The irony of grime being derided as antisocial by its critics – all that clatter, hostility and bad attitude – is that it has always been community music: invented and developed collectively and collaboratively, by people whose lives and roots are deeply entwined, and who made music because it was the sociable thing to do. Community can mean a lot of different things, but whichever way you draw the diagram, grime emerged from a spider’s web of intergenerational influences, schoolmates, neighbours, friends, family, and people who knew people – from school, from the estate, from the local area.
The more you dig into its past, the more you realise grime’s social networks precede the music entirely, not just by years but by generations. Grime is black music (even if it’s not always made by black people), and its roots spread across London, and the world. While east London has for centuries been one of the most multicultural parts of the country, and a first port of call for new arrivals, the generation of Caribbean migrants who began arriving in Britain after the Empire Windrush docked in the Thames in 1948 tended to settle in Notting Hill in the west, and Brixton in the south. But with east London depopulating rapidly in the post-war decades, owing to decay, bombing, slum clearances and degeneration, housing became relatively cheap. Manufacturing jobs in places like the Dagenham Ford car plant, and Tate and Lyle, Unilever and ITT around the docks, encouraged newly arriving Caribbean nationals, now British citizens, to look to the east.
In the tightly bound geography of working-class inner London of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, many of the grime kids’ parents, and in some cases grandparents, knew each other before the kids even arrived – and as a result some of east London’s most important foundational MCs actually played together as children. D Double E’s dad went to school with Jammer’s dad. Jammer’s dad and Footsie’s dad were at Sunday school together. Footsie’s dad was in a reggae band in the 1980s with Wiley’s dad, and taught young Richard Cowie Jr how to play the drums.
‘We’ve known each other before before,’ Footsie says.1 A ridiculous number of MCs, DJs, producers and key behind-the-scenes figures met as children, at school or a playscheme; or playing football, or in someone’s aunt’s house, or at a party, or night fishing in the Hertford Union Canal, between Wiley’s estate and Victoria Park. Roll Deep’s first paid job was working for Wiley’s dad’s patty factory (they were subsequently fired when Richard Cowie Sr caught them having a food fight). ‘It’s so deep,’ Footsie continued. ‘Sometimes I think I’m not doing nothing special, other than carrying on what was already done.’
Grime’s lineage is suffused with this sense of kinship that precedes any sense of desire to make music – of being mates first, and lyrical sparring partners second. It’s easy to romanticise, but not easy to romanticise well: Kano’s nostalgic 2016 album which signalled his return to grime, Made in the Manor, does so brilliantly, telling sincere and evocative stories about his youth in his childhood home, 69 Manor Road in Plaistow, E15. On ‘T-Shirt Weather In The Manor’, Kano vividly describes multigenerational summer barbecues where the kids are listening to UK garage titans MJ Cole and Heartless Crew, and ‘the olders want some [reggae singer] Dennis Brown’, a prelapsarian community idyll, before fame, beefs and adulthood came along and complicated everything.
That kinship was formed, in part, out of marginality. Crazy Titch says he knew brothers Mak 10 and Marcus Nasty when they were children because ‘there was like three black families in Plaistow when I was growing up, and theirs was one of them’.2 In parts of inner London with more substantial black communities, grime’s originators were bound through pre-internet social networks formed by geography and background, by a sense of being marginalised by poverty, or racism. ‘It was a nice little community here,’ Kano recalled, smiling, in a short documentary accompanying Made in the Manor. ‘There was definitely a feeling that we weren’t supposed to be shit, or have shit, or become anything great. An underlying attitude that people grow up with, from around here.’3 Those narrow horizons enforced by poverty keep people down, but they bind people together, too – and when the kids at those barbecues started making music, by themselves, for each other, those bonds provided the foundations for something powerful, and lasting.
Sometimes grime’s ancestral links didn’t become apparent till years later. Footsie recently told his dad who Wiley’s dad was, and he responded that they’d played together as children. ‘I was there with Will, running around as kids, I just don’t really remember it.’4
Sitting in a pub beer garden in Bethnal Green in 2017 with Roony Keefe, creator of the seminal Risky Roadz DVD series, he told a story about Devlin, who he first filmed for his DVD in 2006, when he was a teenage MC from Barking, still only 16:
‘I’ve known Devs all these years but … my dad went to this funeral last year, and he was talking to one of his old mates there, and he said, “Oh, how’s your boy?”, and he said, “Yeah all right, still doing the music.” My dad was like, “Oh yeah, what music does he do?” Turns out my dad grew up with Devlin’s dad in Hackney, they’ve been mates all these years. But we didn’t know that until last year. It’s a really tight-knit kind of thing.’ Devlin wrote lyrics to describe this story of their dads drinking together in their favourite Hackney pub, before its gentrification-makeover, in a freestyle for Keefe’s YouTube channel: ‘Oi Roony, do me a favour and let ’em all know we’ve been around from day: like mine and your old mans, down the Kenton pub before it sold grub, just beer and grams. Funny how it all turns out … damn.’5
Wiley would watch his dad’s VHS copies of famous Jamaican sound-clash events like Sting, where rival sound-systems (with a team of engineers, hosts and selectors) would compete by offering up their biggest dubplates – also known as dubs, or white labels, because the vinyl was freshly cut from a new recording, and specially made for the occasion, rather than released to the general public by a record company. These did not have a sleeve or any artwork, just the naked simplicity of the record, its title inscribed on the white label in marker pen.
‘I sometimes heard my dad listening to Sugar Hill and the Gang,’ Wiley recalled in 2016, ‘[there was] some American rap. But it was minimal compared to all the reggae.’
Wiley had already learned to play the drums, and began to try and copy some of his dad’s reggae jams, using a Yamaha CX5, ‘the one with the big stick-in cartridge thing on top. I would go on there and see if I could play what he had just been playing.’ Reggae suffused the general atmosphere that the grime generation grew up in, tracing direct ancestral links from Britain’s pre-acid house reggae culture, some of it imported from the Caribbean, some of it created by black Britons. South London grime and dancehall MC Doctor – known for his ‘yardie flow’ – was managed by one of London’s most famous sound-systems, Saxon. Dreadlocked grime icon Jammer – a stalwart behind the scenes, a pioneering producer and a zany presence on the mic – grew up in a house immersed in this culture: his parents ran the ELRICS (East London Rastafarian Information and Community Services), which helps Rastafarians with housing, and incorporates work with young people (Jammer himself has spoken at schools and colleges, and been involved in their mentoring programmes). Iconic black British dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah was a family friend. The connections go on: Spyro’s dad is St Lucian reggae singer Nereus Joseph, Scorcher’s dad is jungle MC Mad P from early nineties crew Top Buzz.
It’s not just a family connection, or an abstract component of the musical bloodline: grime echoes its Jamaican reggae heritage in its structure, in its tropes, in its slang, in the way it’s performed, and stylistically: particularly harking back to the
