Is it just a group of mindless London gangsters who spit about "juicing on gash" and shanking mans" or is there more to the scene?
What is GRIME? The grimepedia definition is : Grime is a sub-genre of urban music which first emerged in London in the early 2000s, primarily a development of UK Garage, Drum and Bass , Dancehall and Hip Hop. But to define it properly you need to understand the scene as a whole. Grime is known for it’s insane, unorthodox, Complex 2-step breakbeats and the sickhead MC’s that lace the beat with lyrics displaying vocabularies wider that the half tonne man and life experiences deeper than a hole through the middle of the world.
One thing I want to place in everyone’s mind is that there is a huge group of people (who BY THE WAY know NOHTING about grime whatsoever) who think all grime tracks are pure hype tracks spittin’ about ‘gash”and ‘drawing for the shank’, but studies (AKA me listening to grime for time) have shown that grime MC’s over the years have spat about anything from food to the death of a friend to punctuation and even grime versions of nursery rhymes. Yeah there’s obviously the hype tracks too and the beef tracks but that’s only a fraction of the music grime artists are producing.
People also have this weird idea that all grime artists are mass murdering psychopaths. It’s like people can’t understand that people can be young, talented and NOT A CRIMINAL. It’s linked to the whole ‘hype MC’ thing, people aren’t gonna spit about things they don’t know because it would take away the realness of their lyrics, so just because these artists might have grown up and SEEN gun crime or knife crime or whatever crime doesn’t mean they ARE criminals themselves. There are obviously MC’s that have committed crimes in the past, but think about it, if you can name any line of work where not a single employee ever has committed any crime, minor or major, I will personally send you a house made of gold. People just find it easier to blame grime for glamorization of crime instead of looking around at the corrupt world we live in and realizing it’s everywhere. Imagine if George Bush took a leaf out Grime’s book and instead of starting a war with Iraq he just took the brains to come up with some freestyle bars and clashed Saddam Hussein, wrote some diss tracks or something.
There wouldn’t even be an article on Grime without mentioning the ‘veterans’ of the scene. Starting with Godfather Of Grime AKA Eskiboy AKA Wiley. He invented his own sub genre of grime called Eskibeat. He has devoted years to pioneering the Grime scene and been a huge part of making it such a huge movement. Wiley founded his own record label Eskibeat Recordings last year and has released three albums and 12 mixtapes. He was one of those MC’s who was selling thousands where others scraped 500. He’s been dissed by over 20 different MC’s (including The Movement!) yet has still kept his crown as the Grime King. Around 70% of tracks made by Wiley become grime anthems with lyrics like “I’m 50/50 Nifty/Nifty//Got the best deals nobody can twist me//Everytime somebody tries to shoot me//I flip the wall they miss me miss me.”
But Wiley didn’t make grime what it is single-handedly, other Veterans are people like Wretch 32: Wretch is probably one of the best lyricists in the whole scene with lyrics like “I’m levels above that’s blatant//just check my punctuation//I’m coming to take it, run with the game//Im under, the suns adjacent”, and somehow people mistook his intense lyrical ability featured in his tracks as ‘bait hiphop trying to be grime’, if RWD forum was a town then the whole WRETCH: HIPHOP OR GRIME issue would have been the talk of it, he was part of a highly rated collective of MC’s called Combination Chain Gang but he then moved forward and formed The Movement with Ghetto, Lightning, Scorcher and Devlin.
There are many more flagship grime artists such as JME, Nu Brand Flexxx, Kano, Sway (another one of my personal favourtie lyricists ever : “Are you a liar? If your reply is no you’re lying now//Cos we’re living a lie, then we die, then we’re lying down”), Bashy, Skepta, Devilman, Lethal Bizzle, Ghetto, Scorcher, Jammer etc all of which have produced loads of mixtapes, albums, and well known tracks that helped to elevate the Grime scene.
But grime aint all boys, there are some veteran chicks too like Shystie who’s been non stop over the years making original tracks like her acceptable in the 80s mashup New Style Remix and dropping Dubplate Drama and now starring in AdULTHOOD. Also Lady MCs such as NoLay, $tush, Baby Blue, Ms Dynamite and Wildflower have held their own next to all the guy MCs and are still killing it. Also grime has singers too which people forget about like Syleena, Sadie Ama and Chanel who can still get a crowed hyped as much as the MCs the scene is known for.
It’s infuriating and triumphant at the same time that Grime has got where it is today with minimum help from the media. Channels like Channel U devote their all to the scene whereas mainstream channels like MTV front like they’re helping raise awareness to these hot new grimey stars on the rise once then never promote them again, a prime example of this is Chipmunk. He was featured in MTV Base’s ‘About To Blow’, apart from his 5mins on that when have you ever seen a chipmunk music video on base at a normal time of day? Never. But MTV are more than happy to play his and many other grime videos at the unholy hour of 2am! If it’s not actually a grime track then it will be played …for example (Wearin’ My Rolex-Wiley) I’m sorry to break it to all you people that JUST heard of Wiley when he dropped that track and now think you’re a grimehead….IT’S A HOUSE TRACK!! So you can see the dilemma, and you wonder why Grime artists have been known to make a few hype tracks now and then. To be honest, if I was a grime MC I’d probably make more hype tracks because i’d be so overly angry at the shit the media were doing by pretending to promote me. But credit where credit is due they did play Feel Free by Kano, and a few of Lethal Bizzle’s videos (including his hit single Mister), but that’s not enough really is it as sick as the tracks may be.
To everyone that’s followed grime for long enough to know all this and knows exactly what I’m on about then carry on spreading the word of these talented musicians we have been graced with, who despite all the poor publicity and stereotypes put on them (listen to Sterotypes- Tinchy Stryder Ft GoldieLocks) still produce new tracks all the time, in hope that one day grime will have a space in oxfords dictionary that doesn’t describe a Kim & Aggy Mess underneath it.
