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— by Joseph Patel
"Uuuuurrrggggh!"
That was not the sound Lady Sovereign intended to bellow into her microphone, but it's what the audience in New York's Knitting Factory heard when the 19-year-old British MC took the stage for a show earlier this month. Gripping the mic with one hand and pressing her pale white face against the knuckles of the other, the rapper, who is barely five feet tall and bears a striking resemblance to the Spice Girls' Sporty Spice, was clearly ill.
Whether it was the afternoon's "Mack-Donalds" hamburger (which she publicly blamed for her queasiness) or the previous evening and early morning's revelry was of no real consequence: Clutching your stomach and walking gingerly around the stage is no way to make your U.S. debut to a sold-out room full of music tastemakers.
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Lady Sovereign
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Or is it? As soon as Lady Sovereign began her set, with the rumbling bass and TV-show-theme stabs of a track called "Cha Ching," the crowd of DJs, writers, bloggers and industry types was head-bobbing, dancing and rapping along with her seemingly unintelligible rhymes. The revelers were clearly taken by the young woman's charismatic bloom, even if some of it seemed wilted under the weight of her illness ("I might vomit on you if I'm not careful," she warned the front row of fans in a moment of sincere jest). Yet every song the self-described "cheeky" MC performed got a similar response, and if one didn't know better, it'd be easy to think that the groaning Lady Sovereign and the genre of music she represents — grime — were global worldwide success stories.
They're not — at least not yet.
Grime is still an emerging genre: It can't be heard regularly on MTV or on any but underground radio stations. To date, only two grime artists have even released albums in the United States; Lady Sovereign's debut album isn't due out till winter. In fact, most Americans have no idea what grime actually is, even though it has taken our cousins across the Atlantic by storm.
Like so many new musical genres and subgenres from the last few decades, grime finds the Brits taking an American style and customizing it in fascinating fashion.
Grime sounds like a faster version of Southern hip-hop, rapped with British accents. It is driven by the slanted slang of the London streets and minimal, bone-rattling, bass-heavy beats typically generated on a computer. Grime sounds like its appellation: It's loose and gritty, spawned a few years ago in the dilapidated housing projects of east London that house many black British émigré communities from the Caribbean and Africa. (Run the Road, released earlier this year on Vice Records, is an excellent sampler of the genre, featuring tracks from Dizzee Rascal, Kano, Roll Deep, the Streets, Jammer and Terror Danjah, along with Lady Sovereign's "Cha Ching.")
Grime is roughly parallel to hip-hop in the States — even some American hip-hoppers recognize the similarities. "When I first heard it, I had no idea what the f--- they were saying," admits Bun B, the veteran rapper who is a member of the influential Texas duo UGK. "But I liked the way they were saying their words and slangin' their rhymes. It occurred to me that the way I heard grime is the way other people heard Southern hip-hop, the slang and everything — not really knowin' what we're saying but feeling it anyway. So I fell in love with it right then."
Grime, like many recent European musical subgenres, can trace its musical roots to the U.K. rave culture of the late 1980s and early '90s. Because of England's small size, a musical style's lifespan is condensed: musical influences ricochet around each other, concentrating each subgenre's creative center and shortening its lifecycle to just a few years. The sped-up rhythms of drum 'n' bass emerged in the mid-'90s, but within five years had morphed into an influential musical form known as U.K. garage (which Brits generally pronounce "GAIR-uj"), a more rubbery form of instrumental dance music influenced by the concise beats of house music and the tempos of drum 'n' bass.
For years, the British interpretation of American-style hip-hop lacked any real impact; songs sounded like out-of-tune facsimiles instead of a local revitalization. But U.K. garage would prove to be a welcome ground for British MCs, particularly for those who wanted to rhyme over something faster than the steady, slower beats of hip-hop. Eventually, U.K. garage would evolve too, and a slice of it would grow darker and more intense — so too would the verbal style of its vocalists. A younger generation weaned on U.K. garage would start to incorporate other influences — the riddim culture and tart patois of Jamaican dancehall, the buck bounce of Dirty South crunk — and soon, the music being made was more aggressive, pithy and syncopated; more black. Grime was born.
The most famous artist of grime is Dizzee Rascal, a 20-year old east Londoner who in 2003 won the U.K.'s prestigious Mercury Music Prize for his debut CD, Boy in Da Corner. Dizzee was the first of the emerging grime merchants to release an album in America, and with songs like, "Fix Up, Look Sharp" (which features a booming Billy Squier sample) and "Dream" having found airplay in the States, he's become a de facto ambassador for grime around the world. In any language or accent, Dizzee is a wizard on the microphone, deftly slinging words while riding buckshot over big, beefy beats. Dizzee also came with a story that included a beef between his crew, Roll Deep, and rival posses; his newsworthiness was not diminished when he was stabbed, presumably by a rival gang member, shortly after the release of Boy in 2003. (Sound like any rappers you know?)
Other artists making it big in the U.K. include Dizzee's mentor Wiley, whose "Eskimo" is considered a grime classic. A grime veteran (as much as anyone can be in the nascent genre), Wiley had previously rapped in the U.K. garage scene and as part of a crew called the Pay as U Go Cartel, which is widely considered to be the Wu-Tang Clan of the grime scene. On the other end of the spectrum is Kano, a 17-year-old who delivers ferocity with a wink and a smirk. His "Boys Luv Girls," produced by rising superstar Jammer (basically a grime equivalent of Just Blaze), is considered a fundamental song in the grime canon. Earlier this year, the artist Lethal B released a song called "Pow" that was not only huge in the U.K. underground, but also made its way to New York, earning some spins on Funkmaster Flex's show on Hot 97.
Lady Sovereign's popularity underscores that while race and gender does matter in the U.K. grime scene, it perhaps doesn't have the same impact as it would in the States. Lady Sov is white and grew up in the Chalk Hill housing project; economic hardship seems to be the common bond among grime MCs.
Of course, few knew Lady Sovereign was white until she started making public appearances. She made her name initially by recording songs on her home computer over popular instrumentals and then distributing them to grime message boards on the Internet. The grime scene, like U.K. garage before it, is primarily fueled by the existence of pirate radio — illegal radio stations that dot the British media landscape. The pirate radio galaxy functions much like the mixtape world does here with hip-hop, breaking artists and highlighting new sounds. But grime's impact and growth, especially outside of London, has been aided just as much by the Internet.
"The Internet is my savior," Sovereign said. "You just put your stuff out there and people can download it and respond to it. It's just like holding a show where hundreds of people can listen to it at once."
Grime has formal releases of songs on 12-inch singles and CDs, and "mixtape" DVDs that can be bought in sundry stores and barber shops are part of the grime economy. But much of the genre's propagation outside of London has occurred through Internet technology.
"I used to use little cheap computer microphones and record 30 seconds of me doing a few lyrics," Lady Sovereign explains. "I'd send them to random people that I didn't know and they'd send them on, and so on."
Many of the tastemakers who turned out for Lady Sovereign's New York show have tracked the growth of the genre through MP3s downloaded from British Web sites or grime blogs that distribute music and the scene's stories; like hip-hop, the grime scene is filled with petty regional beefs. For Anglophiles obsessed with emerging British music scenes, reading a blog like Chantelle Fiddy's World of Grime (chantellefiddy.blogspot.com), which has been operating for about a year, will turn you on to shows, interviews and pirate radio broadcasts — it's almost as good as being in London yourself. Esteemed music writer Simon Reynolds maintains a blog (blissout.blogspot.com) on British music with over a dozen links to other grime blogs like Gutterbreakz, Riko Dan and Prancehall.
"It's just this whole word-of-mouth thing that grows and grows," Lady Sovereign says. And it's all enough to make your head spin — or your stomach ache.
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Photo: Karl Heitmueller
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