taken the name’.)

Towards the end of Year 11, Dylan Mills was excluded from all his lessons, after more misbehaviour – but a forgiving headmaster knew that three expulsions, statistically, would most likely lead to a bad downwards spiral, and asked Smith if Dizzee could just sit quietly in the music room with him. So Dizzee would sit alone and work on his music for those last months, and occasionally help Smith teach Cubase to the Year 7s.

‘The music was awesome,’ Smith told me, who has retired from teaching, but now sits on the board of Rinse FM. ‘Nobody else had written music like that, with those really sharp, intricate beats, but sometimes just dropping out to nothing. And that is the hardest thing in music, to create space. And that showed particular talent, especially for someone so young, and you can hear it on Boy in da Corner, to know that you shouldn’t overload it. In Cubase you get quite a visual image of what you’re going to hear – and he would colour code, so you can see when something’s going to be repeated.’

Boy in da Corner was a significant development from the music he made at school, but those basics of creating space were definitely learned there. ‘The giveaways were the very very sharp beats,’ Smith told me. ‘He would compose at about 80bpm – most youngsters were into about 120 – but he would have a deliberately slow beat, so that you could sub-divide each beat, not into 2 but into 4. That’s where you get the really sharp, interesting sound. He would draw it in, so it was filled, and erase certain bits of it, so it had a gap. That’s where that unexpected break in the music came from.’

Many of Dizzee’s instrumental creations in his mid-teens were unfiltered, unvarnished beats, breaks and synths. He spun gold from the most basic and unadorned of sound palettes: the songs he wrote in Langdon Park School were constructed from their kit of a small mixer and Cubase software on the second-hand PCs, using the Cubase sound pack. Simplicity, and the idea of having the beat already ringing around his head, seemed to lead to a very methodical, straightforward composition process. It was the least of experimental techniques to achieve the most ‘experimental’ of sounds – an inborn tendency to the avant-garde, no oblique strategies required:

‘I was always fucking about with some weird noise,’ he said to me a decade or so later, in a break from rehearsing the Boy in da Corner revival show. ‘All the samples were just lined up on the keyboard, I never used an MPC, 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.’ On both Boy in da Corner and Showtime there are moments that reject not only simple pop structures and sensibilities, but any ‘songiness’ at all – part of his desire to move London electronic music on from UK garage, Dizzee once said, was because it was ‘all too nice-sounding’. Even the regularity and order of a simple 8-bar grime track is absent from tracks like ‘Knock, Knock’, on Showtime, a beat that constantly splits off at awkward angles and refuses to settle down. On ‘Brand New Day’, from his debut, Dizzee juxtaposes the most desperately depressive, real-world lyrical narratives with production of breathtaking otherworldliness. It is almost indescribable: effortlessly light, like someone running their finger around the rim of a glass, but it also makes you queasy, like you’re spinning down a plughole, out of control. In Dizzee’s teenage hands, the Japanese three-stringed shamisen becomes something between an earworm and an inner-ear infection.

‘I think it’s really important that you shouldn’t be afraid to use something if you like it, no matter how fucked the sound,’ Dizzee told Sound on Sound magazine in 2004, explaining his use of the shamisen. ‘Some people process sounds too much, but to me, that defeats the object … I felt that it was a really interesting sound, which didn’t remind me of anything else. I like using sounds that are about as “out there” as they come.’

Tim Smith noted that when Dizzee arrived in his GCSE music class at 14 he was already very comfortable with creating clear structures, and balancing rhythm, bass and melody – that he knew what the song sounded like in his head already, and the only challenge would be making it a reality. Tellingly, and unusually, many of the vocal recordings on Boy in da Corner were first takes: Dizzee’s pirate-radio training – as well as the street hustle of practising in the playground or around the estate – meant he could just walk in and get it right first time. But that one-take skill also helps explain the album’s vocal rawness, and its freshness. ‘I’ll never forget da way you kept the faith in me, even when things looked grim,’ he wrote in tribute to Smith on the album sleeve. Smith casually mentioned to me that he still had 33 tracks Dizzee composed back then. ‘I couldn’t pass them on to anyone,’ he said, seeing the glint in my eye, but reassured me they were at least fully backed up (many classic instrumentals have been lost over the years in hard-drive meltdowns). We agreed maybe some kind of donation to the British Library sound archive would be in order.

It takes a village to raise a scene, and it gives that scene an extraordinary power and coherence when everyone in the village suddenly becomes obsessed with it. Appearing on Commander B’s Choice FM show in 2002, Wiley was asked about his ongoing beef with Durrty Doogz (later Goodz) – who did the fans think was winning, of the two of them? He told the radio host he ‘wasn’t really interested’ in what listeners in the world at large thought – there was only one audience which counted. ‘Home is where it matters,’ he said. ‘I care about my own area, I’d rather be the top boy in my own area – I want to be the top boy in east.’

MC Griminal, one of the younger of several members of the Ramsay family to become a key figure in the grime scene (older brothers Marcus Nasty and Mak 10 were founders and legendary DJs with Nasty Crew), tells a story of being an 11-year-old at St Bonaventure’s School in Forest Gate, when Tinchy Stryder, several years his senior, and already well known on the local scene, approached him, handed him a CD of his tracks, and a £10 note for his troubles, telling him to make sure Mak 10 got it. ‘None of my mates could believe that Tinchy was coming up to me, or that Dizzee was at my house,’ Griminal told local paper the Newham Recorder eight years later, in 2010. It was the era of hyper-local celebrity, even while almost all of the celebrities in question were living in cramped council homes with their parents, or sharing bedrooms with their siblings. When Slimzee’s gran went to the Woolworths on Roman Road, five minutes walk from their house, to buy his Bingo Beats CD, she saw two teenage girls enthusiastically pawing it. ‘That DJ Slimzee is my grandson,’ she told them, much to their excitement.

‘We started to become local-famous,’ Kano recalled in the Made in the Manor documentary. These years of dedicated community-based underground music making, in youth clubs, pirate-radio sets and house parties, made for a unique kind of apprenticeship, and a quietly confident mindset, once the stage unexpectedly became much bigger a few years later. ‘What helped when we broke through,’ Kano continued, ‘was the practice hours that we put in, performing in front of like, 20 people.’ When he was signed to 679, and was booked to do his first proper gig outside the manor, opening for The Streets, he wasn’t overly worried. ‘It was my first time performing in front of that many people, but I had put in so much hours, and made all my mistakes behind closed doors, that it was cool. We got to make our mistakes in someone’s kitchen, on a pirate radio.’