| It Was A Bad Time For Me, OK? |
[Apr. 21st, 2005|03:35 pm] |
“You have – one – new message.”
“Get up, get a fucking life, get a fucking career, you’re not even motivated to get off your fucking arse and DO SOMETHING.” – “Pick U R Self Up”
Whatever nightmares your answerphone has been unleashing lately, it’s all too easy to think that the battlelines have stopped being laid out, that it’s time to give in, to accede. It’s time to bite your lip and resign yourself, surrender to the inevitable. There’s nothing new to see here. I’m not a celebrity, get me out of here.
Best known as Dizzee Rascal’s mentor in Roll Deep Crew, former member of the Pay As U Go Cartel, and the name behind the celebrated Eskimo dance, “Treddin’…” may be Wiley’s debut album, but this is only indicated by its hunger and drive, its will to power. Everything sounds so slick, sassy and assured. Apart from Wiley himself. His voice may lack the stuttering cadence of his protégée, but he’s just as confused and contradictory, as obsessed with how brutal minimalist music can be.
So what is it that makes this so impossible to deny? It’s in enforced limitations forcing you to be more creative. It’s in the pure pleasure of turning music into a weapon. It’s in making a call to arms. “Listen to this sound/It sure ain’t garage…Make it in a studio/Not in a garage”, he laughs on “Wot Do U Call It?”. It’s Wiley digging trenches around his scene, his brand, his vision, with a welcoming arm to anyone who wants to join the draft, and a sniper ready for anyone who dares to fight. “At its most endearing, a manifesto has a madness about it”, wrote Mimi Parent. And, when Wiley exclaims “Everybody who likes this go this way/Everyone who likes that go that way” as the cavalcade of his “Igloo” rhythm begins to twist and turn from incredibility at the idea to plain incredible at its execution, metallic insano-riffs clattering into pixieish Mario blips, that quote makes perfect sense.
Although commonly called grime, what Wiley calls Eskibeat reacts to UK garage in the same way that sound reacted to the increasing irrelevance of late-90s jungle. Part of the same pirate continuum, it lacks any semblance of the drug/noise interface: radio slots are suffused with almost comically violent lyrics. It – quite literally – lacks ecstasy. Wiley’s glacial trope makes this almost inevitable: it’s when the ice breaks, like on the baby-doll paean of “Special Girl”, when he exclaims things like “I need a girl who doesn’t flex like a yattie” over an impossibly cute SWV sample, that this album becomes as endearing as it is endlessly listenable.
Disconcertingly, the lyrics are aimed at rival crews, other MCs, rather than the listener (“I know you hate me cos you think I write lyrics and I aim them at your crew/Come on blud, that’s not true.”). And so, if you sense that the problems Wiley has – money, girls, parking tickets – are trivial, that would be missing the point. The triumph of “Treddin’...” is that it revels in small talk, in bitter disputes, in the inner turmoil, paranoia and self-consciousness that defines, internalises and humanises humanity. “Pick UR Self Up”, part anthem for doomed youth, part inspirational exploration of how inertia creeps within us all, is surgically-precise blocks of cartoon noise that sound as wonderfully weird and perfectly pop as anything The Neptunes or Lil Jon are doing now. “Reasons” stuns with a noise so compression chamber paranoid that it glitters. Its fatalism (“If it happens then it happens for a reason”) is so at variance with what is prevalent in every tainted step of millennial living, with what Cristina Odone calls “the terrible power of violent death”, that it’s strangely apposite.
It’s not perfect. Pirate classics “Ice Rink” and “Eskimo” are tantalisingly reduced to instrumental interludes just as they’re ready to soar, “Goin’ Mad” isn’t sure whether it’s a parody or a mistake, and there’s the most gruesome description of a back-of-the-seat fumble ever committed to plastic. But what’s more important is that grime shows new directions for pop to go, fresh areas for it to pinpoint, new playgrounds and fairgrounds for you to find your fun. “Treddin’ On Thin Ice” does all this, while still acting as a point of departure, a beginning for something that should be dovetailing the zeros and ones of your digital technofuture, tracing the uncanny mindspaces that you can never call home.
Surrender. |
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| This Is Going To Be Fucking Insane |
[Mar. 26th, 2005|02:07 am] |
You know what to do. Also:
Apparat
Silizium (Shitkatapult)
Collecting Apparat's May 2004 Peel Session and a handful of remixes, Silizium is precious, perfectly poised pop always on the brink of rapture. Can-cool, but less techno-taut than last year's Shapemodes, the Peel session itself is stunning: lush violin-spun mini-dramas that wouldn't sound out of place on Constellation, toughened up with 'Ice Rink'-minimal breakbeats that stu-t-t-t-er so immaculately you hide your bitten fingernails in disgust. There's an emotional chiaroscuro here, the unenviable fearlessness of music so built for headphones - because it's yours and no one else's to share. But there's also a glorious love of pop music: 'Komponent' is so playful it's feline; Rechenzentrum's click-house mix of 'Not A Good Place' emphasises the original's elemental joy; the rest *glides* with a savagely graceful intent. Wall yourself off from the world and let this set off fireworks in your daydreams. |
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| Sonic contraceptives and kaleidoscopes of carnival colour |
[Mar. 26th, 2005|01:59 am] |
‘Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions.’ – Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
She’s strikingly beautiful and dresses like a magician at a children’s party given style tips by Neneh Cherry. That’s important. A fellow art-school grad dismissively swipes that she’s “well faux, and completely loves herself.” That’s important, too. She’s Sri Lankan, her father has high-end Tamil Tiger connections and her insane first single ‘Galang’ was co-written by Justine Frischmann. Yep, you’ve got it.
The appropriation of military signifiers is nothing new in art school pop, but is rarely this explicit. The cover of M.I.A.’s Arular (XL) splices spray-painted tanks, AK-47s and aeroplanes flying off to nowhere with a kaleidoscope of carnival colour. Lyrics casually reference her “freedom fighting Dad” (after whom the album is named in tribute), the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and Kill Bill slash-em-up, but it’s delivered as an afterthought, worn as an accoutrement. What is engaging about Arular is that is sounds like it had to be released in 2005 – the cut&paste fragments of ‘Fire Fire’ say more in three minutes than modern rock has in a decade. The production borrows from Jamaican dancehall, East London grime, 90s hip-hop, 00s pop, and the Rio baile funk that boyfriend Diplo has been mining to such great effect. Assemblage. Subcultures and fashion students. Hegemony. You can see Dick Hebdige salivating in the distance, but does it work as an album?
Very nearly. The sound is compression-chamber tense and tinny, like it’s been mastered for MP3 distribution: everything filtered through in the top end apart from burbles of bass. At its best – the Richard X propelled fireworks of ’10 Dollar’, the wow and flutter of ‘Bucky Done Gun’, Arular sounds incredible, but you can’t help but think over the course of an album it lacks the freewheeling lunacy to really inspire. It’s a play of surfaces, a too-perfect collection of rough-edged polygons that don’t tessellate like they should.
A more wholesome fusion of party beats and street smarts is The Perceptionists’ astonishing Black Dialogue (Def Jux): sumptuous loops that slam with a satisfying boom-bap crunch; MCs utterly reverential to the sanctity of the beat and to the righteousness of their lyricism. ‘Blo’ is the best beat El-P’s had to his name since ‘Deep Space 9mm’, ‘Let’s Move’ and ‘Party Hard’ have metallic bass to make you dribble, ‘Memorial Day’ gouges chunks from Bush, Rumsfeld and Condi without the try-hard wetness such records so often fall prey to. Just please ignore ‘Love Letters’, the most cloying attempt at rappers showing their love for smart girls since Dead Prez’ sonic contraceptive ‘Mind Sex’. We can’t ever be seen to encourage such horror.
Meanwhile, the best of grime is still clawing away at the living corpse of mainstream rap. Check Ruff Sqwad’s self-released Guns ‘n’ Roses mix-CD for its supreme evocation of how to do so much with so little (one Fruity Loops preset, infinite possibilities). They approach every song with the idea that it should launch a boxing match: stadium rock-woah drum sounds; synth riffs so huge and jagged they’d slice open Neptune; MCs nibbling at the beat, afraid it might bite back. At 76-minutes, it’s inevitably overlong, but even the highlights have highlights.
Ignore Bashy’s Ras Kwame-hosted UR Mum Volume 1 (2NV) (so much pettiness, so little point) and head straight for L-Man’s beguiling Facts Of Life (Electrical Management). The NdoubleA MC reads too many history books, curls syllables around beats like Eminem, has the urgency and love for ideas of Skinnyman, and the deeply destructive past of Dave Pelzer. It’s a frightening delineation of someone who’s thoroughly fucked-up, and quite happy to use that torment to amuse, bemuse and abuse you, scored to orchestral doom-hop and boxfresh grime. Be prepared to spit your coffee when he spits “you’re lyrically shit: you remind me of afterbirth” with clinical nonchalance, be impressed that he hates 50 Cent with more venom than you have energy or time. And someone sign this crazy genius now.
Published in Plan B, April/May 2005 issue |
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| Don your long-coat and shades |
[Mar. 26th, 2005|01:55 am] |
Director Of Football
So it’s not all big money and supermodels, then
So. Are we talking hot-air balloons or peanuts? I mean: how big is your ego? When you’re approaching gaming-management, just how much control do you need in order to satiate yourself? For the brains behind Director of Football, it seems, nothing but the whole gamut of simulated existence. Yessiree: not content with letting you run riot over the traditional methods of player selection, transfers and a smidge of training and finance bolted on, DoF puts you in control of everything. From hiring and firing, marketing, share buying, delegating and communal/personal motivation – to even advising your overpaid strikers when to shoot. Don’t be afraid to don your long-coat and shades. This is control-freak onanism.
Inherent in decent management sim are three key features: ease of use, ease of creating response, and sheer joy of play. And it could have been that, with swish use of tact and tactics, this overload of involvement could have lifted DoF from the Sunday League to challenge CM3’s omnipotence. But no; its main claim to even a talking point is that it fails mightily on all three counts – despite having much to control, you never feel in control.
First impressions are poor, despite the game moving at a fair canter and containing the now-requisite number of league and options. There’s a Derridean* complexity in performing simple tasks, and – pertinently – a nagging lack of response to your commands. There’s also a horrible, insistent tribal chant of background noise. But while you can flick a switch and hide the sound, the stuttering experience of play is unavoidable. Few, if any, management games have ever managed to pull off viewable matches, but DoF’s utter nadir is the isometrically-viewed matchday screen. Examples? Keepers frequently save with their feet. Substituted players spontaneously combust. The camera doesn’t keep up with cross-field passes. It takes four minutes match-time for the players to run from box-to-box.
Combined, not enough of note happens, and it when it does, the end result is something akin to watching a kickabout from the sidelines, trying earnestly to shout advice, but giving up when you realise no one’s listening.
So. Percentage-wise, we’re talking peanuts.
* The subs changed this to “pea-souper fog of” during production, on the grounds that their readers wouldn’t know who Jacques Derrida is. Fine, but I would like to point out that this is a terribly phrased tautology, and I had nothing to do with it.
Published in PC Gamer, December 2001 |
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| Can it be that it was all so simple then? |
[Mar. 23rd, 2005|11:42 pm] |
Football World Manager 2000
The new signing in the Football Manager ranks sees Ubi Soft having to settle for mid-table mediocrity
More than perhaps any sub-genre, football management games are annoyingly good at making time mysteriously disappear. They’re responsible for the fleeting scream you feel throbbing down your veins after casually looking down at your watch in the middle of a crucial end-of-season race for the play-offs, when the realisation that you have precisely two hours in which to force your coffee-stained carcass into work hits. You think: “Ssssssshhhiiiiitttt.” And then, without a glimmer of regret, you proceed to try and lift Brentford out of Division Three, for the next three hours.
Indeed, when you are immersed in the finest football management games, you don’t just feel aggrieved when your favourite striker – the one you’ve been nurturing since his teens – asks for a transfer. You feel like your long-term girlfriend has unceremoniously dumped you and run off with your best mate.
And it is for precisely the opposite reason that FWM2000 utterly fails. I never once felt part of it.
The updates sound impressive – there are now 30,000 players, over 1400 clubs, and 70 countries to get your head around; the transfer system has been refined; a wonderfully crass tabloid informs you of the latest transfer developments and all the players and staff give regular feedback.
Moreover, the new compact game engine is probably FMW2000’s best feature: after worming your way through the myriad of option on the top bar, you can find most screens within two clicks. But CM3 devotees can still smile smugly. Why?
Because, irritatingly, you have to use a scout to ascertain any player info. This is fine if you’re Man Utd and stars are crawling towards you…but Grimsby Town are in for problems. The supposed player interactivity consists of a few tedious, repeated line. Most problematically, the hours put into including Every! Team! Ever! have left your players sadly underdeveloped.
However, when you start to actually play matches, the trouble really begins. Other than the obvious graphical revisions, it’s essentially little better than the version I played on my ST over a decade ago. The limited scope of the players’ stunted, scripted movements on the TV screen hits home after about – ooooh – half an hour into the second match. So, while for the first three indentikit instances your striker failing an overhead-kick might make you curse, every subsequent occurrence makes you scream.
Missing CM3’s clarity, depth and heavyweight gloss, FMW2000 is not bad, but its lack of variety won’t make up for any sleepness nights.
Transcribed for nostalgia's sake: my first ever piece of paid journalism, written aged 18. Published in PC Gamer, issue dated February 2000. |
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| The Drugs Do Work |
[Mar. 23rd, 2005|12:06 am] |
Festival Internacional de Benicássim, August 2004
DAY 1
FIB doesn’t kick off til midnight. Suits me. Earlier, SNOW PATROL’s jangly subpop is so inhumanely pointless that instead of dwelling on different forms of suicide, I propose heading for the litre glasses of beer. And try and find that secret swimming pool. Before I do, Neil Tennant emerges on the main stage with the first of his impressive array of cloaks. PET SHOP BOYS understand that headlining slots aren’t for difficult new material: they are for Big Pop Anthems, light shows that have UFO watchers across mainland Europe scrabbling for their digicams. They put a big gay smile on my face. They are a national treasure.
Smiles and treasure are not for KRAFTWERK, whose performance is like finding your uncles doing Frankenstein tricks in the shed and it being relayed on late night Channel 4 as performance art. The soundtrack is Very Important Classic Electro that sounds awesome for about half an hour - before you realise these noises have mutated so immensely in the past three decades that the originators look like they’re performing funeral rites. BPITCH CONTROL are plugged into that canon but the power is still surging. The Berlin techno animals are led by ELLEN ALLIEN and ply impossibly cute futurepop that ranges from hammers on your skull to soft fluffy clouds of ambient loveliness that still purr as you puke yourself gently to sleep.
DAY 2
Ew! Morning! Three hours later and congealed suntan lotion coalesces with sweat and becomes your lifeblood. It’s so hot that skin must be peeled from the side of the tent before you can exit. B-but! Next to the rows of mixed communal showers there is a stall handing out free bananas. And it’s not a mirage. Ace. Today is marked by a huge skipping rope line of MORRISSEY fans waiting expectantly for Their Hero to come save them, and him getting in a tangle with his private jet and buggering off home. Bless. LOU REED headlines and is just as rubbish as all the horrid leather-jacketed London numbskulls that have taken the worst aspects of his oeuvre and magnified them a million times until they raze the ground to dust.
For all the small talk of KOMPAKT’s sophistication (which is as much to do with the imagery and artwork as their trademark shuffling, gorgeous microhouse), what emerges is far more engaging, even if in the circumstances I can’t make out SUPERPITCHER from TOBIAS THOMAS from Gordon the Gopher. Crucially for tonight, that sophistication is used to make something so fast, hard, dirty and danceable it’s mindwarping. At 7.30am, after about 15 encores, and plenty of men raising themselves into Jesus shapes onstage, I giddily surrender, and make mental notes to visit Cologne every weekend for the rest of my life. If the pavements aren’t made out of diamonds softly humming post-human body-tech, it’ll be a disappointment.
DAY 3
It appears to be sacrilege round these indecently humid and genuinely heartwarming parts, but BRIAN WILSON is without redemption. He looks like he’s about to splutter a last breath (ready for some cruel soul to loop it and release as a bootleg), he’s out of tune, unable to remember any lyrics without consulting an autocue - and leaves any of the difficult bits to his extensive backing band. It’s too much like extended karaoke to a crowd salivating with nostalgia because some of these songs almost sound like they could have been Pet Sounds outtakes that haunted their lonely teenage nights.
YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH. YEAH! There’s a Spanish kid in his early twenties who appears to have swallowed the entire chemical allowance of his first born’s graduation party in preparation for this. He has a piece of paper in his hand, hastily scribbled with “YEAH!” in blue biro. James Murphy is a fatter Daniel Beddingfield but LCD SOUNDSYSTEM’s ‘Yeah’ is the stupidly triumphant highlight of the festival and by the time it finishes I can’t find my voice or mind anywhere in this sweltering tent. It is the last thing I remember, apart from landing in Coventry 24 hours later than expected. It’s what I want my last ever memory to be. Yeah. |
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| Waste |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|11:55 pm] |
Wasteland – October (Transparent)
Combining the freewheeling genius of London’s premiere soundmurderer and the Germanic precision of New York’s I-Sound, this is an all-encompassing flight of fantasy.
It sounds spacious: like drum ‘n’ bass in rhythmic stasis (the searing ‘Hourglass’); dub terror overloaded with a digital gloss so all the rough textures shine (‘Wintermission’). It sounds dense: like glitch given a thorough reworking so every prickle of fractured sound has a purpose, a presence, portent. ‘Saturation’ teases with dancefloor phase-shifts before freefalling into somnambulist beat poetry. It sounds glacial: ‘Industrial Industry’ shimmers like snowdrops captured in freeze-frame slo-mo, or Neptune collapsing in on itself, depending on which way you’re looking.
And if that makes this sound unengaging or uninviting, don’t let it: April may be the cruellest month, but October sounds wholly heavenly, gorgeously grimy, positively august. Submerge yourself. |
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| Last Exit |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|11:44 pm] |
Curiously alien, gloriously synthetic and quite, quite beautiful Canadian pop-hymns toughened up with urban ruggedness; vocals so lachrymose they literally drip with sadness; there’s a gaping silence BETWEEN the beats that sounds like a black-hole reversing on itself; what Scout Niblett would be doing if she had downed a pill containing the last 20 years of electronic music with a whiskey chaser; the need for speed? Junior Boys play parlour games with tempo: their rhythms sound like they are drifting backwards through snow, slow, slow, slowly.
Junior Boys’ incredible “Birthday/Last Exit EP” (KIN) makes me want dance and prance and scream and shout and scribble and press repeat again and again. Why? Because they (Jeremy Greenspan and a rotating cast of collaborators: local friends Johnny Dark and Matt Didemus feature on the debut EP, as does a Fennesz remix that renders “Last Exit” into a soothing scree) conjoin the dangling nerve-endings of 80s synthpop and what the Force-Inc and Kompakt labels have been doing in the past three years – then untangle them via the stuttering swing of Timbaland, Zed Bias and Horsepower Productions. Greenspan answers questions via email with the desired combination of insight and glibness.
What is pop music and why do or don't you make it?
”My friend Steve says that I make ‘earworms’. All good pop music is made up of them. Sometimes you don't want them there, most of the time you don't want them there - but you can't get them out. Todd Edwards and Dem 2 are the kings of the earworm. Have you ever been listening to one of their tracks and find yourself singing along to some completely incoherent string of microsamples? Anyone who can get you singing gibberish knows what they’re doing.”
Especially during the last two years, the music that’s interested me is that which has made me think harder, smarter, faster. Music that’s about difference: culture-clash elements, brutal ambiguity, music that compels you to impose on it your own daydreams of worlds at war. It’s the city where these elements take shape.
How important is the idea of the city to you? I mean, as something pulsing, electric, metallic, artificial, traditional, modern, futuristic and contradictory. It’s always inspired me: there’s nothing more beautiful than a photograph of London after midnight. Your music seems to have either a yearning for or idealisation of the sound of the city, or the comedown from the city. Am I constructing an elaborate fiction from something that is actually quite simple?
”Hamilton is the ultimate city. It’s a second-tier city of the highest order. It’s the embodiment of all of those world cities that are overlooked, ignored and marginalized. For the British readers, imagine Coventry, now imagine it in Canada. I dedicate all of my music to Hamilton.”
Are you in Hamilton now? When I sent your original answers to our designer, he wrote: "the Coventry in Canada thing kinda has me hooked, that's like the most boring city in England plonked in the middle of the most boring country on the planet. That I gotta see!" Does that tally with your own perception?
”I’ve recently moved to Toronto. Toronto is Canada’s largest city, and has the feel of a major metropolitan centre, although it retains some degree of Canadian humdruminess. Hamilton, however, is quite a funny little city. It’s totally forgotten by the rest of the country, very run-down except that it has Canada’s largest industrialized complex. But it’s also filled with local charm and a huge amount of talented musicians. People who are even doing well in Europe like Manitoba, Koushik, Huren and Orphx. They’re all from the Hammer.”
What is there too much of in music at the moment? And what is there not enough of?
“I think that pop music isn't abstract enough and abstract music isn't pop enough.”
What strikes the right balance?
”Christian Fennesz is doing a terrific job. I mean, on the one hand the music is really ‘challenging’, ‘abstract’, or whatever you want to call it – but it’s also totally listenable. He’s amazing. Pop music on the other hand is far less experimental then it was five years ago, but I’m always optimistic about these things.”
What producers inspire you to do better, and which make you feel mortal? Dan Snaith of Manitoba reckoned it would take him ten years locked up in his bedroom to recreate a Timba/Neptunes style hot beat.
“I’m sure that’s not true. I love Timbaland and would probably consider him as one of my five biggest influences, but part of his appeal is the combination of really clever yet strangely half-assed production techniques. I remember those Godzilla noises on [Ginuwine’s] “What’s So Different”. The list of producers who inspire me is too huge to even consider writing, but I’m largely influenced by people I know. I recently did a track with Kode 9 [of the ever-impressive www.hyperdub.com audio-virus] and I learnt a few things by watching how he works and trying to incorporate that.”
Finally, perhaps this question says more about me than you, but do you think a quasi-paedophilic band name helps or hinders you?
“Perhaps indeed. Needless to say appealing to a child-molesting demographic was not closely considered.”
Dedicated to Nick Kilroy. RIP. |
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| A-har |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|11:29 pm] |
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More on pirate radio here: my summer 2003 Sussex dissertation, and I believe the first academic reference Dizzee Rascal ever received. |
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| Pirate Radio |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|11:26 pm] |
“I don’t give head but / I give headbutts / Punch in the guts for calling me a slut” – Lady Fury
When then Postmaster General Tony Benn said “the future will not exist for them” of the offshore pirates in 1965, I don’t think he’d believe that nearly forty years later in London their modern counterparts would often outnumber their legitimate counterparts. Or give such opportunities for teenage girls to speak their minds about sexual issues. Although in a sense he was correct: new legal powers and the emergence of Radio 1 soon brought on a hasty shutdown of first post-war radio stations to represent youth culture. [Insert favoured drunken cultural studies rant about the assimilation of invention by the mainstream: here. No, not the one about the Sex Pistols.] But all that caused was the eventual burgeoning of inner city stations from the 80s, defined increasingly by the reduced locus of low-powered FM signals.
And now, localisation is more prevalent that ever, especially in the semantic minefield of the London pirate scene. Although to the uninitiated, they sound broadly similar, West London’s Jon E Cash calls his music “sublow”, East London’s Wiley “eskibeat”: it’s an attempt to secure your destiny in a scene defined by its exclusivity and newness. The fewer copies of a hot new track, the better. If a record played on the London pirates ever gets a commercial release, it’s inevitably at least 18 months after it was first played out on dubplate, by which time everyone’s forgotten it existed in the first place. No matter: it just means you have to move quicker.
Led by Maxwell D, formerly of Wiley’s legendary Pay As You Go Cartel, South London’s Musketeers ply the “muskesound”, a frantic fusion of bashment, grimy beats, and a host of witty, quickfire, often ridiculously young, MCs. Their lyrics range from cartoon violence and genius teen-girl backchat (choice lyric from Lady Fury about tough boys who come up short: “Your tool’s so small / How the fuck can you penetrate pum-pum at all?”) to explanations to why Maxwell sold his story of having blazing sex with Jamelia in the back of his Merc. In a car park. And then watched Gladiator on the newly installed DVD player. Meanwhile, thirteen-year-old Ashman, whose name is covered all over my local bus stop in black felt tip pen, sighs: “Remember when I first stepped in the scene / I was only six and was still very keen”. It works because of their desire, the repartee with their listeners and each other, because of the music – but also because it’s pop as schoolyard soap opera, with more hilariously brutal honesty then you’ll get on The O.C. and 80 Raves In 80 Days combined. And who doesn’t want to be party to that?
Musketeers, 9nine3fm / 9nine3.com, Tuesdays 10pm-12am
FURTHER LISTENING
Slimzee – Rinse 100.3fm / Rinsefm.com. Sundays 3-5pm. The most important pirate DJ of the past decade now plays exclusive breakbeats, grime and FWD>> dubplates. Check in for occasional super-special guest MCs.
N.A.S.T.Y – Déjà Vu 92.3fm Mondays 6-8pm. Not as hard as they’d like to think (it stands for Natural Artistic Sounds Touching You), N.A.S.T.Y still feature the cream of the current MC crop, including future-stars Kano and Sharky Major.
Plasticman – Rinse 100.3fm Rinsefm.com. Fridays 7-9pm.
Croydon’s finest, pushing the now Rephlex-affiliated FWD>> breakbeat sound |
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| Nineteen |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|11:16 pm] |
Author's note: written September 2000 with Comrade Brem X Jones (words in itals), attemping the fine manouevre of replicating the mood of the event by downing as much red wine after midnight as humanly possible.
Reading Festival - Sunday</b>
“We’re called Daphne & Celeste.”
And we’re called Chris Houghton and Bremstrahlung X Jones. But before we talk about The Event, there’s the boring review-type-stuff to do. Excuse us. Chris?
Morning, Comrades. It's a fine start: as yet, there has been no use of toilets as dominos, vodka bottles and spears as part of a horrific anti-pop arsenal, or small trees being subtly transmogrified into celestial beings.
And Pre-midday Sunday Reading Rock Armageddon never sounded so good. As Seth Taylor’s first febrile scree courses through the scowling intro to “Always: Your Way”, My Vitriol (who, don’t forget, didn’t even exist outside Som Wijay-Wardner’s warped cerebellum this time last year) stamp ice hexes on your insides, whilst still having the temerity to gouge and grind the mind.
Pertinently, they’ve now got the confidence to dictate the dance rather than let it take its natural drift; bassist Carolyn Bannister plays exquisitely and looks ready to step into the shoes of true girl rock magnet; “Losing Touch” is still deliciously unhinged, more rabid than anything the Foo Fighters have ever done, but with the same candy-sweet redemptive flavour. And Wijay-Wardner manages to fit in a funny Eminem tribute with a plastic-Elvis-singing fish. Triumphant.
He’s right too. Two years ago I wrote a review sneering at the stadia-designs inherent in every guitar-sweep of da Vitriol. Part of me stands by every word. Part of me. The bad part. The section of my spirit that I have any pride in elates as the feedback slices through the outer layers of the cerebellum, laying open the pleasure centres, licking the endorphins off the rain-drops. Heavenly.
Sell your soul to them now. Avoid the rush.
I never thought a Cay gig could be anything less than an adrenaline-shot to the brain. Never has been before. But now, devoid of their rawkus rhythm section in favour of a Bad Goth and a session drummer, it all seems so wrong. The early pipebombs, “Better Than Myself”, “Reasonable Ease” and “Nature Creates Freaks”, particularly, are still ill, but then they drift into a bunch of new songs, the pretty Pavementesque “Ressurexit” apart, which aim at the utter thoughtlessness of Feeder and manage to miss the target.
Me. I yawned so wide my neck almost snapped. I love Cay. If they don’t wish that to become “I loved Cay”, they need to realise their own potency and step out from their shield of mere good-natured Indie. The post-star-plasma-rush inherent in their most blissful moments hints that they have the potential to rearrange global tectonic plates. If they don’t try harder, I’m leaving in the morning.
You think I’m scared of girls? Well maybe. But I’m not afraid of them.
“I’m here to introduce the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world,” announces the supremely-sideburned Eddie Spaghetti before launching into the dirtiest, most wicked and wild set the main stage is party to all weekend. It’s an air-raid on guitar music with song titles like “She’s My Bitch” and “I Want The Drugs”. But funny.
My Dog’s got no nose? Doctor Who. Awoooooooo. I am Spartacus. Sorry. You were saying?
“They’re called the Supersuckers. And we’re hear to teach you the evil powers of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Born to be written in neon-lights; for half-an-hour, they’re the best band of the weekend by a stratosphere.
But only a stratosphere on Mars, which as our extraterrestrial atmospheric technicians will realise, is considerably thinner than our earthling air-stuff. As much as the Supersuckers proved a meta- amphetamine injection into the carotid artery for all present, there remains a nagging sense that appreciating the Supersuckers is the musical equivalent of appreciating the Top Shop ironic heavy-metal chic adverts.
Blink 182.
DIEYOUFUCKERSDIEDIEDIEDIE
They’ve got dicks for brains, and their dicks have sold their asses to you. And the chumps are loving every second. It hits instantly that The Supersuckers do the dumb-rawk-schtick with so much more intelligence, so much more liberated joie de vivre than this cesspool. Whereas Supersuckers thrive on outright glint-in-the-eye misanthropy/nihilism, Blink 182 run amok with down-the-line fratboy misogyny; their shrivelled dicks and brains can’t contain their gigantic egos so it’s reduced to a priapic problem and then a thrust at passing objects. Cos it’s, like, fuhhnneee, yeah? No.
It’s punk rock reduced to a comical in-joke with no thought or passion, just the chink and clink of the cash register.
And every single one of the tunes is shit.
Special mention must be made of Bowling For Soup, who prove that what was previously considered a scientific impossibility in fact lies within the possibilities within our realm of sensory experience. It is possible to be a worse Blink 182.
And, at last, Daphne & Celeste. Even The Pop Is Love alumni in our midst didn’t really think it could work as well as it did. But it did. It was beautiful.
In a very real way, we won.
You see, there was always a multitude of reasons for why we fought so hard for our favourite sneer-pop combo to appear at Reading. First was because we love Daphne & Celeste. The idea of cavorting in the Indian-Summer sun to genuine pop music tore hunks of tasty flesh from our limbs. We wanted it for the sheer joy.
We knew it would never, ever happen. Because there’s always going to be enough in-breds to stop any encroachment of levity into the lager-drowned arena of Reading.
So we wanted it for the next best reason. We wanted it as a symbol.
And it worked.
By the simple act of putting a delightfully ephemeral pop band on stage for fifteen minutes, playing two of the most intravenously thrilling pop singles of the year, we managed to create the End Of The World. We managed to turn an audience of the We-just-wanna-be-individual in-breds into an Orwellian three-minute-hate. We transmuted Fool’s gold into lead. We turned people into what they hated most. Notably, the crowd was considerably bigger than Pulp headlining the previous night. I always wanted to know what Nuremberg was like. Now I know.
We offered the Indie-nation and rock-zombies a noose. They stuck their heads in it. When they’re strangled to death, feet kicking desperately in the air, it’s entirely their own fault.
You screamed at Daphne & Celeste, and you’re the enemy. I hate you and hope you choke on your own vomit.
I personally arranged the Daphne & Celeste For Reading petition. I am Spartacus.
No! I am Spartacus.
Slipknot are Slipknot are Slipknot are crass rock played by a bunch of 42-year-old record company executives who wanted to see if their post-pub plan for a surreal bastardisation of a genre would be able to sliver its way into the public consciousness. They called it nu-metal. It was dreadful. Then they got up from behind their desks and hid behind their masks for an hour. They made us laugh. They won.
It must be stressed that they do not sound like Kenickie.
And by the same token, neither do Angelica. They're entirely rooted into the Indie-rock ethos which the Sunderland Ronettes so deliberately kicked against. No bad thing. Angelica today are bright enough to slice holes through the smog of critical comment. Yes, Angelica occasionally stray towards feminity as intrinsic martyrdom rather than emancipation – a theme picked up on the new delectable songs unleashed today – but they still inject acetylecholine into the nerve endings, making pulses kick at their presence. For the quieter of heart, gig of the day.
And talking about people who don’t sound like Kenickie, here’s Lauren Laverne. And, annoyingly, she’s brilliant. I wanted to write something reiterating my opinion of her EP (short note edition: It’s shit), perhaps describing there’s no "How I Was Made", No "Weeknights" and no "That’s Why".
I can’t.
Lauren, stripped of the emasculating production of Pete Gofton (ne Johnny X) – dive into the dark heart of the soul. While eventually the lyrical bent may provoke projectile “commenting”, at the moment the sun-rapt optimism can’t help but seduce; while "Get In" was basically “I met a bloke... a now I’m shit”, Lauren’s solo material states “I was shit... and now I’ve met a bloke."
Eventually, this is sure to tire. But for now, a triumph.
Some people think Elliott Smith is a genius. But I don’t see it. Yeah, the songs are tight and tender/tough in all the right places, but it’s infinitely more reverent towards the Beatles than Oasis ever were. And in doing so, Smith does nothing but expose Guided By Voices as the shining stars they undoubtedly are.
I forgot I saw Elliot Smith.
Meanwhile on the main stage, Brian Molko is going increasingly bald.
Reviewing the Stereophonics would be like discussing the relative merits of potatoes. I think we could use our time more productively.
Night everyone. There's nothing more to see here. See you next year.
TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE
No!! I am Spartacus.
I AM SPARTACUS.
No. The TREE! is Spartacus.
TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE! TREE (Snip – Ed). |
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| Grime Time |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|11:14 pm] |
Reacting to the cocaine and champagne comedown that occurred as UK Garage lost its chart focus in late 2001, early grime productions were brutally primitive. Musical Mob’s ‘Pulse X’, was otherworldly music that sounded alien in isolation, but acquired a mutant ferocity when combined with ultra-aggi MCs fighting for the mic. No melody, little narrative, the minimalism acting as maximiser for passion boiling over to the point that it becomes sheer burning hatred, increasingly vicious, horrible lyrics bending back on themselves until they become comical. It’s pop music as urban graffiti: annoyance to everyone but the admiring observers and those in the know. From then until now, the scene’s seemingly grown exponentially, new producers, MCs and crews (sometimes literally) fighting for attention, Dizzee’s Mercury triumph signifying interest beyond the reach of radio.
Although seemingly always in a state of flux, currently grime’s more disordered than ever. Pirates have been hit hard by another DTI clampdown; violence has scared off venues and promoters so rave bookings are down; some of the creative talent has moved on to more moneyed-up pastures, awaiting the music industry to unleash its marketing muscle on their subcultural capital. But there’s still astonishing music coming out from the underground. Scratch the surface and find Ruff Squad’s ‘Bring It Down’, forlorn synth sweeps and voices used as chainsaw riffs. Check Terror Danjah transforming urban pop into delicate waves of destruction. Feel Lethal B’s ‘Forward Riddim’, set to be the biggest crossover smash since ‘I Luv U’ (albeit with a chorus of “I’llllllll crack your skull”). Hear Essentials’ ‘Jenny’, a tale of a crew who realise they all know Jenny to the sound of a kaleidoscope imploding. It’s just that with Dizzee traversing the globe and burning brighter with every touchdown, Kano about to go ballistic with his princely pervo-pop, you can sense history repeating: as the majors sniff out new territory, the soul is being sucked out, another case of underground resistance conquered by overground assimilation. Don’t let it happen. Immerse yourself in this senseless dystopian daydream. |
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| Summer Sun Grime Fun |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|11:07 pm] |
‘What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.’ - Gilles Deleuze
Monstrous immaculate conceptions. That’s what you need this summer. Synths like heatseeker missles, or sweet soul loops, or dirty noise that is just as likely to be about dirty fucking as about embracing the death-march of modern disinterest and disinterring it completely. Pop that tastes of fizzy pop and glory and is neon. Pop that carries you on its shoulders through the crowds triumphant.
Pop that unearths where rhizomes are spreading out. Since the inception of Raw Blaze FM, you can now hear grime pretty much on-demand in London: if you want some mad bad noise, it’s the crucial place to bend your ears. Terror Danjah ’s mindbendingly lush (imagine Tristan Tzara sprawling alogical inspiration all over the Norfolk countryside with pink paint) work on Shystie’s ‘One Wish’ (Network) remix and Bruza’s ‘Bruzin’’ (Aftershock) teases and pleases in equal measure. Meanwhile, three twelves from Kano, N.A.S.T.Y Crew’s hot cat on the tower block roof make me want to do illegal acts in public. ‘Gangsta Toyz’ (Fl) is the angriest three minutes ever committed to plastic, tag-team threats with East Connection’s Demon that act as adrenaline and gun shot, the sheer textual pile-up ceaselessly engaging, the production so bouncily joyful it’s crippling. ‘Leave Me Alone’ (Paperchase) is jagged edges of psychedelic pop genius courtesy of Davinche that show grime can scrub up neatly to impress your mum. On ‘What Have You Done?’, Kano is trying to steal your girlfriend (and probably will), while Wonder outfreaks the ‘Get Low’ beat. It’s a record to turn dancefloors into violent messy spasms.
The same goes for Diplo’s ‘Diplo Rhythm’ from the slamming *Florida* (both Big Dada), a dancehall/hiphop banger with *Night Rider* synths used *properly* (ie with no truck for anything bar carnage), while Vybz Cartel and Sandra Melody provide infectious silliness that makes me grin like an alcoholic. Kid 606’s *Who Still Kill Sound* (Very Friendly) is mentalist breakbeat hardcore that recalls both of acid techno squat parties and South London youth clubs in 1994 playing ragga jungle as sherbet-sated prepubescents threw bad shapes. Recommended indeed. Planet Mu’s *Amµnition* cheapo sampler piles thirty-four tracks of wide-eyed avant-action from the likes of Venetian Snares, Shitmat and Remarc into an eighty-minute mix that splays your ears into indecently odd angles. Shitmat’s ‘Dis Dancehall Ting Is Better Than That TV Ting Tony’ is just as utterly spastic as it sounds, ‘Walking In The Air’ samples and rave depth charges fighting for attention with fabulously *fluid* insano-beats. Keep these guys off the Venlafaxine forever. Estelle’s ‘1980’ (V2) also makes me happy because it shows us losers born in the year of the monkey aren’t ALL hopeless fucktards, a record to savour because of its optimism and perspicuity as much as its bounding, beautiful strings. On a similar tip, Shystie’s *Diamond In The Dirt* (Polydor) fuses bad-gal slanguage with wonderfully chaotic, shiny post two-step beats. We are in a golden age for young British black pop and if you’re not tuning in you’re a fucking fool.
Pure electro prettiness can be just as joyful, though. Julian Fane’s *Special Forces* (Planet Mu) is what goes through the mind of a 21 year old Canadian NASDAQ trader when he’s not having his soul sucked out. And in this case, it’s impossibly cute MBV dreampop with the just *so* exactness of a Dre beat, and the sighing cadences of Four Tet at his most rough and rich. Munk’s *Aperitivo* (Gomma) is disordered punk-funk with a slick disco gloss that will get you shouting very, very stupid things in public. Dykehouse’s *Midrange* (Ghostly International) is sophis Pet Shop Boys/New Order electro-pop that throws warped Disco Inferno curveballs that will knock you over with how huge they sound. I’m thinking mixing desks the size of manatees. It was all done in his bedroom. A doffed cap, Sir.
And it’s been a long time coming – prison sentences and labels imploding mean *Council Estate Of Mind* (Lowlife) is two years overdue, but let Skinnyman’s debut finger you in all the wrong places, now. Older and more self-aware than many of his peers, it’s a hip-hop record that works as love-letter to his Finsbury Park brethren and exploration of the existential crises caused by bad comprehensives, police harassment and wasted opportunities that never wavers in its sniper precision. It’s a record about failure and success, about turning the daily grind of broke London life into an epiphany that makes me despair for my hometown and make me want to give it a heartfelt hug. The beats are as Kanye-cute as anything this year, UK hip-hop infused with a confidence that’s never anything less than inspirational. Skinny’s flow flips from reflective (‘Love’s Gone From The Streets’) to cocksure and brazen (‘Fuck The Hook’) and what emerges is that he’s smarter than you, a quicker thinker with a neater turn of phrase and more interesting to be around. The bastard. Choruses swell and rise like prime Dexys. ‘I’ll Be Surprised’ is like *Blur*-era Blur and *still* manages to sound glorious. But what drives *Council…* to my Discman beyond anything else right now is the way its anger convinces so wholly, its empathy, tunnel vision and love so attuned to the way hatred overreaches it’s utterly beyond reproach. It’s a fun record that you can play all day without getting bored. It’s also a monstrous, immaculate conception that deserves to destroy your summer.
‘I am against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor against and I don’t explain because I hate common sense.’ – Tristan Tzara |
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| Paranoid Perspectives |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|11:06 pm] |
If 2004 has been about anything it’s about drawing a line between those who make you fear the future and those who embrace it. Between the terrifying retro-rock rumble so easily embraced by the students you avoided at uni, and those idiosyncratic geniuses that realise that pop’s still a game to be played.
So grab Milanese’s delirious *1 Up* (Warp), a slinky dubstep six-tracker that starts from the premise that pop should distort your peripheral vision, and then turns its focus on the rest of your body. Melt with *Kompakt 100* (Kompakt), the sound of a hyper-prolific label so confident in celebrating its centenary of releases that they remix their back-catalogue to buggery and still emerge triumphant: from ambient euphoria to jagged, lush rave anthems, it’s all dancefloor mayhem that will make you swoon and shake. Feel Skinnyman’s super-skill *Council Estate Of Mind* (Lowlife) for peach-sweet beats and militant broadsides, for the way hopelessness is suffused with hopefulness, and for the moment of realisation that you can be a genuinely awful human being acting as a catalyst for ultimate redemption. Maybe. One day. Take on *Life’s A Dice Game* (Dice Recordings) comp as it sniggers and thrashes through sixteen tracks of the sublime and ridiculous, ugly and unpredictable (‘Armhouse’ surreally welds a harsh East London pop aesthetic onto Madness’s ‘Our House’): best is Skepta’s mighty ‘Serious Thugs’, Bone Thugs’ ‘Thuggish Ruggish Bone’ cut and slashed into a piercing siren straight out of the ‘Rebel Without A Pause’ school of noise abuse. Dig deep into *Dread Meets B-Boys Downtown* (Heavenly), Don Letts’ ace rendering of early 80s NYC hip-hop, for a time when possibilities seemed so much more endless, when eclecticism meant more than setting iTunes on party shuffle and hoping for the best.
But mostly, embrace Dizzee Rascal’s *Showtime* (XL/Dirty Stank). Back barely a year after Boy In Da Corner shot a warning across the entire pop landscape, it’s a record that makes demands of you, and so demands your attention. It typifies the second-album syndrome in that it’s about a kid lost and scared, trying to negotiate his lack of centre with a terrifying level of tunnel vision.
It’s a perspectival trick. Propelled from the streets that made him into relative fame, Dizzee still clings to paranoid ideation like it’s a second skin. The tropes are familiar from Boy In Da Corner, except Dizzee’s now got the problem of achieving his dreams to contend with. Everyone is a target. Everyone’s out to steal something, be it money, fame, or a piece of your soul. Everything’s for sale. Everything’s going to hell, and getting out quick is the only option. Legitimacy is something that happens to other people.
So just what is it that makes Dizzee the most irrepressible character in pop right now? The trick’s in his cadence, the manner in which he bends phrases into spaces that shouldn’t fit, accelerates into a tongue-tying pace in the middle of a bar and then spits out the money shot. Name me a noise more enjoyable, and I’ll prove you a liar.
That *Showtime* never deviates from ME-ME-ME enough to form a coherent narrative isn’t a problem; indeed, one of Dizzee’s many gifts is his almost painful self-awareness and inability to stand still: his defensiveness is an enamel shell that sometimes he hides in but usually just windmill-punches his way through. He’s still a teenager, what do you expect? You don’t expect a bizarro remake of Captain Sensible’s ‘Happy Talk’, complete with Dizzee’s hilariously off-key singing, which he’s pitching as his ‘Hard Knock Life’, but is more the sound of someone grinding near-genius from the depths of insanity.
The *sound* is no longer so shocking (and with Wiley, Shystie, Doogz and Kano all signed, it’ll continue to be less so), but this isn’t Dizzee’s pop album. Sure, ‘Stand Up Tall’ wheelspins on Youngstar’s atom-splittingly energetic Super NES noise, ‘Girls’ is a pure club banger, and ‘Fickle’ is a pretty and intricate with a gorgeous helium-pitched diva sample – but mostly the pace is slack, the tone sombre, the atmosphere bleak. Wormholes of technoid-bass envelop these songs. ‘Everywhere’ features a beat of desi-minimalism that’s practically hippies banging bongos. ‘Graftin’’ is crafted from the same sublow bass-biznizz as Dead Prez’s ‘Hip Hop’. You’re never more than ten seconds away from a threat of aggression (*“I’m not mad / I’m a lovely lad / I’ll give you the loveliest beating that you’ve ever had”*) or delicious wordplay that will make you giggle.
‘Respect Me’ features the most impressive vocal performance I’ve heard all year, Dizzee wrestling with the tidal wave surge of the beat and his conscience. *“You people are going to respect me if it kills you.”* Jesus. It’s thee suicide-pact singalong of the year and it’s certainly protesting-too-much. From Tim Westwood to the photo-pullouts in *Sneak*, some jealous UK hip-hop types apart, who *doesn’t* respect Dizzee? But you get the impression that if he cheered up for just a minute, or even just accepted a hug, he’d lose the perspective that’s fashioned the two most consistently stunning, boldly brilliant albums of the past two years. So, Dizz: feed that paranoia, suckle down on it with earnest, and same time next year, eh? |
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| Mr Robinson |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|11:04 pm] |
‘It’s new approach to raves and people are still coming to terms with it. Grime’s about the MC, not the DJ. About lyrics. When we go to raves, and someone’s playing a bashment tune, everyone’s dancing. When we come on for a grime set, everyone’s watching. It’s just a different way of taking it in. When people hear a bar they like, they go insane. It’s more like a rock show. It can get messy.’
Grime seems lyrically limited. In a sense, it’s thrilling, honing down aggressive lyrics to an essence in the same way as the Neptunes did to production, but sometimes you just want to hear something different, something vulnerable.
‘It’s not just an MCing thing, it’s a way of life. But when people hear aggressive lyrics on the radio they shouldn’t start doing aggressive lyrics, it should just inspire people to write. But saying that, it just doesn’t work as well on radio: on pirate radio you’re not going to hear people playing Dizzee Rascal’s most conscious song,’ he says. ‘It’s about what’s catchy, what beat’s grimey or what’s new and gonna create hype. I think when Lethal B, Demon, whoever, get a chance to do their solo albums, the subject matter can’t be the same for fifteen tracks – you’ll see their depth as well.’
A softly spoken, gently mannered teenager from East London’s N.A.S.T.Y Crew, Kane Robinson doesn’t fit in with the grime stereotype of the angry, gun loving hood-rat. His records don’t fit with this, either. Search out the limited edition ‘What Have You Done’ (New Era) – a quivering female voice on the brink of bursting point glides in and out of earshot, juddering bass gouges your stomach, a synth riff like a heatseeker missile aims for your head, and Kano admits that yeah it’s over, I can’t help it but it’s become a trap, with disarming honesty and bubbly sweetboy charm. It’s one of a number of twelves that’s made Kano the hottest new MC to come from the grime underground: starting with ‘Boys Luv Girls’, written and produced in his bedroom aged fifteen, it’s just one of a legion of super-pop anthems to emerge from the scene that’s criminally ended up only pressed up on 500 white labels. Not for much longer: with the release of Run The Road (679), the first widely distributed vocal grime compilation, it’s easy to see that it’s coming to fruition as something that depicts a diverse, hungry, urban underclass in all its messy glory. It’s not just Dizzee and Wiley anymore: with a first major-backed single (the glorious Davinche-produced stutter-pop anthem ‘Ps and Qs’) and a debut album hurtling towards completion, Kano’s on the frontline, pushing things forwards.
‘I saw something on Jay-Z, and he couldn’t even get a deal, so they did it themselves,’ he says. ‘They shot their own videos, sold their own records, and that’s the way I see people making their mark. Like [Lethal B’s] “Forward Riddim” – they just did it themselves, and now they’re getting the attention they deserve, and now it’s been signed. You can do it yourself. Starting up independent labels – I think that’s the way Wiley’s looking to go. Not everyone has to be a superstar, not everyone is going to be a superstar, and you don’t have to be. Not everyone is a Robbie Williams, not everyone’s a Madonna, not everyone’s an Eminem, so you can do it yourself and sell ten thousand records, then why not do it yourself? Obviously, me getting signed will help the scene. Me doing my thing will probably inspire another person to be an MC, or inspire an MC to write songs knowing that they can get somewhere. At shows, I bring in my people. Everything I do is me and my people.’ |
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| Anniemal |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|10:59 pm] |
Norwegian pop princess Annie Strand is hip enough to namecheck disco legend Larry Levan, breathlessly enthusiastic and knowledgeable enough to play MC5 and Britney Spears in DJ sets without even a wink of irony, and bold and beautiful enough to moisten the most hardened cynic. Her album, Anniemal, released by the same label as The Streets and The Futureheads, has the craft of Pet Shop Boys, the meta-awareness and sophistication of Saint Etienne at their most glorious, and the pristine, perfect production of modern dance-pop. It’s as disposable and durable as chewing gum, and as ephemeral and timeless as her cheeky, sassy single ‘Chewing Gum’. That, produced by troublemaking chart-topper Richard X – of Sugababes, Liberty X and ‘Some Girls’ infamy – had Annie cooing: “I bet you think you’re chocolate but you’re chewing gum”¸ and compared boys to sweets, while thinking of sex.
What was the idea behind Anniemal? “The whole thing was never really planned,” she says with a kittenish giggle. “OK, I knew we were going to do an album, and it was going to be a pop album, or an underground album or whatever. The whole thing started four or five years ago – I was working on my own music, and my boyfriend Tore was working on a track. I suddenly had an idea for the melody for ‘The Greatest Hit’, and we started working together, and it ended up being quite good. We put it out on a tiny label. The reaction was strange. We just did it for fun, and then suddenly a lot of labels were interested, so we decided to do an album.”
While Anniemal sounds too good to be true, it almost didn’t happen. After wowing clubs worldwide with underground smash ‘The Greatest Hit’, Tore suddenly, tragically died of a heart complaint in 2001. “After that, I became withdrawn; I didn’t really see the point,” she says. “It stopped me wanting to work in music, but I knew he’d hate that so about half a year later I started on my own.”
How was that for you? “It was tough,” she says. “When I started again, I didn’t have my own studio, I was quite broke, had jobs in clothes shops… Then I was talking a lot with Royksopp, they wanted to work with me on their album, and was also working with Timo, which meant travelling a lot to Finland where he was working. And then I met Richard X when I was in London – I come here quite a lot.”
Those three producers make up a loveable triangle of the paradox of modern pop music: chart-friendly and melodic, but oddly experimental at the same time. “I’m really into pop music,” she says. “I really like melodic music. To me the melody is incredibly important, but at the same time after being with Tore, I was focused on having really good production, a strong sound. What I do is definitely pop, with an emphasis on being strange at the same time. I wanted to make an album that you can dance to, but also listen to it on your own.
“I think pop used to be not such a dangerous word. I think it’s the same as in England as in Norway, that it wasn’t very accepted as being credible, but then you saw many more interesting producers, for example Richard X, starting to do bootlegs, and went from that to working with very commercial singers.”
Do you have any skeletons in your pop closet? “My first band was an indie-pop band called Suitcase,” she laughs. “We were named after a Beck song – I was and still am still a massive fan. I was the singer, and one of my girlfriends was playing the synthesiser even though she had never played a synthesizer before. The three guys were playing guitar, bass and drums. And it was a really bad band. We only played one gig ever, it was the first and the last. We sounded a little bit like Elastica, and I really like Elastica, but we weren’t anywhere as good as them. Then the band wanted to make trip-hop, and I was like, ‘No! We’re never going to make trip-hop!’, and we split up.”
She’s come a long way since such auspicious beginnings: today, she’s being followed by a Norwegian film crew, managing to slip them at various points to check out import vinyl. “It’s quite weird being followed round,” she says. “But I can’t complain. In Norway I get approached by such a range of people. Screaming girls who are seven years old, as well as women and men who are in their forties who are just as interested and bought the record.”
‘Heartbeat’ is out now on 679 Recordings. Anniemal follows on March 7. |
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| The Things I'll Do For Money |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|10:56 pm] |
Electric Six are wonderfully ridiculous. After setting charts and irony barometers alight with anthems “Danger! High Voltage!” and “Gay Bar” (the former, featuring fellow Detroit resident Jack White, was only kept off the top of the charts by Girls Aloud’s “Sound of the Underground”), they’ve romped across the globe with disco-pumped rock ‘n’ roll for company. Recent download-only ode to virility “Vibrator” shows they have no signs of slowing down. All madcap synths and overwrought guitar solos, it features the almighty chorus “She don’t need no vibrator / no artifical stimulator / non-organic excavator”. This Christmas sees live favourite version of Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga” finally released. We accosted singer Dick Valentine to talk Bush and bangers, Vikings and virtual volleyball.
Hey Dick, what are you doing?
“You actually caught me in the middle of watching Star Trek.”
William Shatner’s just had a record out. What do you think of it?
“I’ve only heard a couple of tracks, but Shatner is an incredible man. We were interviewed together once on a puppet show. These finger puppets were asking us questions and he’s doesn’t bat an eyelid. He’s just ‘pow-pow-pow’ with the answers and anecdotes. He’s so professional. I was blown away.”
What have you been up to since “Danger! High Voltage!” and “Gay Bar”?
“We’ve been touring mainly. The best thing about this job is that we’ve been to so many countries, South America, Japan, Europe, when before I’d be lucky to get to Chicago.
“We went to Moscow, and we were there for three days, and the Russian language threw us. You know how the Russian alphabet has characters from ours, but then their own ones as well? The hotdogs were spelt dead-dog. I think a couple of the guys tried them out without too much ill effect.”
What did you get up to there?
“It was quite a surreal experience, even though we didn’t actually venture that far. We’d go to Red Square, and then back to the hotel, and then be like ‘What now?’ and someone would go ‘Let’s go to Red Square!’. We must have been there and back about ten times. The thing about being on tour for so long is that you keep bumping into the same people at festivals. Franz Ferdinand had done every one in the galaxy, and we must have done seven with PJ Harvey.”
Did you literally bump into anyone?
“No you have to be careful about that. Bumping can get a little dangerous in the wrong circumstances.”
When I last saw you in the UK, you had a slight Patrick Bateman-esque quality in your performance. Was that intentional?
“Thank you. The main thing in New York that makes you want to chop people up is the restaurants. You can go in and ask for a table for two, and they will just laugh at you. “The best place to eat in New York is this place that does sausages – bangers, as you call them – and just covers them in grease. They’re amazing, and only cost like $8. That’s got to be the highpoint of the New York culinary experience. The rest of it for me is trying to get a table at a good restaurant, and realising quickly that I’m not of a high enough status to carry it off.”
How’s the new album coming along?
“We’ve written tonnes of songs, maybe 200. This record is a little darker. It’s a bit difficult not to be, living in America in 2004. There are a couple of tracks that you could take to be anti-Bush songs. Hopefully it’ll surprise people: because of ‘Gay Bar’ and ‘Danger! High Voltage!’, people assumed we had been listening to a lot of disco, thought we were into the Bee Gees or whatever, when that was just one aspect of our sound and essentially, we’re a fun rock band. Not so much like the Detroit garage sound of the White Stripes or the Detroit Cobras, but like the Pixies or something.”
Your new single is a cover of Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga”, which your publicist reckons is “set to soundtrack office Christmas parties everywhere”. How does that make you feel.
“It makes me feel like a hundred bucks.”
Is that all?
“What do you mean? That’s like £50 or whatever. Surely you’d like to feel like that. It’s a song that we’ve been wanting to release for ages – it almost came out last Christmas, and it marks the end of the first stage of Electric 6 and the beginning of the next one.
“The first album was joined together by the theme of fire – lots of the tracks had ‘fire’ in the title. And we initially tried to make this record about devils, and thought it would have a devil theme. But the devil must have got to us, because that didn’t work out, and currently it’s called ‘Detroit Stone’.”
People have drawn comparisons to Detroit in the last few years and Seattle in the early 90s. What do you think?
“I mean it’s similar in the sense that there’s one huge international band who have blown up, and lots of smaller, surrounding ones from the same area. But it’s not like if The White Stripes are Nirvana then we’re the Pearl Jam, or I hope not, although we’d love to do as well as them internationally. But I guess it is similar in that it’s quite a tight-knit community, and everyone’s into a lot of the same bands.”
What’s it like being in the US in the run-up to the election?
“You have a Bush channel, and a Kerry channel, and you have lots of other channels dissecting every single word. It’s quite astonishing the amount of analysis you can have over such minute details, but hey – that’s America for you.”
What’s your life like out of the band?
“When I’m not in the band, and not on tour, and not attempting to sneak into New York’s premiere eating establishments, I spend time on the Internet trying to work out who I am as a person. That’s the great thing, it’s got so many options that you can, say, see if the Viking lifestyle is for you. You can go in chatrooms and talk to people that share whichever weird interest you have. I did that, and found out being a Nordic Viking wasn’t for me. So you just move on to the next thing, which in my case was virtual volleyball.”
And how’s that going?
“Not so well. We’re currently 14-6 down to the Puerto Ricans.” |
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| I Have A Lot To Blame On This Piece |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|12:40 am] |
"When I half-close my eyes, ghosts rest on my eyelids and talk to me. And like it. I do. I really do. They show me their tar-black insides scarred by life, their beautifully still, undead hearts and minds. I don't think they share my deep, deep paranoia and dissatisfaction with the world, my sense of being blinded by the primordial fug. They're happy… Death, to me, is the future, deferred. I'm looking forward to it." So wrote Clare Falry in last year's scarily pertinent millencholia tour de force "Paranoia Bites". I've got a feeling Techno Animal would concur.
Don't let the name fool you: Techno Animal, a duo formed as the cracks in the pavement from Godflesh filled with detritus, are undeniably hip-hop; they don't just embrace its tricky, tricksy logic (remember: dullards chasing "real" hip-hop in 2001 are missing the point as much as the rigidly style-less chasing "real" punk: it's an anachronism in the sense that it's an acceptance of an authenticity in a genre which at its apogee is dictated by its rejection of inertia, its Tourette's-like inability to stand still); they use it, abuse it, stick it in a sauté and shit it down your throat. And then throw in a bassline so danceable they expect you throw shapes to it.
Welcome, truly, to the terrordome.
Sonically, "The Brotherhood Of The Bomb", Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick plus a handful of collaborators, is possibly the most paranoid record ever made. Its tense, terse, metallic grooves conflate Coupland-ish end-of-the-world moments into ephemera and into epiphany; and the mood – a sense of impending doom lightened only by the realisation that if only they stopped smoking so much weed, opened the curtains, peered out of the window and saw a rotating billboard or a shiny new car speeding off to nowhere, a symbol of what we've become, everything might be fine; they would, if only for a split-second, be human, deal with it.
But that would no doubt ruin this sometimes startling, often ugly, but always compelling, sprawling mess of a record. Make no mistake: "Brotherhood" is the album "Maxinquaye" would have been had Tricky been holed up in a nuclear bunker for six months with only a collection of war-propaganda films, faked extracts from conspiracy documents, and suicide pills for company. Case in point: opener "Cruise Mode 101" a weft of thudding callisthenics that out-bomb the Bomb Squad. It says nothing I can comprehend but opens up an oblique vision of limitless futurism stiffened and deadened by existential anger. Ditto "Hell", a 20/20 vision of 2020 society going nowhere fast, descending into a squeal of radio static and insistent techno rhythms. Better still is when the dense, often indecipherable raps, from the likes of El-P (ex-Company Flow) and dälek stand up against the squall and confirm what you most feared and desired: that this virus is spreading, beyond Falry's paranoid delusion of bright lights and dead ends into the minds of further acolytes, believers. And because you only get fragments of dialogue, "Brotherhood" forces you to bridge the gaps, create your own narrative based on the macabre sonic shifts and gut-razing mercury rushes and sulphur flashes.
"I'm not scared of the future because I know I'm bound to it. The future's bright. It's spiritual. It's just…empty space. Bright lights. Dead ends. I hope I'm right. The alternative is an existence weighted down with enough ennui to sink an aircraft carrier. Reincarnation would kill me. I want those bright lights and dead ends."
But unlike in "Paranoia Bites", there's no brightness in "Brotherhood", no wry smiles, no end of the tunnel succour or splash of chiming melody for realisation, to let you in on the joke. And it's this difficulty in the TA personal that makes them so intriguing. I've got no yearning to hear explanation for this. It would debase the magic and mystery: to think of its trajectory plotted on a graph, desperately thought/wrought out reduces serendipity to subterfuge. Analysed to decay. Indeed, as the Kraftwerk-inhuman, robotic bottom-end of "Hypertension" stretches out like a silver sunset, you begin to question your own sanity for being suckered in to this pulpit of empty noise; and the ambient mid-section – the album's nadir – the drifting through amniotic fluid "Monoscopic", the slashing, crashing, frenzied emptiness of "Freefall" do nothing to better that. Like watching fly-on-the-wall documentaries detailing the lives of excitable-but-talentless working-class nobodies, when "Brotherhood" slots into second gear, it's not a particularly edifying experience, but it is indecently involving, and what’s weird is for something so superficially anti-pop (anti-glamour, bereft of the - sellsellSELL / corporate tie-in / film soundtrack / MTV advertorial - mechanism that reduces the stun to pulp), is how it fits in with the sonic rubric of contemporary hip-hop / R&B and pushes the ante towards the ceiling. Indeed, it’s this meshing and melding in current pop which makes "Brotherhood" so intriguing: like 2nd Gen’s "Irony Is", for such an ostensibly leftfield album, it doesn’t sound like it wants to be heard in isolation, it sounds like it deserves to push itself from the peripheral to the forefront of your pop-vision; and - think about it - the thought of Ludacris horny-porn nerdboy-with-priapism baby babble over the top of "Cruise Mode 101" on 2002’s MTV awards is nothing less than a salivating prospect.
Because despite often being the sound of the earth imploding as the last blazing white-hot sunset descends wearily over fault-lines blurring into debris, of paranoia, of panic, of desperate, suffocating ennui, "Brotherhood" is the sound of a future. I don't think I want to go there. But don't defer. Look forward. Embrace the Animal. Its paranoia bites. |
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| A Perspectival Trick |
[Mar. 21st, 2005|11:32 pm] |
The Streets / Shystie
Brixton Academy, London
Don’t mention girls. It’s the theme of the evening. How relationships fuck you up, and how once burnt, you’re still so willing to jump back into the fire. Finding out that the girl you’re in love with is still besotted with her ex. And he’s standing next to you, and she never looks at you that way, laughs at his jokes like that. It’s enough to make you cut your hair, lose some weight, and wish you’re ten years younger.
Ignore that rule for Shystie, though. An impish, kinetic Hackney MC, she’s about to release a delightful debut that redraws the map for the new wave of East London MCs by the sheer virtue of its assured femininity in a subculture of machismo. Tonight she’s unfortunate: flanked by two rappers without a trace of her charisma, her machine-gun cadence, clean and lucid on record, is submerged in the mix. There are nods to the past (a wicked, cheeky snippet of ‘Push It’, the retro-riff of ‘7 Nation Army’ condensed into a supreme splurge of garishly dirty low-end), but ‘Step Bac’ and ‘One Wish’ are modern UK pop in all its glory. Super-produced, bass-heavy, radiant: Shystie’s making a savage statement of intent.
And so to The Streets. A huge green laser show scans across the venue like a radar. ‘Turn The Page’ opens, the beat as exciting as secret sex, and three thousand bodies melt. The question of how to recreate the narrative of A Grand Don’t Come For Free is ignored. (With the rash of hyperbole that’s surrounded A Grand…, it’s been forgotten that Original Pirate Material is clearly a superior record, reflected by the balance of this greatest hits set.) The communal crush of being here, of moments remembered and returned to is enough. Although sometimes too much: ‘It’s Too Late’ brings tears to eyes, realisations that moving on can leave you empty. (They spy each other across the venue, and you’ve lost.)
“Don’t mention girls,” barks Skinner, turning to his band. He could be so lucky, having built his career around shaping semi-fictions that gracefully trace post-teen relationships (with people, but also with pop, drugs, money) in all their messy glory. There’s always been a delicious cartoon element to Skinner, but the construct – laddish braggadocio fused with an unnatural ability to resurrect micro-observations from the realms of cliché – is rendered more tangible when your heart’s being sucked into your mouth. The only letdowns are the Chas ‘n’ Dave do ‘Parklife’ of ‘Fit But You Know It’, and the way the off-key live drums on ‘Weak Become Heroes’ blunt the irrepressible house beat of the original. That’s more than made up for by ‘Blinded By The Lights’ and ‘Could Well Be In’: stunning, post-rave mini-dramas, the music too sumptuous to do anything but surrender.
Too close for comfort, tonight was too impressive to deny. Just don’t mention girls ever again. |
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| Fix Up Look Sharp |
[Sep. 29th, 2003|04:27 pm] |
I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES
“What I’m doing is representing something that’s been happening for a fairly long time,” says Dizzee Rascal. “There’s a lot of frustration and a lot of fear in my ends, but a lot of action and I’m an observer so it all goes into my music. The album is day-in-the-life, getme? It goes from sitting on a wall to lying in your bed. The things I chat about are what happens in my life. Some people find that uncomfortable, but so what? It’s real.”
There’s something that bothers me. Pop’s literal distorted plasticity (bumps or digital ones/zeros marking out sound) makes it pointless to attempt to reconcile to it a trope of realness. But nevertheless, its something that brings out a firing squad of clichés aiming point-blank at your ribcage. *It’s just noise, right?* Or: *no sell-out. Ever.* Or: *pop is not about inclusion.* Fine for the trust fund kids/bedroom romantics sloping/moping around in Manhattan lofts/Hertfordshire cottages convinced that the world owes them an artful living – but the reason that, say, US rap was triumphant for so much of the 90s and early 00s is because the intersection between aspiration, commerce and involvement is so important to how pop works: it slams forwards the innovation of the unknown, rather than the safe comforts of home. That equilibrium is uneasy right now. And it’s about time something took its place. It’s about time. It’s about…
YOU CAN NEVER OUTPLAY ME I’M AN ACE
Dizzee Rascal sits in the shiny new suite in the XL offices, continually refixing a New York Yankees cap, wearing absurdly baggy grey Nike jogging bottoms and a black t-shirt that looks like the Edward Munch’s The Scream. “I like it because it looks like me when I’m vexed,” he says, his lips cracking into a rare smile. (This may be because he’s been freshly delivered a pair of his beloved Air Force One trainers, customised with the “I Luv U” sticker-patches that cover every lamppost in London.)
Your album’s all *about* time, isn’t it? About never having enough, about wasting it away, about it slipping away from clammy fingers, zipping past in XR3i’s before you have time to breathe…
He pauses. “I dunno about that. But we don’t have much time, do we? There’s positive and negative, but you can always see the world slipping away from you.”
Man, you’re only a teenager. How do you think people twice your age feel? Doesn’t that make you slightly pessimistic?
“I know, but in a way that makes it even more crucial. I’ve got so much to do, so much to see.”
HAS IT COME TO THIS?
Perhaps aggravated by our current epileptic fit of nostalgia, but founded in a general malaise that stems back to the post-war years and beyond, youth culture is casually debased, derided and denied – but most obviously, patronised. It’s something that permeates leader columns in broadsheets, broadsides from tabloids, and the numbing tendency towards smaller word-counts in the music and style press. It’s something that blares out of *CD:UK*, every blather from Cat Deeley’s mouth a further argument for the legalisation of hand-guns. And it’s something that the likes of Dizzee Rascal, 18-year-old MC and producer from Bow and member of the Roll Deep Crew, can be seen as a grabbing a 50-foot flamethrower and storming the ivory towers in protest of.
It helps that he’s just released the album of the year. Called “Boy In Da Corner”, it’s a malevolent maelstrom that fascinates on so many levels. The production is crude, minimalistic, and almost nihilistic: snarling synth stabs and rat-a-tat rhythms ricochet off your synapses like flashlights against damaged retinas. On “Brand New Day”, “Sitting Here” and “Live-O”, there’s a quivering unsureness in the ice-hot electro riffage that Squarepusher or Venetian Snares would kill for. “Fix Up, Look Sharp” wheelspins on the freshest use of Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat” since UTFO’s “Roxanne Roxanne”, but it’s the only track that uses straight beats. The rest, like recent top-30 supernova “I Luv U” (written in school when Dizzee was 16), is off-key, abrasive and almost amelodic, and is completely in tune with my times: just like Nasty Crew’s piercing, frantic “Destruction”; the yardcore squall of The Bug’s “Pressure”; !!! and The Rapture shaping post-funk into writhing new forms; Broadcast’s impossibly addictive “Haha Sound”; and, of course, Lumidee’s heartbeat beautiful “Never Leave You”. And his voice is the most distinctive rasp I’ve heard in far too long. Stuttering, insecure, often sounding on the brink of breakdown, he also struts with sureness. It’s pretty much all perfectly contradictory, paradoxical facts. Dizzee is a thug rapper who wakes up wishing he could sleep forever. Dizzee is a sensate and sensitive teenager who casually talks about the increasing prevalence of war weapons. Tough as tungsten, soft as sodium, sad as madness, his lyrics are vulnerable, solipsistic, violent, vituperative, funny, petulant, obnoxious, beautiful, ugly, confused, cathartic. And English, too, flitting from a tearjerking growl/cry to Mockney yelps, its reference-points unfolding exponentially. Dizzee flushes “MCs down the loo”. He “comes old-skool like Aristotle”, but he’s also “old-skool like Happy Shopper”. He claims he’s a “problem for Anthony Blair”, but there’s little overt political protest. When these contradictions unfold on plastic it’s not always pretty. On “Jezebel”, Dizzee tirelessly piles into a young girl who ends up with two kids by the age of 16, bottle of whisky hand-in-hand with regret.
Do you have problems with relationships?
“Way I look at it is that, I’m 18, I’m too young to get settled down. Seen too many people get burnt. Seen bare amounts of girls from my ends losing their childhoods by getting pregnant. That song’s not against women in any way, it’s just about a certain type of girl that goes out looking for trouble and so trouble starts to follow them.”
“Boy In Da Corner” may be the sound of urban dystopia, a repeated image of skulls from the seabeds of *T3: Rise Of The Machines* floating to the surface, but it’s an album born of the 80s. That is, created from the freewheeling tensions that the generation of those of us born in that decade know so well. It’s my generation, the kids who came of age in the 90s. The decade in which, as Michael Bracewell correctly argues, surface became depth. The decade when grunge got big, but when hastily-copied jungle compilations were played on youth club stereo systems next to angsty rock hymns, gloriously cheap sounding rave anthems and Britpop’s yobbish/foppish posing, while sewage-sniffing bravado from the likes of Wu-Tang Clan, Nas and Mobb Deep were handed down from clued-up siblings. (It’s also the reason that The Streets’ “Original Pirate Material” made so much sense last year. The first record of the 00s to turn a narrative to what the 90s were about for people who actually lived through them, rather than those who sat swilling their fat faces and spilling it out on late-night TV as “cultural criticism”.) It was never unnatural. Dizzee loved Metallica and Nirvana and The Prodigy and was a jungle DJ before he started rapping.
“I borrowed that Nirvana album from some kid at school,” he says. “It was the one with that song, ‘dnn dnn-dnn, dd-dd dnn-dnn’, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, yeah? I didn’t know what those guys were on about, but that anger and energy really appealed to me at the time.”
ACCELERATE >>
In 1999, Wiley Kat, Dizzee’s spiritual mentor in (then non-existent) Roll Deep wrote a song called “Know We” that provided the springboard for the current generation of rappers on pirate radio. A step on from jungle crowd-hyping, it applied rudimentary rap skills to increasingly abstruse and lo-fi garage beats (long gone is the gorgeous gloss that marked 2000-era UKG), and begun to flourish on the London pirates and its associated rave circuit. Now, what Dizzee’s generation of pirate-radio reared artists have in common is the combination of the fearless naiveté and belief of youth, their tenure on the illegal airwaves rendering them unsuppressed and unafraid.
“Pirate radio, that was my education, the base, getme? But also, Wiley would take me to raves all over the country, which broadened my horizons beyond East London. Before then I was like, yeah this is my ends, this is it. But the more I see, the more I realise there is.”
You mentioned that being from London is important to you. But what is it about American clothes that you like so much?
“It’s not about America,” he argues. “It’s just that they’ve got the best styles right now. I don’t wear this because it’s American, it’s because I like it. It’s like the music I do: it’s natural to my surroundings.”
It’s something your lyrics seem to focus quite heavily on, too. East London. Bow, Hackney… What’s it like for you there?
“It’s pretty shitty, but it’s what I’ve lived through. It’s real. Council flats, ‘nuff poverty. Shotters. Blotters. Drug dealers, yunno? And mad beef. Guns are regular. And it’s getting worse.”
And music’s your way of getting out of that cycle?
“It’s a way forward. It can be a very positive thing, young people making up new metaphors and new sounds. You might say that this music sounds negative, sounds grimy, but that’s because of the world I’m in. There are bare problems. I saw the generation above getting in beef and using guns and that becomes normal, so my generation starts on all that even younger. And the generation below, bwoy, the fourteen year olds. There’s even 10, 11 year olds getting into all kinds of shit.”
*It’s about time*. A generation being little more than four years is laughable, but the notion of an accelerated culture makes sense for the pirate scene. New heroes regularly emerge or disappear. He enthuses about Tinche Stryder, a 16 year old from the Ruff Squad who has been on the pirates since the age of 12 and raps about ninjas and knockdown ginger. And he’s aware that his current position as president-elect of the garage new wave can be just as evanescent as adolescence itself.
“I don’t care about being the next Craig David, the next Ms Dynamite, whatever,” he says. “That was a different generation, getme? What I'm doing, what Roll Deep are doing, what More Fire Crew, what Nasty Crew are doing, it isn't garage anymore. It's a step on from garage, which was a step from jungle getme? People have been calling it grime because it sounds so murky, but I say, ‘I don't make garage, I make grhyme garage. G-R-H-Y-M-E.'” |
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