PROLOGUE
1. Stan Anderson, ‘How Wiley Finally Learne to Accept His Role As The Godfather of Grime’, The Fader, 12 January 2017
ONE: THE CITY AND THE CITY
1. James Meek, ‘In Broadway Market’, LRB.co.uk, 9 August 2011
2. Wot Do U Call It?, Channel 4 documentary, 2003
3. So much so, in fact, that east London-raised sociologist Professor Dick Hobbs could write in Doing the Business (1988): ‘Despite the odd outpost of bourgeois settlement in Wapping and Hackney and bizarre shrines to gentility in Spitalfields, the East End has evolved as an exclusively working-class society … East of the City of London you are either an East-Ender, a middle-class interloper, or you can afford to move sufficiently far east to join the middle classes of suburban Essex.’
4. The Chop Up: The Grimiest, B.E.T. documentary, 2006
5. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Graftin’’ (XL Recordings, 2004)
6. East is East, BBC Radio 1 documentary, 25 May 2004
7. For more on this see Owen Hatherley, ‘The myth that Canary Wharf did east London any good’, The Guardian, 15 May 2012
8. LDDC, ‘A Strategy for Regeneration’, November 1997
9. The Robert Elms show, BBC London radio, 15 June 2010
10. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Is This Real?’ (XL Recordings, 2004)
11. ‘Didn’t chat about champagne and cars/More concerned with you know, the grime’ – Dizzee Rascal narrates his own early career, ‘Showtime’ (XL Recordings, 2004)
12. Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma (Penguin, 2008)
13. ‘The quality of housing and imbalances in the mix of tenures, household incomes and uses are a key factor in the decline of many neighbourhoods. We are paying a heavy price for past mistakes: over-sized estates designed for only one tenure, and chronic under-investment by some owner-occupiers and landlords. Public investment in affordable “social” housing must achieve a stronger mix of people within a neighbourhood and deliver more flexible tenures.’ – The Urban Task Force, Towards an Urban Renaissance (Routledge, 1999)
14. ‘The Government may want an urban renaissance, but middle-class families are heading for the hills, scared off by crime, drugs gangs and poor schools,’ said an editorial in the Observer in April 2003, calling Britain a ‘two-tier nation’.
15. Dan Hancox, ‘In These Corny, Depressing Videos London’s Property Development Sharks Make Themselves Look Like Dicks’, Vice, 10 December 2014. The developer was Richard Fagg, Regional Director for London and the South East for property giant Bouygues Development. And no, I didn’t write the headline.
16. The word ‘creativity’ was used constantly, wrote Robert Hewison in Cultural Capital (Verso, 2014) because it ‘suggested transformation without inconvenient specificity’.
17. Peep Show, Channel 4, 2007
TWO: IN THE ROOTS
1. Hattie Collins and Olivia Rose, This Is Grime (Hodder & Stoughton, 2016)
2. Ibid.
3. Kano, ‘Kano – Made In The Manor Documentary’, YouTube video. Posted Feb 2016.
4. Hattie Collins and Olivia Rose, This Is Grime (Hodder & Stoughton, 2016)
5. Risky Roadz, ‘Devlin RiskyRoadz Freestyle 2016’, YouTube video. Posted Feb 2016.
6. Nabeel Zuberi, ‘New Throat Fe Chat’, in Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 (Routledge, 2014)
7. In a sense, the idea that cockney culture and slang are traditionally thought to be formed and contained within earshot of the Bow Bells, arguably makes the historic church the pirate radio station of its day.
8. See Jeffrey Boakye’s Hold Tight (Influx Press, 2017) for much more on this.
9. Which is not to say some key grime artists didn’t borrow templates and tropes from American hip-hop as well: Dizzee in particular was fixated on southern rap, as well as Biggie and Tupac (and Nirvana) – he told me ‘I Luv U’ was an attempt to make a London version of Memphis Bleek’s ‘Is That Your Chick’. ‘Sittin’ Here’, meanwhile, was ‘a bit like my version of “Project Windows” by Nas’, and ‘Jezebel’ was originally written to Foxy Brown and Blackstreet’s ‘Get You Home’. Meanwhile other pioneering producers like Ruff Sqwad were taking concepts and inspiration directly from Dipset and Just Blaze, before reconfiguring it through the filter of the music around them, and the lineage of jungle and UK garage.
10. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Harvard University Press, 1993)
11. Resident Advisor podcast, ‘EX.301 Geeneus’, 12 May 2016
12. Emma Warren, ‘Wiley: The Eski Boy’, Red Bull Music Academy Daily, 26 May 2015.
13. Wiley, Eskiboy (William Heinemann, 2017). ‘Crackney’ = Crack cocaine + pre-gentrification Hackney.
THREE: THE NEW ICE AGE
1. Grime’s early golden age is littered with utterly transient producers and MCs who appeared from nowhere, created or destroyed one beat, and vanished forever. In Essentials’ superb Deja Vu FM set from 10 May 2004, a south London MC called Pepper pops up on an epically long, never-released version of ‘Headquarters’, later released in substantially condensed form as ‘State Your Name’, and delivers 16 bars of furious hype – he promises to ‘eat MCs like Kipling cupcakes’ – to howls of approval from Remerdee and the other MCs in the studio. It’s one of the best 16s I’ve ever heard, and yet nobody seems to know anything about the MC. Even with extensive digital archiving of pirate radio sets and DVDs, and YouTube accounts like ‘silverdrizzle’ devoted to uploading grime’s lost and unreleased mp3s, its basement tapes, no other recording or mention of Pepper seems to exist anywhere, just this ferocious 30 seconds on the mic: ‘Pretty mean, with a 16 I split spleens/I’ll slash you in half like a TV splitscreen/Spit clean just to let you know I’m rinsing, then I’m gone/Watch my style just slipstream.’ In the blink of an eye the next MC comes in, and like Pepper says, he’s gone.
2. Ian McQuaid, ‘The lost grime anthem behind Stormzy’s Shut Up’, Red Bull, 8 December 2015
3. Resident Advisor podcast, ‘EX.301 Geeneus’, 12 May 2016
4. Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (Faber, 1998)
5. Skepta, ‘King Of Grime’ (Boy Better Know, 2007)
6. Instinctn9, ‘Skepta vs Ghetto’, YouTube video. Posted May 2008.
7. Martin Clark, ‘Eski Beat: An interview with Wiley – Part 1’, Hyperdub, October 2003 – republished on Fabric London, 21 May 2014
8. Simon Reynolds, ‘A Life of Grime’, Spin, August 2005
9. Martin Clark, ‘Eski Beat: An interview with Wiley – Part 1’, Hyperdub, October 2003 – republished on Fabric London, 21 May 2014
10. Music Nation: Open Mic, Dazed documentary, 2014
11. Jammer & Diamond Click Ft. Sharky Major, ‘Don’t Ya Know’ (Jahmektheworld, 2003)
12. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Do It’ (XL Recordings, 2003)
13. Stormin, ‘Stormin, Sharky Major and D Double E over Chinaman’, YouTube video. Posted May 2013.
14. Sharky Major, ‘This Ain’t A Game’ (Unreleased, 2003). NB sometimes named ‘Diss Ain’t A Game’.
15. Roll Deep, ‘Bounce’ (Wiley Kat Records, 2002)
FOUR: THE LAST OF THE PIRATES
1. Dick Hobbs, Doing the Business (OUP, 1994)
2. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Graftin’’ (XL Recordings, 2004)
3. Resident Advisor podcast, ‘EX.301 Geeneus’, 12 May 2016
4. Ibid.
5. JDZmedia, ‘JDZmedia – Little Dee & P Money [B2B]’, YouTube video. Posted Apr 2017.
FIVE: THE MAINSTREAM AND THE MANOR
1. Dizzee Rascal, ‘2 Far ft. Wiley’ (XL Recordings, 2003)
2. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Sittin’ Here’ (XL Recordings, 2003)
3. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Brand New Day’ (XL Recordings, 2003)
4. Hattie Collins and Olivia Rose, This Is Grime (Hodder & Stoughton, 2016)
5. Wiley, ‘Keep Moving ft. Donaeo and JME’ (Boy Better Know, 2006)
6. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Brand New Day’ (XL Recordings, 2003)
7. Sophie Goodchild, ‘Raids are launched on radio pirates’, The Independent, 3 December 2000
8. Cat Park, ‘A Tribute: Darren Platt, Founder Of Channel U’, Clash, 15 July 2016
9. Their two ‘Heating’ studio sets and ‘Stop the Deck’ mixtape are well worth hunting down – as is their show on Deja Vu FM with DJ Bossman from 10/05/04. Jendor and N.E. would go on to form O.G.’z (Organised Grime), with P Money, Blacks, Dot Rotten and Little Dee.
SIX: GRIME WAVES AND THE RESPECT AGENDA
1. Jamie Jackson, ‘Ready to blow’, The Guardian, 24 April 2005
2. Ruth Levitt and William Solesbury, ‘Policy tsars: here to stay but more transparency needed’, King’s College London, December 2012
3. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Respect Me’ (XL Recordings, 2004)
4. Skepta, ‘The End’ (Not on label, 2005)
5. Clicky2k9, ‘Skepta – In The Country Reply [Wiley Diss]’, YouTube video. Posted Jun 2009.
6. Wiley, ‘Nightbus Dubplate’ (Not on label, 2006)
7. Kano, ‘GarageSkankFREESTYLE’ (Parlophone, 2016)
8. Aimee Cliff, ‘How Nolay Found The Strength To Speak Up For Women Everywhere’, The Fader, 17 April 2017. The self-descriptive Female Allstars’ 2006 track ‘Grab That Mic’ was a brief if overlooked attempt to give a platform to underrated female MCs like No Lay, Lady Fury and Lioness, a feat repeated with Rock The Mic in 2012 – but it is only more recently, with the crossover successes of Lady Leshurr, Nadia Rose and Stefflon Don that the situation seems to have improved slightly for female MCs.
9. Richard Bramwell, UK Hip-Hop, Grime and the City (Routledge, 2014)
10. JME, ‘Man Don’t Care (ft. Giggs)’ (Boy Better Know, 2015)
11. Big-E D ft. D Double E, ‘Frontline’ (After Shock, 2003)
12. ‘From Grime Legends to Grime History Vol. 7’, www.slewdemmafia.com, 3 January 2016
13. Jeffrey Boakye, Hold Tight (Influx Press, 2017)
14. David Olusoga, Black and British (Macmillan, 2016)
15. Jocelyn Cornwell, Hard-Earned Lives (Routledge, 1984)
16. For more about the response to the Macpherson Report see Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Routledge, 2011)
17. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Vexed’ (XL Recordings, 2003)
18. Dizzee Rascal, ‘I Luv U (Remix) ft. Sharky Major and Wiley’ (XL Recordings, 2003)
19. Tom Lea, ‘‘‘Died in your Arms”: before the legendary grime unit disbands, FACT meets Ruff Sqwad to talk White Label Classics’, Fact, 3 December 2012
20. The Fader, ‘Skepta – Shutdown In NYC’, YouTube video. Posted Mar 2015.
21. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Do It’ (XL Recordings, 2003)
22. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Stop Dat’ (XL Recordings, 2003)
23. Ned Beauman, ‘Is violence holding grime back?’, The Guardian, 6 November 2006
24. John Heale, One Blood (Simon & Schuster, 2012)
25. ‘London – Crazy Titch’, Vice, 7 November 2006
26. Tim Lott, ‘Racism – it’s not simply a black and white issue’, Evening Standard, 27 June 2002
27. John Muncie, Youth and Crime (SAGE Publications, 2004)
28. Gareth McLean, ‘In the hood’, The Guardian, 13 May 2017
29. Lady Sovereign, ‘Hoodie’ (Def Jam, 2005)
SEVEN: NEIGHBOURHOOD NATIONALISM
1. Tania de St Croix, ‘Volunteers and Entrepreneurs? Youth work and the big society’, in Youth Work: Histories, Policy and Contexts (ed. Graham Bright) (Palgrave, 2015)
2. Les Back, New Ethnicities and Urban Culture (Routledge, 1996)
3. GRM Daily, ‘Nikki S & Nyke feat. Flirta D – Legendary’, YouTube video. Posted Sep 2016.
4. Skepta, ‘Man’ (Boy Better Know, 2016)
5. Anthony Gunter, Growing Up Bad? Black Youth, ‘Road’ Culture and Badness in an East London Neighbourhood (The Tufnell Press, 2010)
6. End Productions, ‘Are You Really From The Ends?’ (End Productions, 2003)
7. Young Dot, ‘Don’t Chat Shhh’ (Not on label, 2007)
8. Da’VinChe ft. Essentials, ‘Doin It Now’ (Paperchase Recordings, 2003)
9. Kano, ‘P’s And Q’s’ (679, 2004)
10. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Imagine’ (XL Recordings, 2004)
11. Dave, ‘JKYL + HYD’ (Not on label, 2016)
12. Andrew Merrifield, The New Urban Question (Pluto Press, 2014)
13. Devlin, ‘London City’ (Island, 2010)
14. Ruff Sqwad, ‘London’ (Ruff Sqwad Recordings, 2006)
15. Wiley, ‘Nan I Am London’ (Boy Better Know, 2007)
EIGHT: SHUTDOWN
1. Including grime’s sibling dubstep, which initially tended towards the egalitarian layout of having the DJ booth on the same plane as the dancers, ensconced in darkness – and usually weed smoke, until the British smoking ban came into force in July 2007.
2. Joseph Patterson, ‘Sidewinder’s Untold Story’, Complex, 11 May 2017
3. Chantelle Fiddy, ‘Restin’, chantellefiddy.blogspot.co.uk, 24 April 2006
4. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Make It Last’ (Dirtee Stank, 2017)
5. Dubstep DJ and producer Loefah named his label Swamp 81 after the police operation that prompted the 1981 Brixton riots, and was asked to explain the musical connection: ‘I think a lot of shit started after the riots. I was chatting to [reggae artist] Ricky Ranking one day when he was working with The Bug. We were talking about the riot and he told me the best party he’d ever been to was the night it all finished, a party on Coldharbour Lane in a disused warehouse type gaf. He said it was black, white, Asian: it wasn’t a race thing. It was lovers rock all night long.’ Martin Clark, ‘Full Circle’, blackdownsoundboy.blogspot.com, 16 May 2009
NINE: DIY AND REDEMPTION SONGS
1. Simon Wheatley, Don’t Call Me Urban! (Northumbria Press, 2015)
2. Jme, ‘Serious’ (Boy Better Know, 2005)
3. Wiley, ‘Nightbus Dubplate’ (Not on label, 2006)
4. Kano, ‘Sometimes’ (679, 2005)
5. Durrty Goodz, ‘License To Skill’ (Awkward, 2007)
6. Dave Stelfox, ‘How to Make Grime Pay’, The Guardian, 16 May 2008
7. Ibid.
8. Nasty Jack, ‘Oh Yes’ (Nasty Records, 2007)
9. Trim, ‘Inside Looking Out’ (Not on label, 2008)
10. Wiley, ‘Nightbus Dubplate’ (Not on label, 2006)
11. Elijah, ‘Swagger = Swag’, Butterz blog, October 2008
12. Young Dot, ‘Broke For So Long’ (Not on label, 2007). NB he changed his name to Dot Rotten with his subsequent mixtape, ‘RIP Young Dot’.
13. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Get By’ (XL Recordings, 2004)
14. Roll Deep, ‘Let It Out’ (Relentless, 2005)
15. Andrew Motion, ‘On The Record’ (2003)
16. Ghetts, ‘Fuck Radio Volume 5: Ghetts Birthday Set’ (Not on label, 2007)
TEN: WE RUN THE STREETS TODAY
1. ‘Video: Students protests beat the snow’, The Guardian, 30 November 2010
2. When challenged on the use of kettling on the day Ian Tomlinson was killed in 2009, PC Simon Harwood’s commanding officer, Inspector Timothy Williams, told the inquest he disliked the term, and preferred ‘peace bubble’ to ‘kettle’. After the student protests, David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham and one of the few black MPs in parliament, asked then Home Secretary Theresa May in a parliamentary debate, ‘Is not the point of a kettle that it brings things to the boil?’ She replied – as she had done several times already, ‘The police ensure[d] that it was possible for peaceful protesters to leave Parliament Square.’ See my ebook Kettled Youth (Random House, 2011) for more on this.
3. A legal challenge against the Met was taken all the way to the European court of human rights in 2012, but kettling was ruled lawful.
4. Tom O’Grady, ‘How politicians created, rather than reacted to, negative public opinion on benefits’, LSE British Politics and Policy blog, 7 November 2017
5. Jme, ‘96 Fuckries’ (Boy Better Know, 2012)
6. Genesis Elijah, ‘UK Riots’ (Not on label, 2011)
7. Bashy, ‘Angels Can’t Fly ft. Ed Sheeran’ (Not on label, 2011)
8. Fresharda, ‘Tottenham Riot’ (Not on label, 2011)
9. 2KOlderz, ‘They Will Not Control Us’ (Not on label, 2011)
10. Skepta, ‘Castles’ (Boy Better Know, 2012)
11. Plan B, ‘Ill Manors’ (679, 2012)
12. Rival, ‘Talk That’ (Major Music, 2011)
ELEVEN: GENTRIFICATION AND THE MANOR REMADE
1. Alex Vasudevan, Alex Jeffrey, Colin McFarlane, ‘Rethinking Enclosure: Space, Subjectivity and the Commons’, Antipode, Volume 44, Issue 4, September 2012
2. If … Things Don’t Get Better, BBC 2, 17 March 2004
3. East is East, BBC Radio 1 documentary, 25 May 2004
4. As I expand upon in ‘The Sad and Shocking Truth About London’s Poverty Exiles’, Vice, 22 December 2014
5. See my article, ‘East London “Regeneration” vs. Young Mothers’, Vice, 21 January 2014
6. Jonathan Meades, ‘Constructive Survival’ (2006), collected in Museums Without Walls (Unbound, 2013)
7. Luke Jacobs, ‘Residents unhappy at Stratford Rex re-opening proposals’, Newham Recorder, 23 February 2012
8. James Butler, ‘Social Cleansing in Tower Hamlets: Interview with Balfron Tower Evictee’, Novara, 20 August 2013
9. Nabeel Zuberi, ‘New Throat Fe Chat’ in Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 (Routledge, 2014)
10. ‘Relighting the torch: securing the Olympic legacy’, London Assembly report, November 2017
11. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Scream ft. Pepper’(Dirtee Stank, 2012)
12. Jace Clayton, ‘J Hus Is The Sound Of Diaspora’s Boomerang’, The Fader, 25 April 2017
13. ‘M-Town: The Hidden Olympic Village’, film from Simon Wheatley’s Don’t Call Me Urban! digital version (Northumbria Press, 2015)
TWELVE: A TRUE URBAN RENAISSANCE
1. Skepta, ‘That’s Not Me ft. Jme’ (Boy Better Know, 2014)
2. Ibid.
3. Hattie Collins, ‘Time For: Skepta’, G-Shock Blog, 9 June 2014
4. Ibid.
5. Both Rapid from Ruff Sqwad and Wiley have lyrics which attest to this invisibility: ‘you can’t see me because I move low key’ in Rapid’s case, and ‘I guess you wanna find me but I move low key’ in Wiley’s.
6. Skepta, ‘Shutdown’ (Boy Better Know, 2015)
7. Ajay Rose, ‘How Rashid Kasirye’s Link Up TV Became A Dominant Force In UK Rap’, Complex, 17 October 2017
8. Ben Homewood, ‘The sound of the streets: The inside story of Spotify’s Who We Be show’, Music Week, 12 December 2017
9. Chip, ‘Sonic Boom’ (Cash Motto Limited, 2015)
10. Aniefiok Ekpoudom, ‘Inside Chip’s Decade-Long Journey To Become One Of Grime’s Most Honest Voices’, The Fader, 8 December 2016
11. The coinage is Jace Clayton’s, in Uproot (FSG Originals, 2016)
12. Ben Homewood, ‘Common sense: A detailed look at UK rap’s new industry’, Music Week, 19 December 2017
13. Stormzy, ‘Wicked Skengman 4’ (Not on label, 2015)
THIRTEEN: THE REAL PRIME MINISTERS
1. Ben Homewood, ‘Glastonbury moments: How Skepta broke in 2016’, Music Week, 21 June 2017
2. Joseph Patterson, ‘Interview: Sharky Major’s Grime Originals Rave Is About To Take Over’, Complex, 20 November 2017
3. Skepta, ‘Konnichiwa’ (Boy Better Know, 2016)
4. Sanjana Varghese, ‘Big up MLE – the origins of London’s 21st century slang’, New Statesman, 26 August 2017
5. Nick Harding, ‘Why are so many middle-class children speaking in Jamaican patois? A father of an 11-year-old girl laments a baffling trend’, Daily Mail, 11 October 2013
6. Musa Okwonga, ‘Pogba x Stormzy: the blackest football transfer ever’, okwonga.com, 10 August 2016
7. ‘New wave of Birmingham rappers fired up by Lady Leshurr’, BBC News, 25 November 2016
8. It wasn’t actually the first time the grime scene had been used to mobilise the vote. In a rather more obscure example, a decade and a half earlier, in the local elections of May 2002, Camden Council made the slightly oddball decision to get More Fire Crew to rework their hit ‘Oi’ into ‘Oi Vote’ – complete with a cinema advertising campaign, and a glossy reminder card featuring Bizzle and his fellow MCs, and the words ‘More Fire Crew say Oi vote!’.
9. Alexi Duggins, ‘#grime4Corbyn – why British MCs are uniting behind the Labour leader’, The Guardian, 17 May 2017
10. ‘Young voters, class and turnout: how Britain voted in 2017’, The Guardian, 20 June 2017
11. Kate Hutchinson, ‘Boy Better Know: “We should have been playing big festivals six years ago”’, The Guardian, 22 June 2017
12. John Broughton, Municipal Dreams (Verso, 2018)
13. Dave, ‘Question Time’ (Not on label, 2017)
14. Artists For Grenfell, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ (Syco Music, 2017)
EPILOGUE: BACK YOUR CITY
1. Deutsche Bank, ‘Mapping the World’s Prices 2017’, 3 May 2017. The report compares the prices of monthly travelcards in cities around the world: London’s cost $174 USD, a substantial distance ahead of Dublin, in second place, at $131 USD, and double that of San Francisco, Boston and Berlin.
2. LSE, ‘The role of overseas investors in the London new-build residential market: Final report for Homes for London’ (May 2017). Using Land Registry data, researchers from York University estimated that 13 per cent of London new-build units sold in the two years to March 2016 were bought by overseas buyers (excluding properties sold for less than £200,000 and including those sold to overseas companies).
3. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Slow Your Roll’ (Dirtee Stank, 2017)
4. Alexi Duggins, ‘Dizzee Rascal: Read NME’s exclusive comeback interview’, NME, 14 July 2017
5. Straight No Chaser, ‘Straight No Chaser: Scorcher – Music, Movies and The Movement’, YouTube video. Posted May 2015.
6. Harlem Spartans, ‘Kent Nizzy’ (Not on label, 2017)
7. Ibid.
8. Dizzee Rascal, ‘Brand New Day’ (XL Recordings, 2003)