This documentary just came to my attention, and it’s great. UK Hiphop artist Rodney P traces the history of Grime music in the UK, back through sound system culture and traces the process through which UK youth started rapping in their own accent. I was involved with the grime scene for a number of years and had some great experiences being welcomed into it by some of it’s great practitioners, including artists Skepta and Jammer, who are featured in the documentary. For me, as someone who was involved in the early years of the jungle and drum n bass scene in the US as a fan and raver, and came from a hiphop background, grime was the perfect blending of these two threads. It’s raw, aggressive and DIY nature also appealed to the part of me that loved punk aesthetics. It was a terrific validation for me of the idea of hiphop as a blueprint for DIY culture, a way that people could speak about their local conditions and dreams in an accessible and authentic way. I never liked UK hiphop before when I perceived it as trying to sound American, it felt inauthentic to me. When grime came along, filled with unique slang and hyper local flavor, it felt to me like the beginning of hiphop had in New York (which I experienced the tail end of as cultural echos, being born in 1979). Now, years later, grime has survived it’s early surge of novelty and stabilized into a viable underground scene, with new artists coming through and existing foundational artists maintaining their position. I’m happy to have played a small role in exposing it to the wider world as I did 15 years ago, and happy to see people from within the culture examining and documenting the history in a thoughtful way.
