which ‘may have a lot to answer for’.) But the world it conjured – the same city, from a totally different perspective – had a completely different atmosphere.
In this crucible moment, around 2002–03, the taxonomy of what would become ‘grime’ was greatly contested – and even debated on one of Wiley’s first label-released singles, ‘Wot Do U Call It?’. (‘Garage? Urban? 2 Step?’ he speculates derisively, without providing a definitive answer.) Eskibeat quickly became a one-man sonic empire, a distinctive sound all branded with an arctic theme: the track titles from that era include Ice Rink, Igloo, Ice Pole, Blizzard, Ice Cream Man, Snowman, Frostbite, Freeze, Colder and Morgue. ‘Sometimes I just feel cold hearted,’ he said in 2003, by way of explanation. ‘I felt cold at that time, towards my family, towards everyone. That’s why I used those names … I am a nice person but sometimes I switch off and I’m just cold. I feel angry and cold.’8 The narcotically-enhanced, loved-up bliss of the eighties and nineties rave predecessors, and the giddy utopian place-making that made raves ‘temporary autonomous zones’ had been wiped off the map. Wiley offered another explanation in 2005, which pegged the claustrophobia, emotional dislocation and rage of his and his peers’ music to the city around him: ‘The music reflects what’s going on in society. Everyone’s so angry at the world and each other. And they don’t know why,’ he told American magazine Spin. ‘As things went bad, away from music, the music’s just got darker and darker.’9
‘Eskimo’ was the first of his eski-oeuvre, the most game-changing, and the most enduring: a few minimal drum skirmishes, some artificial synth stabs, and the sound of a hollow metal pole rolling around a construction yard. Docklands after the docks, and before Canary Wharf – just a wasteland – but maybe with a hint of the bankers’ blocks’ futuristic glint, too. During the Pay As U Go school tour, they would play ‘Eskimo’ as an instrumental bed, and the kids would come up and freestyle over them. ‘The kids were going mad over that beat,’ Maxwell D recalled – this alien soundtrack was appropriate to the mood of the age. Its sheer newness is startling, and unsettling: it is easily situated in the context of millenarian anxiety, with all the apocalyptic fears that had accompanied that mystical calendar change, made worse by an ambient sense of dread about the new era that lay ahead. The frosty wastelands and open space reaching out ahead in the twenty-first century provoked a kind of psychic agoraphobia, triggered by the seismic jolt of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and the rush to war that followed, with the growing likelihood of unavoidable climate catastrophe ahead. Wiley wrote one of his formative eskimo tracks, ‘Ground Zero’, on the day of the attacks. ‘Imagine travelling through the streets, through all that dust. I want [Americans] to understand that I understand. I felt it,’ he told Martin Clark in 2003. ‘If we were in West End and the BT tower fell down and we were on that street. The fear – you can’t imagine the fear that would be in someone. “Am I going to die? Am I going to live?” Your heart would pop out of your chest. I’ve had that feeling: where you feel like death.’10
There is a case for saying that grime’s sonics are grounded in the material experience of east London life, that grime sounds like its environment; as Hattie Collins says in the documentary Open Mic11 – producers sample snippets of police sirens and gunshots, and perhaps in some of its clanking metallic sounds we can hear the heavy security gates on council flat front doors closing. But beyond this quotidian, literal testament to urban claustrophobia and noise pollution, is a sense that a historic rupture is happening, and that is audible in the music. You can hear it in some of Dizzee’s instinctive ad-libs on radio sets and Sidewinder mixes with DJ Slimzee in the 2001–03 period, his off-the-cuff reactions to the year zero tunes being faded in by his DJ: ‘two thousand and slew … this is the new ice age’, ‘playing all these end of the world beats … all these tunes sound like judgement day’, ‘this is divine intervention stupid … now we’re going to start getting space age’. Embracing those unknown frontiers was a mark of pride for the grime generation: ‘Millennium time!’ one of the Diamond Click MCs announces as the tectonic bass drops on Jammer’s 2003 classic ‘Don’t Ya Know’ – millennium time for those brave enough to be ready for it, even though ‘nuff man still stuck in 1990s’.12
There is a kind of shlocky horror show melodrama to many of grime’s formative instrumentals, often reflected in the naming as well as the sonics: Danny Weed’s seminal and irresistible ‘Creeper’, a kind of prancing Halloween ghoul lurking in the shadows, Target’s ‘Poltergeist’, tracks by Macabre Unit, or Terror Danjah’s work, tracks like ‘Creepy Crawler’ and ‘Gremlin’, stamped with his trademark sinister chuckle. The same goes for much of the sublow sound of west London’s Jon E Cash and his crew Black Ops, where, on ‘Spanish Fly’, a 1950s B-movie quality is granted by an unnerving tickle of Spanish guitar, before the glowering bassline kicks in. Other pioneering producers like Waifer and Young Dot created maximal, militaristic instrumental assaults, turning strings, hiccups and other sound effects into deadly weapons – anthems like the former’s ‘Grime’ and the latter’s ‘Bazooka VIP’ left little space for the MC; or at the very least, demanded a huge effort and big lungs to keep up.
What is unnerving and uncanny and which differentiates grime’s sonics from darker garage, is the sheer alien newness of the bass sound (dark bass was not invented by grime, as any junglist will tell you) and frequently off-kilter arrangements, all jolts, awkward gaps and juddering surprises. Wiley’s eskimo creations were perhaps the pinnacle of this: taken to the extreme on his ‘devil mixes’. These were remixes of tracks like ‘Eskimo’, ‘Colder’ and ‘Avalanche’ made even more sinister by stripping the drums out, inspired partly by the dub versions his dad’s reggae sound system had created, but so named because they ‘sounded evil’. As if to highlight the ungodly power they had, the devil mixes sold really well, and Wiley used the proceeds to buy a car, which he then crashed. Convinced that his creations were cursed and too powerful to control, he insisted on calling them ‘bass mixes’ after that.
Before it hardened down into the fabric, Jammer, Dizzee, Danny Weed and Wiley drew another strain of futurism into this creatively molten moment: what’s come to be known as sinogrime, a glitch of Chinese instrumentation in grime’s normally stable sonic geography (the UK and Jamaica, with a bit of US rap swagger, house from Chicago and syncopation from West Africa). Grime’s instinctive (and functional) tech-positivity is what always helped it feel like sonic futurism incarnate: rejecting the organic clutter of live instrumentation in favour of empty space, dehumanised synths and cyborg basslines. I was unlucky enough to see Roll Deep play a one-off show with a live band at the Stratford Rex in 2005, and it was all kinds of wrong – the wholesome twang of the live bass guitar the antithesis to grime’s aesthetic (let us not even deign to discuss Ed Sheeran’s strumming collaborations with grime MCs). Grime is situated in the future aesthetically, and perhaps embedded in sinogrime’s Chinese elements is a sort of intuition about where the future lies, geopolitically. In looking east beyond the blinking light of One Canada Square, sinogrime producers were offering a kind of accidental socio-political prophecy, taking grime’s acquisitive tendencies and sending them east on a journey beyond Britain’s pre-2008 bubble.
Following the history of slum clearances, Luftwaffe bombing, empty warehouses and managed decline, by the early 2000s east London had become the archetype of the post-industrial city. The future had gone to China, and grime instinctively followed. You can hear it in the delicate sino scales on Dizzee’s ‘Do It’, a minor lament, as the rough and tough drums try and put a brave face on the poignant instrumentation and deeply depressive lyrics (‘Feds don’t understand us, adults don’t understand us, no one understands us’, he mumbles, forlorn, on the intro13). On the stunning ‘I Luv U Remix’, what might be a MIDI (digitised) version of a guzheng or guqin – Chinese stringed instruments – is used to play out a light but intensely melodic bed for the MCs’ heartfelt lyrical sketches, accompanied only by the sparest, subtlest snatches of bass and drum. Wiley and Danny Weed’s ‘Blue Rizla’, Jammer’s ‘Weed Man’, and Kode9’s ‘Sinogrime Minimix’ are all in this category. Of course, there is a direct influence from the staple teenage boy’s cultural diet of Wu Tang Clan, kung-fu
