This script was originally performed and published as an audio essay via the Side Missions project.
Introduction
It’s the 16th of October, 2019, and it’s a bit nippy out. Forgive me for wandering into British cliche territory this early, but follow me for just a second. Today’s sub-par weather report is barely noticed by Grime MC and Tottenham royalty Jamie Adenuga, best known as Jme, but also as an all-year-round shorts-wearing advocate. He’s bopping with purpose towards the legendary online radio station NTS, who dutifully transmit the city’s underground sounds live from their cozy East London shack-turned-homemade-sticker gallery tucked away in one corner of Dalston’s legendary Gillett Square. This community square, one of few remaining in the city, is described by Don Travis and Wayne Crichlow as “a space of radical history through the black experience”. Today is yet another entry in this wavey diary of certified dons.
Our hyperactive protagonist is on his way over there to link Elijah, DJ and co-founder of Butterz, one of the few record labels that championed Grime music defiantly through a relative downtime in the early 2010s. They are plotting an impromptu radio set, conjuring the fabled pirate radio settings that they once helped build. It’s the first bit of radio Elijah has done in half a decade and the first time that the pair have linked up on the airwaves. Knowing this, you would excuse signs of rustiness or a lack of chemistry. Instead, they went and made a slice of radio that washes over you with heart and soul in the same way that the best home cooking does.
Revisiting this set another five years on, I’m flung head first in to the room by the raw, inimitable feeling on full display. Jme’s energy is excitable and honest, Elijah’s mixing feels urgent and propulsive. The playfulness on show is infectious, witnessing two near-veterans in creative flow never fails to put a beaming smile across my cheeks. Barely five minutes in, Jme is compelled to shout out his audio engineer, MSM, congratulating him for finally completing Super Mario World. Something unusual is brewing. Around the 23 minute mark, Elijah achieves the unthinkable. Jme freezes as a beat selection enters his dome from a whole new musical universe.
Hold on a second, this isn’t grime…is it?
In case you missed what was going on there, that’s a legendary Grime MC spitting over Ryu, Blanka and Guile’s themes from Street Fighter 2. The booth is filled tightly with high emotion, enough to stop an ice-cold mic man dead in his tracks. Music is a powerful vessel capable of transporting the mind back to a specific time and place. Jean-Michel Basquiat once said that “music is how we decorate time”. It is capable of resurfacing and vividly colouring in our memories without warning or consent. Where did Jme go, where did these tunes take him, in this purest of moments? To answer this question, we have to take it right back to the start.
Grime 101
For the uninitiated, Grime is a predominantly Black, British and working-class musical tradition birthed on the council estates of Bow, East London in the early 2000s. Its family tree is dizzyingly tall, with meandering roots that trace musical styles echoed across the diaspora. Many of the scenes early participants are second or third generation Black Brits with Caribbean or West African heritage. Nods to MC-led sound system culture can be felt as strongly as more commonly cited hip-hop influences. There are stylistic similarities with darker strains of UK electronic music that made splashes in the 90s, like jungle and UK garage. Wiley, heralded as the genres “godfather”, once described why it’s the natural successor to punk, stating:
Punk rock was very rebellious against the Queen – they didn’t give a s*** and that’s what tip they were on. There’s that punk rock song “banned from the Roxy, OK, I didn’t much like it anyway!” We’re banned from places too – it’s the angry kid that these movements are based on.
All this chin-stroking about Grime’s heritage doesn’t help you to know what it sounds like, does it? As with any music made with sound systems in mind, you are best off taking it in somewhere that will rattle the riddims clean through your chest. Failing that, here is a burst of Pulse X by Youngstar that landed on earth in March of 2002, recognised as the first Grime instrumental.
One of the motifs of these early productions was the distinctive “8 bar” pattern. One arrangement plays for eight bars, then another plays for eight bars and the switch back and forth continues. This arrangement went hand-in-hand with the frenetic, pass-the-mic pirate radio sets that acted as a training ground for Grime MCs to hone their craft, a chance to experiment and play with the format. Here’s a taster of a Kano, Ghetts and Skepta radio set featuring an all-time sweet exchange over the Pulse X instrumental:
Grime’s formative years were pre-broadband, pre-Facebook and pre-SoundCloud. As a new musical genre it grew slowly and was unavoidably shaped by place. It’s arguably the last British genre that got to do this. Phill Dodds wrote on Grime being “distinguished by the intensity of its fine-grained, postcode-scale locality”. From the crews representing specific council estates they lived on together, to the prideful radio shout-outs for numbered London bus routes, the scene’s reference points were taken from everyday life. These mundane little details were moulded into poetry and evidenced a strong social fabric. Grime MCs telling stories of their lived experiences is a modern example of folklore, with important nuggets of information transmitted orally from one generation to the next. In this way, Grime is something of a successor to English folk music. A people’s history of being marginalised on multiple fronts in a city increasingly defined by inequality and excess, lives within the beats.
My own introduction to Grime came on the school playground. Like a contagious illness at the start of term, grime was passed around frenetically and making helicopter parents upset. Records were shared via BlueTooth, THE cutting-edge phone technology at the time, as files were distributed on emergent peer-to-peer sharing technology like LimeWire. Living in Essex, I was outside the pirate radio broadcasting range, but the relationship I had to the music shared similarities. Receiving loose MP3s like this was faceless and ethereal, the lack of context for what you were hearing meant your imagination could paint twisted pictures of the tales being spouted by mystery MCs. One of my fondest memories of this type of bamboozlement was hearing Roll Deep’s When I’m ‘Ere for the first time - Danny Weed’s devilish ‘gypsy accordion’, Scratchy’s hair-raising (and, at best, politically incorrect) ad-libs, every member of the crew hitting full stride on their 16s.
I imagined this lot as faraway superheroes, alien lifeforms. When I saw the artwork for their debut album In At The Deep End for the first time, it felt like an affirmation of these childlike fantasies. These wierdo cartoon critters spoke directly to this necessity of mystery and imagination, a time when conjuring up ideas about who might be on the other side of the tunes was the only context you had.
All these early examples of the art-form hint at an intoxicating duality at the heart of this scene. Early in it’s development, this music was part hyper-local gully poetry, part alien-like sonics, all while being cartoonish at the same time. Where did this cocktail come from?
Cool Britannia
It’s a cold, dark sound because we came from a cold, dark place. These are inner-city London streets. It’s gritty. (Wiley, 2017)
To understand grime, you best have a crack at understanding London, first. Get acquainted with the “informal city” built around high-rise tower blocks of council estates sectioned in places like Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham. These are the workshops and studios that Grime’s collective alchemy took shape in.
New Labour won a landslide victory in the 1997 general election after 18 consecutive years of a Conservative government. That same year, Tony Blair made his first speech as Prime Minister on the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth, South London. At the time, it was one of the largest council estates in Europe. He spoke about the estates residents as “the forgotten”, setting out a mandate of “regeneration”.
In practice, Tony would usher in a new inner city that suffocated the lives of Aylesbury Estate residents. A new, bold vision of an expensive, private and surveilled monoculture. A 2013 paper written by Professor Loretta Lees of King’s College London examined this shady gentrification of council estates through a case study of the Aylesbury. The human cost is felt to this day. Aysen Dennis, who lived on the Aylesbury Estate for 30 years, was recently forced to leave her flat after losing a 24-year long fight to stay there. In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, quoted by Lees, Owen Hatherly writes:
Regeneration was always ever a gentrification strategy, and we knew it. We knew it from Blair’s 1997 launch of New Labour’s regeneration policy from the stigmatised Aylesbury Estate in London where the desperate “70s class-neutral language of…regeneration was revived in the 2000s – a … friendly cover for class cleansing in the urban landscape.
In Terraformed Joy White describes how processes like this one have created social and economic segregation in her home of Forest Gate in East London. She writes:
The drive from Newham Council’s regeneration programme to create an urban village, with bars, cafes and creative/cultural outlets, flattens existing consumption and makes undesirable the consumer options that already existed there, including takeaways and cheap fruit and vegetables at £1 a bowl.
A painfully fitting tale of this split personality city is chronicled in Dan Hancox’s book on Grime’s origins, Stand Up Tall. When profiled in 2003 for the BBC to celebrate his Mercury Prize win for his debut album, Dizzee Rascal looked on from the 25-storey Crossway estate where he grew up. A financial district to rival the City of London was shoehorned into his neighbourhood in the late 80s and early 90s, called Canary Wharf. The 244m Canary Wharf skyscraper at One Canada Square was the first one to rise out of the docks in 1990. It was Britain’s tallest building for two decades, finally overtaken by the Shard in 2010.
“That is Canary Wharf.” Dizzee explained to the camera. “It’s in your face. It takes the piss. There are rich people moving in now, people who work in the city. You can tell they’re not living the same way as us.”
By the end of the decade, Dizzee had warmed up to the noisy neighbours, even naming that same skyscraper as his favourite building. During this time, he had moved away from the grime scene and into pop stardom. He would later be marketed as a feel-good story for the upcoming 2012 Olympics, another site of regeneration-come-gentrification. This snippet from another BBC interview always stuck out to me:
I remember when we were little, we had a conspiracy – we thought that thing on the top of it was like aliens, and they were about to fly off – loads of little theories like that. We’d blink and think they had lasers up there.
Dizzee and his peers felt like strangers in their own city, literally backed into a corner. Undeterred, they were able to channel this into what Hancox construed as a distinct blend of Afrofuturism, applying science fiction to these hostile surroundings as a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens. When Dizzee was screwing at the Canary Wharf skyline, he was manifesting visions of space travel and alien lifeforms at the same time.
This vision oozes through Dizzee’s magnum opus debut, none more than Stop Dat. The intro rolls in with all manner of bleeps and zaps, like an alternate soundtrack to War of the Worlds. Then it gives way to a titanic, barrelling verbal rally that brings you back to earth with a bang and a half.
These visions in the cold night sky give us a glimpse into the dystopian state of wonder and restless creativity young pioneers would channel into something special, against all the odds. The futuristic, speculative leanings don’t start and finish at one blinking red light up on an office block, though, surely?
Cool Japan
I hate to divide the world – east and west. Where is the edge?
(Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1995)
Warren Stanislaus, a scholar who has dedicated himself to understanding and documenting cultural exchange across the UK and Japan, penned a 2022 study in the Japan Forum journal called From Cool Japan To Cold Japan: Grime Cyborgs In Black Britain. Much of the ground covered in this section is examined forensically by Warren, who has spent extensive time living across London and Tokyo. Check the video description for a link to this essay and make sure to go run it up.
Starting in the 1980s, Japan set off on a campaign to market their key cultural industries to the rest of the world. This included anime studios, manga publishers and video games companies. In a 2002 article titled “Japan’s Gross National Cool”, Douglas McGray surveyed the role of these sectors in expanding Japan’s cultural footprint across the globe:
Japan has made deep inroads into American culture, usually written off by the rest of the world as aggravatingly insular. Bestselling Sony Playstation and Nintendo home video games draw heavily on Japanese anime and manga for inspiration…Japanese anime-style cartoons currently fill the majority of time slots in the after-school and Saturday morning schedules on U.S. cable television.
Douglas McGray (2009)
This article helped make the term “Cool Japan” stick and, crucially, labelled it a purposeful, state-led policy rather than a happy accident.
80s and 90s babies formed the foundations of Grime as a cultural movement. As these impressionable young minds gained consciousness, Japan was hustling its artistic exports to them hard. It’s no exaggeration to say that they grew up together, intertwined. Streets of Rage landed on the Sega Mega Drive in October 1991, with Super Mario World and Street Fighter II: Champion Edition landing on the Super Nintendo the following year, in April and August respectively. To marry up these timelines, Wiley, AKA the godfather of grime, would’ve been 12/13 years old at this time.
The first Tekken game on Sony PlayStation arrived in 1994. The first Tamagotchis came to these shores in May of ‘97. The first entries in the Pokemon game series to hit UK shops, Pokemon Red and Blue, arrived in October of 1999 while the anime began airing earlier that same year. Dragon Ball Z first aired in the UK on 6th March 2000 via Cartoon Network (and later Toonami). All this is to say - British playgrounds were subject to a manic onslaught of Japanese pop culture that might as well have come from the far reaches of the universe.
In his essay, Warren Stanislaus revisits the idea of afro-futurism to describe how these technologies fostered a conscious “rewiring:
By reappropriating technologies and machines that seem to have arrived from some distant future beyond Western space-time, they can sabotage their subjugation and move out of a fixed place assigned to them by a dominant society.
As those brains got rewired and primed to absorb the sensory overload of Japanese media exports, how did this manifest in the music?
Production
A direct style transfer that manifested between Grime and Japanese pop culture was the sampling of video game music, sometimes shortened as VGM. In the hands of Grime kids, the chip tone FX and ear worm 8-bit melodies found in Japanese VGM would be taken and spun into frenetic, hybrid sounds of the future.
In 2005, Macabre Unit released Lift Off on Plastician’s Terrorhythm label:
Not only did the record feature artwork that looks like an entry in PlayStation’s now-defunct Syphon Filter series, complete with Sniper rifle crosshairs, those maximalist synths wouldn’t sound out of place in a stressful Metal Gear Solid scene. That same year, Geeneus would put out Grand Theft Auto under his Wizzbit alias. Listen carefully for a litany of GTA III samples:
In 2010, Devlin put out London City which sampled the Kingdom Hearts II OST:
In 2012, D.O.K. released Chemical Planet on Butterz, sampling Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in the process:
Champion and Terror Danjah made a track together in 2013 called Bowsers Castle, released on a label called Hyperdub (remember that name):
The tune features a 16-bit melody that is a clear homage to Super Nintendo era mario kart OSTs.
Here is a track composed and performed by Dot Rotten, Real Talk which samples Shinobi III: Return Of The Ninja Master on Sega Mega Drive.
Part of the power of video game music from this era is the subliminal and repetitive nature of its influence. Every time you boot up a cartridge or retry a level, the soundtrack clicks back in from the top. Rinse and repeat. As you progress, the music evolves and mutates, taking the same samples and contorting them into stranger forms. These feedback loops create patterns, and impact taste in unseen ways.
The music production exchange going on here gets altogether weirder when you consider that there is an “accidental” grime instrumental on the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis platformer Wolverine: Adamantium Rage OST that was made a full 8 years before the first instrumentals recognised as Grime. The producer, Ian Beale (no, not that one), was part of a jungle duo at the time called Rude & Deadly. The limited sample space he had to work with on 16-bit game cartridges meant he leant into a spartan, digital sound that goes hard under a J Wing vocal almost 30 years later.
Was grime itself sent back in time by those aliens Dizzee was on about? I’m backing it.
Sinogrime
As a related aside, during the early 2000s a sub-genre called ‘sino-grime’ began to formulate. The name was coined by Kode 9, founder of the blog and later seminal electronic music label, Hyperdub. First-generation grime artists like Jammer and Wiley were pulling from nominally “Chinese” sounds that were in their orbit at the time. Here’s a snippet from Kode9’s 2005 Sinogrime mimimix:
Wiley tries to break it down in a 2003 interview with Martin Clark:
I used to watch a lot of Kung Fu films. I just like the idea of the Oriental thing. I started that idea, then I stopped it and then went back to it. It just something I like. I like Chinese music.
Our old mate Dizzee Rascal once explained that he sampled the shamizen, a traditional stringed instrument from Japan that was derived from the Chinese sanxian, because it was ‘about as out there as they come’.
The Shanghai-based Swimful offers up an alluring alternative theory for the emergence of this sound:
Around the late ’90s there were a lot of hugely popular Japanese games like Shenmue and the Final Fantasy series that made heavy use of pentatonic scales, which generally sound more Chinese, and heptatonic scales, which generally sound more Japanese.
Mr Wong was a first-gen Grime artist with Chinese heritage. Here’s an instrumental he made with Jammer, called Chinkrasta, a nod to the meeting of Chinese and Jamaican identities throughout the prism of Grime:
These production patterns formed the foundations of a musical exchange that began with Cool Japan and continued to stretch outwards, gathering up collateral along the way to form an exoticised version of “the East”. As traditional music scenes go, the producers are arguably the nerdiest component (no offence). These kids were the ones who’s fascination with electronics and sound was directly and viscerally shaped by the video game medium. It set the scene for the mic men to fully geek out.
Lyrics
Whereas a reductive view of the production samples could be that the producers simply liked the sonics (like Dizzee and the shamisen), the MCs pen provides us with an indisputable first-hand folklore of Japanese influence from the source.
Here’s Wiley’s Crash Bandicoot Freestyle, taken from the first volume of his legendary Tunnel Vision mixtapes:
Our old mate Jme is one of Grime’s most certified MCs when it comes to living/mining Japanese pop culture exports. For example, Jme has a record that doubles up as a love letter to Pokemon, aptly titled The Very Best, which samples the classic (western) TV theme.
The video is playful and cartoonish, and the sample works as a useful conduit for Jme to translate Grime’s frenetic energy and confidence into a series of boasts about his link cable battle record and trading card collection, then lyrically draw a beautiful link between Tottenham’s Meridian estate (where he grew up) and Kanto’s Viridian City (where the final gym leader resides). (Quick aside - he isn’t lying about “shiny Charizard life”).
As mentioned previously, Dragon Ball Z hit our shores in the early 2000s and had many school-aged kids in a cultural chokehold. One of the memorable aspects of the series is the concept of Super Saiyan, a “beast mode” style transformation utilised by those with Saiyan heritage. Here’s Goku, the main protagonist, going Super Saiyan:
There are numerous examples of grime artists reaching into their dragon ball fandom for bars. Here’s Mz Bratt’s Get Dark:
Here’s Giggs featured on Man Don’t Care with Jme:
Warren Stanislaus speaks directly to this ‘impulse for transformation’ in his aforementioned essay, writing:
Whether it’s Super Saiyan charges in Dragon Ball Z or Evil Ryu and Violent Ken in the Street Fighter series, a change in eye color and a new crown of hair is a way of visually depicting possession and a sudden surge of power.
This picture that’s being painted reminds me of those supercharged instances where an MC is bringing energy so electric the DJ is compelled to bring proceedings to a grinding halt via a rewind, also affectionately known as a “wheel-up” in these parts. A signal that the Super Saiyan metamorphosis has been felt down to the rooms vibrations.
Back on the topic of aliens, Newham born-and-bred MC D Double E has an uncanny ability to halt proceedings in a dance (in the best way possible) that verges on extra-terrestrial power. Here’s an unrelated clip of D Double executing a famous ad-lib while surrounded by his peers, who are almost as gassed as the crowd in anticipation:
Clashes & Streetfighter
I would have used any excuse to get this clip into the video, but there’s a reason we’ve arrived here. In 2010, D Double E put out Street Fighter Riddim. Arguably the definitive example of the genres flirtation with the famous game series, the legendary MC is truly on job:
There are well-trodden grime ceremonies that mirror the format of Streetfighter. “Clashes” see MCs go toe-to-toe verbally (mouth-to-mouth?) over a series of instrumentals with a view to out-rhyming and out-cussing their counterpart. These clashes range from the silly and playful, right up to gladiator, cut-the-atmosphere-with-a-knife battles that boil over. Right down to the language of the clash - rounds, sparring, bodying - code these duels as in the realm of fighting games.
One of the most prominent, and well-archived examples of this rich tradition is Jammer’s “Lord of the Mics”. Originally shot on tape and distributed via DVD, this long-running series immortalised legendary meetings of minds in the clash. Watch one of these and it won’t take long to spot direct homage to the beloved fighter series:
The core of these clashes is competition, strategic verbal volleys and a dedication to the art of oneupmanship. Right down to the clash structure, taking turns to do your worst, feels like the trading of killer combos practiced endlessly. In a sense, the tense vibes and steel nerves of a professional one-on-one Streetfighter bout are transplanted into real life. As fate would have it, Logan Sama is a reknowned Grime DJ hailing from Brentwood, Essex who happens to moonlight as a professional Streetfighter commentator and online personality:
Here’s what the day job looks like:
This is no coincidence. These rituals in the grime scene are adaptations and augmentations of cartridges that beamed out into their front rooms. We are joining the dots between inner city London kids making Grime and inner city Tokyo nerds making video games. In a recent exchange for Resident Advisor, poet and musician James Messiah talked shop with Touching Bass’s Errol Anderson. Here they are passionately talking about this exact phenomenon.
Jamie - why don’t you detail your Street Fighter 4 credentials for the people, real quick?
Grime in Japan
I think it’s about time to circle back to where we started out. back to the cosy NTS studio on Gillett Square. You might have forgotten about Elijah, the man spinning Streetfighter themes for Jme to bar on. On a different evening, on the other side of the world, Elijah could be found doing the same thing with some of Japan’s finest Grime MCs: Here’s Elijah shelling and MC Dekishi earning a wheel-up in Shinjuku, Tokyo in 2014:
This moment emerged out of a slew of Japan tours he did alongside his DJ partner and Butterz co-founder, Skilliam. The consistently passionate reception they received for playing Grime records was something of a surprise. It led to one of the best curated examples of Grime in Japan, a Soundcloud mix titled Japanese Grime Allstars, put together by Elijah and Skilliam in 2016:
Boiler Room made a short documentary in 2016 called Full Circle: Grime In Japan that acts as a vignette of what was going on in the scene at that time. There’s a poignant moment when Chocola B, a DJ in the GUM crew, talks about what makes Grime special to her, having discovered the genre in 2011 through a Shystie mixtape:
Talking about the beats, Grime has so much freedom and aggression. However, old Wiley tunes have exquisite percussion and melody…Thats what attracts me most to Grime instrumentals. In terms of MCs, I like their aggression, hard rhymes and the realness.
Around the same time, Boiler Room invited Chocola B to contribute a mix to their Upfront series. In another full circle moment, she decided to open the mix with an edit of Dizzee Rascal’s I Luv U.
Close
What does it mean when culture is boxed up and sent somewhere far away? What does it mean for this culture to be refracted by a foreign music scene and to then make the return journey, completing the circle?
This call and response is what moves art forms forward, together. Brian Eno used the term “Scenius”, or “Communal Genius” to describe the extreme creativity that groups, or “scenes”, can produce. The art of peer pressure, you might say. Drawing on this theory to describe cultural exchanges like this one helps to counter the Lone Genius myth and blurs the lines where one scene begins and another ends.
Eno states that in healthy artistic scenes we bear witness to mutual appreciation across mediums and a rapid exchange of tools and techniques. Ever seen someone make a Grime beat using a PS1 game? Here’s Benga making a Grime beat on Music 2000, to ram this point home with a sledgehammer:
This cross-continental exchange has helped to create beautiful moments, both small and significant. Finding obscure Japanese Grime artefacts from artists who have long been inactive exist gives me straightforward joy. In that same Boiler Room doc discussed a moment ago, we get to hear briefly from Elijah who talks about what Grime music’s relationship with Japan has done for him in a material sense:
The music and stuff has allowed us a level of freedom, like, allowed us to travel. I’d never think that we could just come to Japan for music. Before the music, I didn’t leave the ends, bro.
I still don’t know exactly why Jme was so shook from hearing those Streetfighter themes in the booth, but it must be emotional to deep how intrinsically tied your childhood memories are to your craft. How you’ve taken this Grime thing around the world, yet never really left the bedroom.
Sharing your art is one of the most generous and open-hearted things you can do with your time on this mortal journey. You can’t control who it touches and where it goes. That’s the leap of faith that keeps you a bit more human and brings us closer together.
I wanted to close out on a Grime set I took in earlier this year that says something about the long tail of this tradition of cultural exchange. Kibo, an up-and-coming MC from around the corner from where I’m recording this, had himself a birthday bash on Pound and Yam radio (itself around the corner from NTS). For the last half hour or so, while Nammy Wams and Chamber 45 hold it down on the decks, the mic gets passed frenetically around a room of MCs that includes the Master of Inane Conversation AKA M.I.C. He calmly breaks down the first two generations of Pokemon in a solitary 8 bars. This story isn’t finished, far from it.