SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/690210
4 6 S X S W o r l d | M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 6 | S X S W. C O M hen Kanye West performed "All Day" at the 2015 Brit Awards, he brought out dozens of black-clad Brits who bobbed to the music and belted out the tune's titular hook. Many of the people onstage with West spent years rap- ping and building up the U.K.'s grime scene, though their identities might have been lost on the celebrities watching the performance — among them Lionel Richie, Taylor Swift, and Sam Smith — and North Americans checking in on YouTube. Still, West made sure that onlookers learned about at least one person who was with him that night. "Yo Skepta," West said as the song ended. "Thank you." Skepta's reputation has rippled across the pond recently — the grime veteran has since appeared on the cover of The FADER and made a splash at this year's SXSW. He wasn't alone in carrying the banner for grime at SXSW. Joining him were Ghetts, Elf Kid and Stormzy, who also appeared behind West at the Brit Awards and has become an inter- national poster-boy for the genre. The appearance of those MCs at SXSW furthered the sound's presence in North America, but this is hardly the first wave of grime — or the first to land in Austin. Early grime star Dizzee Rascal played SXSW in 2004, just as the genre took hold in the UK. Grime emerged in the early 2000s, growing out of the country's long pop music tradition that is equally beloved and illicit: pirate radio. Young London DJs with illegal radio equipment and a fondness for garage and jungle occupied small portions of the FM frequency to broadcast tracks. Rinse FM, one of the longest-running pirate sta- tions (it actually received a community broadcast license in 2010) led the charge in gravitating towards a darker, harsher electronic sound. Rinse roped in a small crew of MCs such as Wiley and Dizzee Rascal to spit harsh bars littered with curses, slang and stories inspired by London's gritty streets. Grime made a home on pirate radio, which like the music was raw and underground. But grime didn't stay below the surface for long. In July 2003, XL Recordings released Dizzee Rascal's debut album, Boy in da Corner, which earned the MC international acclaim and the esteemed Mercury Prize that September. Though grime would eventually cede the spotlight to dubstep in the U.K., its first wave set a foundation. Talented rising MC Nico Lindsay remembers rotating through 50 Cent, Fabolous and Mobb Deep before gravitating towards grime in 2004. Specifically, D Double E's "Frontline" caught his ear. "I could relate to it; it was like a U.K. rap scene but with a different energy, different perspective and different approach," Lindsay writes in an e-mail. "Grime and hip-hop both are the sound of the streets and current events, but just have two different backgrounds." Grime's connection to radio still informs it today according to Montreal DJ and writer Son Raw, who covers the genre for the online magazines FACT and Passion of the Weiss. "One of the things that differentiates grime from hip-hop is you still have this tradition of spitting bars on the radio," he says, explaining that while hip-hop has evolved into a studio art form, grime's vocalists have been more focused on the airwaves. "Right now there's a lot of young MCs that are going to radio — they just have this hunger and it's making them into really good MCs." That precedent meant MCs were less inclined to crank out new recordings, which contributed to grime's long return to the underground after its initial breakout. Some acts surfaced in the mainstream in the ensuing years, though these crossover efforts didn't always resonate with grime fans — Wiley's 2008 single, "Wearing My Rolex," was far more electro-pop than grime. But removed from the spotlight, grime's sound expanded beyond the harsh riddims Wiley and company established in the early 2000s. By the early 2010s, a cadre of producers and independent labels devel- oped a sprawling scene, and some of those players pushed the style towards the fringes of both the experimental and pop. Time not only allowed grime to grow, it endowed the scene with wisdom. Son Raw points out that many of the pioneers were teens when grime first broke. The genre has since built an infrastructure complete with artists and managers with industry insight (Skepta had more than a decade of experience before Kanye uttered his name). Pirate radio stations such as Rinse FM, DejaVu FM and Mode FM jumped online in recent years, reaching a wider audience than on the terrestrial airwaves. The decade-long groundswell after grime's initial breakout helped the genre re-emerge on the U.K.'s pop charts. "It's survived so much," Son Raw says. "It just refuses to die." The challenge is continuing to build on the momentum after grime's cur- rent trendiness wears off, and reaching North America, a massive market brimming with hip-hop fans eager to discover something new. In the words of Son Raw, "There's always gonna be someone who wants to hear something different." That something could be grime. T East London Calling: Are American Audiences Primed for Grime? by leoR Galil W A M A N D A P I E L A Lit tle Simz a t SX S W