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
