SEVEN
Since the millennium, urban space in London has become a battlefield on which young people keep on losing. More and more chunks of outdoor public space were privatised as the Docklands had been, and became subject to the whims of their landlords and their private security patrols, while the rest of the city was surveilled and policed ever more intrusively. CCTV watched Londoners’ every move, and ASBOs and the Respect agenda helped to turn hanging out into a quasi-criminal activity. In the late 2000s, permanent signs went up on lampposts in parts of east London with the sinister instruction that you were in a ‘Good Behaviour Zone’, featuring a picture of a CCTV camera, the logos of the Metropolitan Police and Tower Hamlets council, and the advice that ‘additional powers to disperse people’ had been granted to the cops – along with their barely trained volunteer corps, the Police community support officers (PCSOs) – under the 2003 Anti-Social Behaviour Act.
Amid all the debate about ASBOs themselves, these ‘dispersal orders’ were a widely overlooked part of the legislation – in part, because the people they were used against were almost all poor, young, and did not have newspaper columns, and also because, unlike ASBOs themselves, the cases never ended up in court, and so were never reported on. Dispersal orders allowed police forces to spontaneously, without court involvement or oversight, force ‘groups of two or more people’ to leave a designated ‘dispersal zone’ and not return to the area for at least 24 hours, if they were of the opinion that antisocial behaviour was either happening, or likely to happen – adding a nice dystopian flavour of ‘pre-crime’ to an already arbitrary process. Local councils could designate particular areas ‘dispersal zones’ for up to six months at a time (and then renew them when that six months had run out), essentially prohibiting groups of two or more from hanging out in public: hundreds of these zones have been applied since 2003, almost always in the kinds of urban spaces where young people congregate: on the streets, in public squares, around shopping centres, next to transport hubs. Additionally, any under-16s found in a dispersal zone between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., unaccompanied by a parent or ‘responsible adult’, can be marched home and effectively put under curfew. Breach of a dispersal order is a criminal offence.
At the whims of the local police force, public gathering and socialising in cities could be de facto criminalised by New Labour. Its greatest impact would be on young people growing up in the most crowded urban areas, and in the most overcrowded home environments. If your parental home is a six-bedroom detached house in Dulwich with a huge garden, or in a village in the home counties, rather than a tiny council flat in Bow, where you share your bedroom with one or more siblings, the legislation would be less likely to affect you. Young people from poor backgrounds were having their freedom restricted from several different angles, even while senior police officers and the press happily labelled them ‘feral’. Even those bits of state support that were offered came with a catch: while New Labour invested in youth services and youth centres after coming to power, they also focused youth work on individualised, short-term ‘solutions’ to problems, and like everything else, it became increasingly driven by targets and outcomes, and organised along business lines.1 Other avenues of public social activity, or even – god forbid – festivity, like under-18s raves, which had been a critical and popular part of the late garage and early grime scene, started to disappear after 2004. Another overlooked aspect of London’s development, securitisation and gentrification during the 2000s had the effect of limiting the mobility of young people from poor backgrounds: more comprehensive installation of ticket gates at tube and railway stations in London from the nineties, and the introduction of the Oyster card system in 2003, as well as consistently above-inflation fare rises, prevented affordable or free travel around the city for young adults (albeit services were half-price for under-18s). London’s public transport was ranked the most expensive of any city in the world by 2015.
When the wider city is less accessible, more dangerous and more heavily policed, ‘the manor’ is rendered even more important. Grime’s strength was always in its intense localism, more than its expression of universal truths: crews from different London neighbourhoods described their ends with glowing pride, in part because they continued to be excluded from grander national or civic identities. The result is something reminiscent of what the sociologist Les Back called ‘neighbourhood nationalism’: a positive identification with the local area and the people in it, one that often transcended racial divisions, sharing slang and culture, to create a sense of civic harmony, even while racism and hostility remained commonplace in the city and the nation at large – the idea that ‘if you’re local, you’re all right’.2
The cosmopolitan hybridity intrinsic to scenes like two-tone ska, jungle, UK garage, grime and dubstep lead to some fun cultural collisions, layers of different identities, where cockney rhyming slang, Jamaican patois and twenty-first-century London slang overlap and cross-pollinate. White MC Nikki S’s bars on ‘Legendary’ boasts of the ease of his multiculturalism, even while supporting a team with a reputation for racist thuggery: ‘I’m a Millwall man, not West Ham/To my white mates I’m like “OI OI”, to my black bredrins I’m like “bless fam”.’3 Skepta’s track ‘Man’ reflects the same kind of harmony, with a subtle swap of two key nouns: ‘Came a long way from when whites never used to mix with blacks/Now all my white ni**as and my black mates, we got the game on smash.’4
Conviviality in the local community often came as a product of the danger that lay outside it, however. The grime scene ‘felt more like a community’ in the early days, says D Double E: ‘it felt a bit closer: we had to work our way out of certain conditions – it used to be quite racist back in the day in east London.’ Academic Anthony Gunter has shown that the growth of black and Asian youth ‘localism’ in recent decades was partly a response to the threat of racist violence in the wider city. All of his young east London subjects can give examples of other less safe neighbourhoods nearby: they mention specific National Front-run pubs that are known and discussed in the community, and carefully avoided.5 Similarly, Les Back writes that coming up against the barriers of institutional racism for some of his black interviewees – especially in employment, after leaving formal education – would provide a certain amount of shock, contrasted with the multicultural sociability of the local neighbourhood.
While there are precedents in parts of the UK hip-hop, reggae, jungle and UK garage scenes of the eighties and nineties (including a rich vein of reggae tracks about the Brixton riots), grime, more than any genre in its ancestry, makes a huge priority of neighbourhood pride. If you’re from the ends, then you know, if you aren’t, then you don’t. This is a genre for which a pivotal track, released in January 2003 in that crucial late-garage-into-grime period, was called ‘Are You Really From The Ends?’ – beginning with the dramatised, accusatory speech ‘Yo bro, where you from? You’re not from the borough, you’re not from the area, you’re not from the ends …’ Too many boy dem want to pretend, you see.6 Grime’s ‘rep your ends’ lyrics and anthems are not just countless, but integral to its entire identity. ‘Don’t chat shit if you ain’t from the ends, if you ain’t from the bits, if you ain’t from the block,’7 Dot Rotten growls on his desperately bleak mixtape-masterpiece, This Is the Beginning. Grime’s local fixation even gave rise to the coinage ‘endzish’ – i.e. being concerned with, and loyal to, the ends.
The south London anthems alone are legion: positioned against the east hierarchy, crews like South Agents and South Soldiers wore their allegiance prominently in their names. The most prominent of south London crews in the first wave, Essentials, made a track called ‘Doin It Now’ as a direct challenge to the rest of the city: ‘You don’t want to play with boys from south London,’ spits Remerdee, before the chorus ‘New Cross Gate, Brockley, Catford, Brixton way, Deptford, Peckham, Lewisham, ’llow [forget] Stonebridge, Tottenham, Slough: look who’s doing it now.’8 This south pride – particularly in the grime heartland and ‘blue borough’ of Lewisham – continued up to The Square’s 2015 tribute to ‘Lewisham McDeez’, a track calling on MCs to meet in the local McDonald’s for a clash. From SLK’s anthem ‘North Weezy’ (‘the north west city, where tings are gritty’) to Elf Kid declaring he is ‘Deptford Market’s local rep’ or Ipswich’s long-forgotten Hectic Squad asking, ‘What You Know About Ips?’, the grime canon is full of key lines and tracks in which the MCs’ identities are so wrapped up in the local area’s identity that separating them is impossible.
Grime’s king of local obsessions is, ironically, the MC who has lived mostly either in Kent or Cyprus (or Canada, or Jamaica, or Liverpool) for the last decade: the godfather. Wiley’s references to Bow litter numerous bars in numerous songs, the glaringly obvious one being his 2007 single ‘Bow E3’, in which he namechecks the local sights: Tredegar (Road), Monteith Estate (the home of his tower block, Clare House), Malmesbury (Primary School), Vicky (Victoria) Park and Moon Lee (Chinese takeaway). These reference points are far too obscure to call iconic in any city-wide sense, let alone beyond London or the UK: they’re all minor residential streets and amenities, all within a mile radius of each other, in an unfashionable and little-known part of east London, all walking distance from Wiley’s childhood home. Contrast it, in terms of the breadth of its horizons, to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ New York anthem, ‘Empire State of Mind’, with its bombastic, five-boroughs-spanning references to globally recognised places like Broadway, Harlem and Yankee Stadium. It might seem a mildly hyperbolic comparison, but both are anthemic singles by MCs widely recognised as being at (or near) the top of their respective genres – for Jay-Z, the song is there to rep that ‘Afrika Bambaataa shit, home of the hip-hop’, for Wiley, ‘we made the genre everybody’s onto, it’s all come from Bow E3’. The tracks serve the same purpose, but one is playing to the world gallery, against a backdrop of sweeping strings, with the bombast of a Hollywood film-score; the other, equally sincere, shouts out a tiny, dowdy local takeaway which currently has a rating of 2.2/5 on Google Reviews.
Though its horizons may have broadened a little over time, grime is in its essence not just local, but microscopically local. To make another hyperbolic comparison: US rappers like Lil Jon have a tendency to shout out the entire American South in their tunes – an area home to approximately 100 million people; Tinchy Stryder made a track called ‘One Of Those Days’ narrating one hectic day in his teenage life, with trouble brewing in the ends, the police circling, weed in the air, Wiley summoning him to the studio: all of it centred around grime’s single most iconic location: Roman Road in Bow. Is it any wonder people like to describe grime’s sonics as ‘claustrophobic’, when this is the world it inhabits? ‘As you get older,’ Tinchy reasoned, when I brought the song up with him a few years later, ‘your brain becomes more open to painting pictures that everyone’s in tune with. But back then, if you weren’t around Bow, you might not understand.’ That single road and its street market, locally known as ‘the Roman’, is mentioned in tracks by Kano, Ghetts, Dizzee and Merky Ace and (on several different occasions) Wiley, whose childhood home was a two-minute walk away. ‘Roman Road was so lively,’ Wiley once said to me, ‘because it had that street market culture, every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday – even walking around the local area, you could see Roman Road was the nurturer. It all has something to do with the Dizzees and Wileys coming through. It nurtures people to strive.’
Grime’s neighbourhood nationalist tendency is a response to urban claustrophobia, and a reflection of the need to confidently declare a positive identity: to stand up and be counted as a representative of your area; especially if it’s a re-branded, comic-book grime version of it. (Roll Deep’s Limehouse is known as Wilehouse, OT Crew repped Barking and Dogenham, The Square’s T-shirts name the blue borough Slewisham, while SN1’s Peckham is Pecknaam.) Perhaps these identities are all the more tempting if you’re a person of colour for whom diasporic identities feel precarious or contingent – if owning one or more of ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Jamaican’ or ‘Ghanaian’ feels complex or out of reach, or has been denied to you. ‘Repping’ is an interesting verb, in how generalised its meaning becomes: you might hear an MC just say casually while hosting a set, ‘Yeah, we’re repping’: one of those broad, generic bits of slang that says, even in the most generic sense, we’re here, we’re representing: ourselves, our peers, our area, something. It’s wrapped up in grime’s tendency to write self-help pep talks ostensibly directed to its listeners, but maybe really, subconsciously, directed inwards. You’re lacking confidence, but you shouldn’t be: ‘Stand Up Tall’, ‘Pick Yourself Up’. ‘I stand tall in the Deptford flats,’ spits Remerdee on Essentials’ ‘Headquarters’, capturing the spirit of grime’s hyper-localism – it is designed to uplift yourself, via pride in your ends. It’s something So Solid Crew’s Asher D sums up in his bars on ‘Southside Allstars’ too: ‘I just want to stand correct for my block.’
‘Southside Allstars’ and ‘Headquarters’ were two prime examples of the locally-orientated all-star tracks which dominated the pirate airwaves and Channel U in grime’s formative years. The latter – subsequently renamed ‘State Your Name’ upon its release – required each MC to present themselves as if in a military line-up: Remerdee, aka the Captain, asks of each MC in turn: ‘what’s your name soldier? State your location. Who are you repping?’ And after they’ve answered that, they’re ordered to ‘drop and give me 16’ – bars, rather than press-ups, of course. ‘You’re messing with the New Cross blue boss,’ spits Essentials’ K Dot in his 16, ‘it’s K Dot, Kidman, bad man from Brockley.’ The implication of militancy is a recurring theme – from Newham Generals to South Soldiers – not only because it suggestions violence and machismo, but also the idea of repping your area, and even wearing a uniform indicating your allegiance. ‘If you’re from dirty south, salute, and you’ve got a bandana to match your tracksuit …’ Young Dot spits on ‘Dirty South Salute’ – this is grime at its most gangsterish, where the (gang) colour of your bandana is enough to mark your territory.
Nikki S and Nyke’s ‘Southside Allstars’ is perhaps the most ostentatious example of neighbourhood pride, a legendary Channel U-era all-star track featuring a staggering fifteen different MCs from across south London, each repping their crew, their neighbourhood, their postcode, or all three. It was, Nikki S said to me from the back seat of his cab, ‘a statement, rather than a club tune’. It was a response to, and intensified, the south v. east tensions of the early 2000s. So Solid Crew had dominated the MC-driven side of UK garage so completely that, according to Nyke, all the east London top dogs (Geeneus from Rinse FM, Diesle from Deja Vu FM) had a ‘secret meeting’ in which they plotted to build up an alternative power base. ‘They basically said, “We’re going to build a fence up around east now, and start burrowing in, and making our own sound.”’ Alias, the respected early grime producer who made the ‘Southside Riddim’ instrumental for them, deliberately neglected to stamp his ‘Alias’ audio-logo on the track, as he usually would. ‘He was worried that his tunes would get shut down by Slimzee and Geeneus,’ Nyke recalled – the association might be too controversial. ‘I remember the east London artists were ringing up our manager, Sponge, because he would be orchestrating raves still in south, and they were like, “What, is it cool to come south? Is it beef Sponge?”’ The very last line of ‘Southside Allstars’, after almost six exhausting minutes of chest-beating and relentless hype, is the devastating mic-drop of, ‘You can roll deep but not around here.’ Did they mean ‘roll deep’ or ‘Roll Deep’? Almost certainly both.
The consequence of this intensifying neighbourhood nationalism, of outward pride and inward claustrophobia, was that anything beyond the boundaries of the neighbourhood felt at best like an alien landscape, and at worst like enemy territory. For Geeneus, a teenage fixation on getting onto legendary jungle station Kool FM presented a huge obstacle: everyone on Kool FM was from Hackney, and he was in Bow. Back then, it felt like those areas were worlds apart, ‘Like the difference between London and Manchester,’ rather than being about 15 minutes down the road. ‘Don’t worry about what’s going on across the water,’ K Dot from Essentials says on the first Risky Roadz DVD, when he’s asked how his south London crew will cope with east London’s dominance of the scene. He makes it sound like another country, but the body of water he’s referring to is the Thames, not the Atlantic Ocean or the English Channel. Almost every MC I’ve ever interviewed has talked about their first experience going to perform at a pirate station or a rave outside their immediate neighbourhood, and the anxiety associated with the expedition. ‘I remember going to Eskimo Dance in Watford, and it felt like the furthest place in the world,’ Tinchy Stryder told me in 2010, confused by the myopia that had once been the norm. ‘It was weird, I didn’t ever look at the bigger picture.’
It was a weird disjunction for a crew like Ruff Sqwad, with their expansive musical horizons, making epic-sounding ‘stadium rock’ grime like ‘Died In Your Arms’ or ‘Together’, but still nervous about their music taking them more than a few miles from their front door. It was no small thing for a group of black east London teenagers to travel to parts of north London or Essex (‘even Dagenham!’ Dirty Danger exclaimed) to do guest shows on other pirates, or visit vinyl-cutting houses or recording studios. ‘In a sense you’re risking your life,’ Rapid told me, earnestly, ‘because we used to come out of our area where we’re comfortable, taking buses and trains to Tottenham, or walking deep into areas in Hackney from the bus stop: we’d have people asking, “Where are you from? What are you doing here?” seeing people pulling out guns at the radio stations, dogs, whatever – it was a harsh time.’
This is the more perilous side of the intense, claustrophobic atmosphere the grime generation grew up in: ‘slipping’, or being caught alone or outnumbered, outside of your area – it relates to the meaning of the phrase roll deep, in fact: when you move, move in numbers. ‘No whip, out the manor linking chicks: that’s slipping,’9 Kano helpfully explains on ‘P’s And Q’s’. Wiley was not the only grime MC to be stabbed (14 times, on two separate occasions) while out of his area – he also wrote a specific song about getting caught ‘slipping in south west London … wrong place, wrong time’. The evolution of this kind of nihilistic territorialism, the negative side of the convivial neighbourhood nationalism, became increasingly hyped by the media as ‘postcode wars’ during the 2000s – though it was, inevitably, more complicated than that suggests. Location-specific criminal gangs have a long history in London prior to this point, going back decades, if not centuries – at my school in south London in the mid-nineties, the playground chat was all about the 28s (in Brixton), and Wo Shing Wo, a triad gang (all over) – but the received wisdom is that inter-area hostility has greatly intensified in the last 20 years: it correlates, in fact, with the increasing gentrification of the inner city. The relationship between music and these conflicts was tenuous in grime’s heyday, but it still affected young black musicians, insofar as their safety when they roamed outside of the neighbourhood was under threat in a way that was both unique, and generally overlooked by the powers that be. By the end of the 2000s the connection was becoming less tenuous, reflected in the overlap between ‘road rap’ music videos and (albeit hype-driven) ‘gang-related’ videos on YouTube, becoming a surreal public forum for inter-area conflict in London. Depressingly, it is even less tenuous now, with respect to drill music, in particular, where performative lyrics about riding to ‘opp blocks’ to attack or humiliate opponents seem to correspond more and more with the reality.
‘It’s mad,’ mused DJ and MC Complex in Simon Wheatley’s Don’t Call Me Urban!, summing up the futility and absurdity of the conflict between Lewisham and Peckham, located just over the borough boundary in Southwark: ‘It’s all south east London really, but they have blue bins and we have green ones, and if it was just one area there’d be no problem.’ He also suggested the problem had intensified in the short space of a decade, in grime’s lifetime: ‘I live in Peckham, but no area is great enough for me to put my life on the line. I’m not putting my life on the line for a postcode! I try to explain this to my cousins but their generation’s different. I left school in 1999 and now it’s 2008 and a lot has changed.’
To insert myself into the story momentarily, as a marker of how race and class privilege can determine the way you move around the city, I remember being momentarily surprised by a black workmate saying to me, in 2006, that her little brother was about to turn 17, and she was determined he would learn to drive and get a car immediately. We were both lifelong south Londoners, both in our mid-twenties. I’d never learned to drive, and she hadn’t either – there never seemed any point, in a city with a public transport network as comprehensive as London’s – but her little brother was a black teenager, in London, in 2006, and thus, she reasoned, needed the safety of being able to move around the city without risking trouble. The point is, you don’t have to be involved in any kind of trouble, let alone a known gangster, to warrant an attack – you just have to be not known to local young people with gang pretensions, and thus assumed to be an enemy, and fair game. This is what Rapid means by ‘in a sense, you’re risking your life’.
Without the safety or money to travel, you’re restricted to a small bit of turf, watched from all sides, back to the wall, justifiably paranoid and tense. ‘Imagine if we never grew up on a council estate, and was country manor raised with a spoon in our mouth: would we still be making fuss about the east and the south?’ Dizzee asks on ‘Imagine’, a poignant track off Showtime about class, privilege and ‘selling out’. He concludes that ‘we don’t know who the real enemy is … instead we defend a couple square metres of pavement.’10 Territorialism intensifies as the space you are allowed access to gets smaller. This same futile postcode-warrior mentality was lamented more than a decade later by teenage south London rapper Dave (partial to the odd grime crossover tune); on ‘JKYL+HYD’ he squeezes in an extra dose of tragicomic pathos – the madness of defending an area with your life which you could never hope to own a home in, to have a proper stake in – and under grey London skies, to boot: ‘Man are still beefing over ends, but we don’t own this land, and we don’t even like this weather.’11
On the 2004 Radio 1 documentary, East is East, still only 19, Dizzee was asked to explain his references to a ‘ghetto mentality’ – similar to what the rapper Skinnyman called, on his thematically grimy album from the same year, a Council Estate of Mind. ‘Our ghettos aren’t necessarily massive projects,’ Dizzee said, comparing them to American mega-estates, ‘but they’re council estates [where] people have a ghetto frame of mind: you’ve got a small perspective on things, you see it a certain way, from the corner.’ This explanation of the myopia of the ends casts significant light on the title of his debut: Dizzee was not just the boy in the corner because of a personal loner sensibility, or because he’d been sent there by an exasperated teacher – his whole outlook, and that of many of his peers, had been shaped by life on the margins. It’s hard not to feel like you’re in a corner, when you’ve been backed into it. In a sense, the creation of grime was not just a collective act of identity formation, but the creation of a space – one positioned in between dominant American pop culture, the alienation and hopelessness of British society (especially as jobs-for-life and the welfare state disappeared), and inherited second- or third-generation immigrant cultures that felt less relevant to the young lives of those touching the mic.
Given the intensity of the manor, it’s no wonder that the possibility music offered for escape was tantalising. Playing abroad for the first time, or even reaching new audiences beyond the youth club or the local pirate station was mind-expanding. The location didn’t even have to be glamorous, to begin with. For Skepta, going to St Albans, north of London, to do Manic FM, or to Stevenage, Hitchin or Hatfield – exurbs and small towns circling the north of London – to play a rave, or on a pirate station, was part of building up his first non-local fanbase, and realising that the music’s popularity could travel beyond the manor. But it was also an escape from the claustrophobia of the ends, its drama and road beefs. ‘In the early days,’ he laughed, ‘going to Stevenage was like going on holiday.’
Being on the margins of urban living does not mean living in the furthest outskirts of the city, necessarily – it’s not about how close you are to the centre in miles; to the citadels of power, to the tourist attractions, to Westminster or to Buckingham Palace. What matters is your economic distance, your social distance, your psychic distance, and your ability to move freely around the city, unharmed. As grime helped some of its crossover stars to get out of the ends for the first time, interaction with the ‘official’ parts of London recognisable from a postcard marked a kind of graduation, from the manor to the parts of the city already open to those with class, wealth and race privileges. On BBC London radio in 2010 Dizzee recalled his fond memories, in the early days, of coasting over the bridges over the Thames at dawn, on the way home from a rave in south London: ‘that’s proper,’ he said – that ‘feels like a movie’. The host, Robert Elms, asked if he felt a sense of inclusion in his home city. ‘More so now,’ Dizzee replied, ‘now I’ve come up in the business world.’ Money delimits, and poverty constrains.
‘I was born in this little bit of rock, in the East End,’ he said in an interview with the Independent back in 2003. ‘But I’m in the world now.’ It’s startling to think that people he grew up with were not ‘in’ the world, as far as Dizzee was concerned, so tightly bound was the geography.
There is also another side to grime’s neighbourhood nationalism: a forgiving and expansive sense that anyone who has chosen to be in the in-group of this maligned form of underground music, anyone who is listening – on the radio, in the rave – is all right by the MC. All the more so, in those early years, when the idea that anyone beyond the postcode might care was dazzling and flattering. ‘How did they even hear of us?’ London MCs have said to me several times of their first interactions with random fans in Scotland, or beyond the UK. You can hear expressions of a kind of community solidarity in MCs’ asides and ad-libs to an audience on radio and rave tapes from over the years: ‘big up the north London crew … south London crew … east London crew … west London crew’. And it goes outside the M25, too, to a sense of a nationwide or global community; Dizzee’s ‘Stand Up Tall’ may start out with the assertion that he’s ‘London city forever’, but also that he is ‘ghetto wherever’, until he’s shouting ‘Big up my Midlands, up north troops’, and then, beyond England, ‘Big up my Ireland, Scotland types’ and finally ‘Europe, USA troops’. He does it on ‘Get By’, too, muttering the sermon’s opening incantation: ‘London ghetto, Birmingham ghetto, Manchester ghetto, Luton ghetto … each area council estate.’
There’s a sense of solidarity with the troops and ghettos in other cities, in other ends of London, or in other countries: on a banal level, the troops being shouted out might just be fans: anyone who ‘gets it’, anyone who supports the music. But it’s also perhaps a kind of testament to the way cities are evolving: divisions deepen and the wealthy centre becomes estranged from the urban margins. It’s a pattern repeated the world over: economic globalisation, increasingly complex migration patterns, and cultural globalisation mean that the super-rich living in gated communities or helicoptering into their penthouses in London or New York share more with their fellow elites in Johannesburg, Moscow or Rio, than they do with the poor people living two miles down the road, and vice versa.12 In this respect, Dizzee’s ‘troops’ in Bow have more in common with their peers in council estates in south-east London, or Paris, or Atlanta, than they do with fellow Londoners who are lucky enough to grow up with a decent amount of economic, housing and health security, who aren’t harangued by the police on a daily basis, and so on. ‘Ghetto wherever’ is a shout-out, a testament to the fact that moving around the world won’t change him, but it’s also a description of the global thread connecting the urban margins across the world.
Sometimes, grime has taken on a grander civic identity, and the mantle of speaking to or for London as a whole – on Kano’s ‘London Town’, Ruff Sqwad’s ‘London’ or Devlin’s ‘London City’. The latter is a starry-eyed, twinkly paean to the capital, and literally charts a journey from the margins, the Dagenham where Devlin grew up, into the West End for a lads’ night out: ‘I’m on the A13 on the way to the city,’13 it begins, a tribute to the trunk road linking the city centre to the Essex borders, the same road that divides Bow from Canary Wharf. It’s fairly rare for grime MCs to romanticise the capital like Devlin and Ruff Sqwad do on these tracks – ‘the best city in the world when everyone’s not shanking and blasting’ is Devlin’s qualified compliment – but the desire to do so is clearly there, even if it’s almost impossible to overlook the hardships they’ve grown up with. ‘Right about now man have got nothing but nish/east London where it smells like fish,’14 runs one of the verses on the Ruff Sqwad track.
Wiley’s three-minute letter to his grandma, ‘Nan I Am London’, is a glorious personification of the city from the MC who spits bars about the capital incessantly. ‘Ask anybody, anytime, anywhere, if Eskiboy represents London? I am London.’15 It’s tempting to compare his sense of belonging and identification with London to the attitude of his forebears. Could a 1970s reggae artist, or 1950s calypso artist, have transcended a sense of unease and alienation in the city to write a song pronouncing, ‘I Am London’? Lord Kitchener’s ‘London Is the Place for Me’, written upon his arrival from Trinidad on the Empire Windrush in 1948, is a celebration of the city: but it’s a giddy tale of arrival at a ‘mother country’, not one of direct identification or recognition. For all the grime generation’s manifold types of exclusion, they were embedded, and justifiably defiant about their right to the city. Dizzee Rascal was asked a few years ago on BBC Radio London whether he thought, in fifty years time, people would still be listening to his music. Of course they would, he laughed: ‘I’m here – I’m in the fabric.’