stars produced in grime’s early days, for several years, were all black British: Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Kano, Shystie, Lethal Bizzle. With the exception of Lady Sovereign in 2005 – always a bit of an outsider to the scene in any case – and some years later, Devlin, the few white MCs weren’t the ones getting record deals.
There is something utopian in grime’s collectivist origins, of ‘kids hanging out together making something they enjoy’, as Jammer described it to me recently, and this is a rich part of its musical roots too. Academic Jeremy Gilbert has said that the relative weakness of neo-Nazi street thugs in British cities in the nineties, while such groups were on the rise elsewhere in Europe, owes a lot to the ‘cosmopolitan hybridity’ blooming (and booming) out of the speaker stacks and pirate-radio aerials where hardcore, jungle and UK garage were created. State-led multiculturalism takes the form of abstract government initiatives and directives, more progressive school curricula and better community and arts funding – and these things are all essential, and should be done right – but in terms of creating a more harmonious society, its impact looks fairly tepid compared to what young, working-class people of different ethnic backgrounds cooked up together on London’s council estates. In fact, to tweak James Meek’s pessimism about our class-riven, divided city, where the ingredients are laid out side by side, not touching, not mixing, perhaps the solitary demographic where multiculturalism is an organic, lived experience, rather than an idealised illusion, is in young, working-class communities where schools, youth clubs, estates and later workplaces make a shared and convivial culture not just realistic, but the unforced reality.
‘I was one of the only white kids on my estate growing up,’ recalled Nyke from white UK garage and grime duo Milkymans (humorously named, they explain, by a Caribbean bouncer, surprised to see them at a mostly black nightclub). ‘The Irish community had moved out, and me and Nikki grew up in the Afro-Caribbean communities in Peckham and Stockwell – so I lived between Ghanaians and Jamaicans; if I couldn’t smell fufu, I could hear Capleton blasting. My radiator used to shake off the wall! And even if I didn’t know what some of the artists meant, in a kind of black culture context, I was still feeling the vibrations of the music from young. I remember I used to wash my mum’s car, and I’d be blaring Kool FM – if I think back to it now, I’m lucky it was a noisy estate, because I love jungle, but that was noise. Like that was not easy listening.’ He laughed. ‘But when you’re a 13- to 14-year-old obnoxious, rebellious kid, that’s all you want to hear. It’s kinda the equivalent of someone listening to really dark heavy metal. That was our version of that.’
As with punk’s extensive late-seventies love affair with reggae, and the ‘two tone’ ska of the early 1980s, jungle saw urban multiculturalism manifested in youthful conviviality. It channelled a mixture of cultural influences into a novel, fiercely experimental form, created by a rich ethnic mix of producers, DJs and promoters, and enjoyed by a similarly diverse assembly of ravers. It transcended the difference in junglists’ backgrounds, but it did not forget those origins – something you can hear in the music, with soul and ragga samples and fierce basslines high in the mix.
In a 1994 BBC jungle documentary, UK Apache, the MC behind the superlative jungle anthem ‘Original Nuttah’, highlighted the power these styles had in forging a sense of belonging for second- or third-generation immigrants. Growing up as a working-class child of an Indian-South African mother and Iraqi father in Tooting in the 1970s and 80s, when the National Front were a menacing presence on the streets of south London, Apache made friends with kids of Jamaican heritage and went to reggae sound-system dances with them in some of the same estates in Battersea from which So Solid Crew would later emerge. He told the BBC documentary crew:
‘Jungle, because it’s from England, I can really relate to it, it’s important to me because I’m born here. I’m from England, and London, and nobody can tell me I’m not from here. Once I was ashamed of being British, but it’s like the jungle’s drawn me back into my roots, where I’m from. Although my parents are – I’m half Arab, half Asian, African – I can relate to those countries only up to a point. When I talk to my children, I say, “You’re born in England, be proud of it,” and don’t let nobody tell you different, no BNP or anything like that.’
There is another key cultural lineage to grime that is too easily overlooked. Long before Afrobeats (with an ‘s’) and its rap, R&B and bashment hybrids made their way into popular consciousness in the UK, the children of African migrants to the UK, in particular from Ghana and Nigeria, were making grime, and slipping in references to this heritage. Among others, Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder and Lethal Bizzle all have Ghanaian parents; there were musical links from London to West Africa too – genre-hopping producer, singer and MC Donaeo and grime-adjacent rapper Sway were performing big shows in Accra and collaborating with Ghanaian rapper Sarkodie in the late 2000s. Skepta, in particular, made it clear in his most well-known early radio and rave bars, that he was ‘Joseph Junior Adenuga, from Nigeria, not St Lucia – big lips, African hooter’. This didn’t preclude an upbringing in which he obsessed over Ninjaman and Jamaican sound-clash culture, but it coexisted with the West African music he heard at home. By the time I interviewed him for a second time, in 2015, black British youth culture was changing – a diasporic shift in emphasis away from Caribbean dominance had been slowly taking place in the UK. ‘When I was a yute, to be called African was a diss,’ he recalled, sadly. ‘At school the African kids used to lie and say they were Jamaican. So when I first came in the game and I’m saying lyrics like “I make Nigerians proud of their tribal scars/my bars make you push up your chest like bras”, that was a big deal for me.’
Even saying his full name in his lyrics was an act of defiant pride with a very personal context. ‘In school, when a teacher would try and read my name, as soon as she goes to try and say it, I’d be trying to say it first, to stop the embarrassment of her not being able to pronounce it. Eventually I grew up. I remember one day when I was about fifteen, my mum told me, “Junior, your name means something – just because your name isn’t some standard English name.” I remember going back into school and it started to power me up. Bare self-hate vibes was pushed into me as a kid at school, trust me. That’s why it makes me happy to see all these kids today just love Afrobeats, because since the start I’ve been trying to fucking fight this ting, for them to be able to stand up.’ He mentioned ‘Sweet Mother’, his single released in 2007 for Mother’s Day, a reworking of Prince Nico Mbarga’s 1970s hit of the same name, an early pointer to the way black British music might be going next, with Nico’s sweetly sung, Nigerian-accented chorus sitting alongside Skepta’s grimy London beats and MCing.
The ‘Black Atlantic’10 pathways between Africa, Britain, America and the Caribbean have seen cultural exchange, revision and refinement in numerous iterations, but it should be no surprise, given their histories, that black British MC culture has evolved along very different lines to American hip-hop culture. South London rappers Krept and Konan, schoolmates of Stormzy, are situated very much on the rap side of the rap-grime divide, in terms of the slower, hip-hop tempo of their beats and rhymes: and yet, they explained to me, there wasn’t that much of a divide at all – that just as black Britishness embraced its diverse roots, it also produced a family of different, coexisting genres. I’d been sent by the Observer to ask them what separated British microphone culture from its American equivalent. Konan didn’t hesitate in saying that it was essentially ‘everything’ – fairly or not, he viewed American hip-hop culture and identity as monolithic in a way black British culture never was:
‘What’s different? Our accents, our lifestyle, our culture. When we was in America we’d say “Where are you from?” and they’d say “America”. But over here if someone said where are you from you might say “Jamaica”, or “Africa” or something else – maybe “British” and adding something else. We bring different cultures to our music, and different slang, a different way of doing things. And there’s different-sounding beats: in their clubs there’s a lot of just hip-hop, in our clubs you’ll have house, dance, Afrobeats, bashment, you’ve got
