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The Year So Far Pt. 1 |
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As 2007 tailed off into 2008 the air was ripe with musical prophesies. Chief among these was the notion that grime – surely, to most listeners/observers, the most scintillating British musical evolution of the era – was at the critical point, the morphing point, where its listless vitality would be diverted elsewhere, towards the next station in the continuum. This idea assumes that there is an almost-finite amount of creativity in music; that as it drains out of one genre, it supplements another, probably newer one. I won’t address the problems with that here.
As dubstep has slipped into dnb’s slipstream (somewhat removed from this argument by their stable status as student floor-fillers), house dominated these prophesies of forward motion: funky, bassline, the slinkier sounds or the gullier ones, whichever you chose, they were poised to annex that area of pop culture that isn’t permanently occupied by white rock – the area that is available to non-guitar music, space that always has to be negotiated with its more readily marketed American cousins.
There haven’t been any revolutions yet. Funky’s sonic progress creaks along in increasingly – though you’ve got to say slowly – innovative directions, and continues to fill clubs, continues to attract interest. Everyone likes Apple’s ‘Siegalizer’. Of course they do, it’s great. It’s not reached The Pop Moment though, it’s not the new religion. Bassline, Niche, 4x4, and its fellow bass-undulating travellers kill dancefloors, though generally they remain a midlands and northern phenomenon, despite the more nation-wide, audacious raid made on the charts by T2 et al, where they camped out for a few weeks earlier this year.
Enough pussy-footing around though: everyone’s prophesies missed something pretty vital. Here’s the question:
How did vapid electro – electro that sounds like 2003’s pomo, plastic sword-stab at futurism – suddenly become the British urban underground’s most easy avenue into the mainstream?
Dizzee’s ‘Dance Wiv Me’, Wiley’s ‘Wearing My Rolex’, Wiley’s ‘Summertime’, Tinchy’s ‘Stryderman’, Skepta’s ‘Rolex Sweep’, Lethal’s ‘Keys To The Bentley’, even God’s Gift has done one for christ’s sake, though I can’t find the rip.
They aren’t uniformly massive hits, but aggregated they’ve done – or are about to do – astonishingly well. It’s pathetically easy to name better, grimier songs by each artist above that should have done just as well in the charts (Wiley has at least 20), that should have been just as successful as POP singles, if charts were meritocracies – but therein lies the sticky issue of why the music industry doesn’t like to put out good music.
Some of this arbitrary, chart-topping wave of electro has been half-decent. No more than half decent though. And perhaps, tenuously, it is part of a wider, cross-media trend, part of a series of disconnected gropes in the direction of ‘new rave’, which neatly coalesces with the twenty years rule for nostalgia cycles: there are acid house documentaries on Radio 2 this year. Radio 2.
But from grime's point of view, why electro? Why now? Why has it worked?
Meanwhile, 2008’s second hallmark seems to be nostalgia for a more recent era. Garage in the clubs, and grimetapes.com (and its thematic pre-thoughts, Goodz’s ‘Switching Songs’ and Lewi and Smasher’s ‘Back in the Day’) high in your bookmarks seem central to this wonderfully lost period. And it is lost. While this bizarre urban pragmatism is thriving on T4 and the Radio 1 playlist, nostalgia for another grand crossover era is thriving in so many clubs. You want ‘Flowers’ or ’21 Seconds’? Of course it’s in the bag, let me just cue it up...
Here’s what me and Alex were saying on gchat a couple of days ago that prompted this blog post:
Alex: this year grime is about electrohouse singles and nostalgia
Dan: so weird isn't it
i would like to read a convincing blog piece about why electro, why now, and why it's worked??
i would write it myself, but i ain't got a clue
i think it's interesting that no hc continuum theorist would EVER have predicted wiley, dizzee, skepta, even stryder breaking into the charts with weird OLD electro
Alex: i have an inkling
Dan: and this in its own way proves the dysfunctionality of the continuum
Alex: i think it’s two processes at work
i wanted to write about this year in general
cos it’s really weirding me out
Dan: totally
until you said 'nostalgia and electro' it hadn't occurred to me really
those are the two twin overriding themes
bloody strange
Alex: my theory on what's going on with grime crossovers
post-Topshop's idea of new rave, this country is SOOO CONFUSED
this year you have African middle aged dads on the walworth road (and tinchy stryder) wearing
katherine hamnet/house of holland ripoff Ts
so combine that with the yearning of the urban music scene to get back onto the dancefloor
x a really misguided sense of what is 'white and cool'/trendy = wiley over electrohouse
also THE THING THAT NOBODY REALISES IS
wiley is a contextual genius in terms of songwriting
Dan: yes
Alex: and wearing my rolex, clearly, was done in the same way as the streets' rave tune
Dan: hence the paucity of lyrics on rolex
Alex: it’s like a snapshot of him drunk and lairy
Dan: because electro doesn’t need lots of bars
Alex: in a club that he's at just to get crunk and hit on girls
hence the electro is playing in the background
it’s incidental as far as i’m concerned
i think its just short(long)hand for 'mainstream club' right??
but the grime scene being what it is people copycat like crazy
Watch out for part 2...
Labels: dizzee rascal, electro, funky, grime, house, nostalgia, Wiley
24 Comments:
I agree and disagree. The electro crossovers have been very poor but potentially the combination of grime and a dancefloor is exciting.
great post. innovation/time/repetition can be confusing though - from another angle everything is flat. plus (music) industries only care about innovation when one form becomes unprofitable. old is boring yes, but as long as people aren't bored of it, it remains ok. obviously nostalgia is a wider issue in consumption-driven cultures and not just limited to music. what is acceptable as dancefloor is unfortunately not born out of rhythm.
and yes wiley is a master of disguise and context... tho he learned to drive manually first.
oh and keep it to yourself, but i have a funny feeling that funky, far from being the new wave, may be broken beat in disguise. not that there's anything wrong with that.
haaaaaa! interesting. I think that's true for most funky but some of it really is too wierd to be anything but (early-style) grime in disguise
but yeah broken beat is no bad thing, bring it back I say. I loved it when people like Vex'd and other breakstep dudes took brokenbeat drum patterns and dirtified them
Generally when something in Grime has worked, every1 does the bandwagon thing. If wearing my rolex didnt chart nobody would entertain it, or would they?
Forward Riddims format of 10 man on a tune was copied by loads of other songs months before it came out, not saying Forward was the first tune to do this, but it certainly influenced the surge of others that came out.
Same goes for the t shirt business. Was JME the first to sell a t shirt with a Grime related slogan or brand on it, nope, not really. But it worked for him, and his brand, and everyone saw the benefits, so jumped on it.
Even the mixtape thing is still a myth, as people have no idea how much people sell, people still think they can just come outa nowhere with a "hot" mixtape and just "blow" and make money from it.
I like what Wiley did with wearing my rolex because loads of people were being consumed by fast complex flows and crazy energy, but he just took it easy on the tune. Let the beat do the work for him.
Anyway "genres" are just buzzwords these days. It is an easy way to identify the ARTIST and not the type of music they are making.
I.E Scorcher is a grime artist. But the music he makes is not grime to me.
But from grime's point of view, why electro? Why now? Why has it worked?
I think your answer to this over complicates the issue.
Basically electro and disco house are indistinguishable now (people call Justice electro, whereas they called Daft Punk disco house).
the reason why electro got grime acts places where grime beats didnt is because mainstream people mostly like what they already know, and this was de-agro'd grime mcs in an accessible dance pop format they already felt safe with.
to get to number 1, you have to dumb down (ask dizzee). surely this is no great revelation?
(signing up for email followup)
i disagree blackdown ! See i think Wiley was being more clever/interesting than that
Even if his aim was to get to the top of the charts (and i reckon it wasn't and Rolex was a fluke!) he still wrote a song that captrues a snippet of a grime MC getting lairy in a non-grimey club - the whole setup is post-modern
As opposed to Rolex Sweep which is a pretty straightforward dance song.
I dont think anyone in grime could have guessed that electrohouse was the route to crossing over until it actually happened
Unless you know something to suggest the contrary?
I dont think anyone in grime could have guessed that electrohouse was the route to crossing over until it actually happened
i like rolex a lot, i'm not dissing it but...
erm, you dont think anyone in grime could have guessed that [popular generic established dance pop format] was the route to crossing over until it actually happened?
grime no, but then they dont live in the mainstream. to everyone non-road, it's a no brainer. if you want to sell out... find something mersh and jump on it.
once wiley did it (albeit well meaning and best), everyone else desparate for Ps, jumped on it...
unconvinced I'm afraid
"the whole setup is post-modern"
really? can you REALLY see him sitting at home, bless goes "oi richard, maybe we're going about this whole music thing wrong. we should really be taking a POST-modernist approach."
come on. he heard the beat, thought "hmm, pop, that gets in the charts all the time. i can make money this way."
it was hardly a lucky guess! the rolex beat sounds so similar to "yeah yeah" by bodyrox that you'd have to be an idiot to bet against it for chart success. its got a synth line stolen from a recent hit, a bit of 'urban' appeal to get the bloggers worked up, and a catch female vocal. it had HIT written all over it, not 'clever post modernist representation of grime artists in non grime settings'.
wiley performed at a white tie oxford ball, alongside 6 kids on stage attempting the rolex sweep in full tails. something tells me he's mainly interested in popular appeal and $$$.
Nobody's saying Wiley doesn't want to make money! Maybe he did hear the Bless instrumental and maybe his eyes did turn to $ $s but he still had to sit down and write the song and the way in which he did that is worth looking at IN OUR OPINION.
BTW nobody said anything about "post-modernIST" - that suggests consciously working in a style. I'm hardly suggesting Willy woke up one day and thought he'd get really avant garde on his big crossover single.
All these things granted that still doesn't stop us from analysing what's going on in the song, why it's been written and sounds the way it does.
Music, even pop, can be more than just songs to be taken at face value
There's no reason to dumb down your understanding of something just because its commercially poised!!! That's the whole problem with blogging about grime now, nobody ever looks behind the basic facts or makes any worthwhile analysis of the cultural resonance of this music - and while you may not think that what we're writing here is worthwhile at least we're trying to bring blogging about grime back to an analytical standard higher than just "so and so has a new mixtape out" or "this person parred that person"
snore
"...it had HIT written all over it, not 'clever post modernist representation of grime artists in non grime settings'."
alex already explained the difference, but just to add to that point - grime is a descendent of hip hop, the first, not discounting the various weirdos who'd been experimenting w/sound collages, tape editing, etc., major post-modern musical form. of course hip hop is only one of grime's parents, but nearly all of its other major influences - jungle, garage, dancehall - were themselves heavily informed by hip hop (w/caveats; the dancehall/hip hop relationship goes both ways, and garage on more mid-late 90s R&B which by that time had become a subdivision of hip hop). so for the kids who made grime all that stuff was a fact, not a novelty/new idea. I wouldn't claim something as silly as "all grime is inherently post-modern", but nearly all of the best grime, I think, has that "anti-music" quality that made stuff like Mantronix, P.E., Eric B & Rakim so fantastic, funky and cold and brutal and vulnerable all at the same time but without overtly trying to do any of them.
Wiley, of course, was a champion of all of those things, which is why it doesn't surprise me in the least that he was the dude to strike gold w/warmed-over electro. he's one of those true, repeat innovators who confound the "scenius" theory. I too doubt he was sitting around & thought "yeah, I'll make a post-modern dance tune, that's the ticket" but if you think it's just a naked cash grab then I think you're denying the depths that dude has in him. plus, even it is, so what? who else deserves to get paid more? and, honestly, the whole thing smacks of the KLF's theory on how to make a #1 tune, which can only be a good thing.
i wasn't suggesting in any way that wiley doesn't deserve a chance to get paid - god knows if any uk artists has put in the legwork pioneering, developing and popularising a genre, its him. i just think that its easy (and misguided) to read too much into a tune like 'rolex'.
i agree about grime having that anti-music quality, but that's a pretty moot point, as rolex isn't a grime track in any way.
either way, i'm not being argumentative - i though the article was a cracking read.
rolex is definitely a post-grime record. wiley might not be so wordy on it (NOT a bad thing at all from where im standing) but he delivers it like a grime MC. this was made more obvious to me when i saw him at glastonbury with hot chip. he still has the anger of grime, its just that hes not rapping about anything angry.
i like that record a lot more than some of the other post-rolex songs, just cos wiley reformed his flow for it, some of the others like tinchys seem to still be rapping like he normally does, or they try and do what wiley did but not as well.
"i agree about grime having that anti-music quality, but that's a pretty moot point, as rolex isn't a grime track in any way."
yeah, but that 'is' the point, innit? "Rolex" works where the subsequent knockoffs don't because it's played against the framework of Wiley's whole ouerve, whereas when Stryder or God's Gift or even 2008 Dizzee makes a shite electro track it mostly just sounds like shite electro. I'm not saying give him a pass cause of his history, more that Wiley, like any true pop innovator, Lee Perry, Moroder, or more obviously Juan Atkins or RZA, has the knack for making things work that shouldn't. it's not just a grime MC chatting up girls, it's 'Wiley' doing it, and that makes all the difference. and yes, the big pop hooks/accessibilty which can be called either good songwriting or shameless pandering depending on one's POV, and is probably a mix of the two.
btw, I didn't think anyone was being argumentative. Also I'm aware of the danger of reading too much into a song and spitting out naff, overwrought drivel, but hey, occupational hazard of wasting time on the Internet dissecting pop music, right? I just preemptively assume I'm reading too much into everything.
That's the whole problem with blogging about grime now, nobody ever looks behind the basic facts or makes any worthwhile analysis of the cultural resonance of this music
is that an indirect alex?
lol! naw man dont take that personally - youve got to admit that the general volume and ferocity of blogging about grime has dropped significantly since its early days!
sorry i missed this debate i was on holiday within two hours of posting this.
martin, this:
That's the whole problem with blogging about grime now, nobody ever looks behind the basic facts or makes any worthwhile analysis of the cultural resonance of this music
for me applies to most bloggers OTHER than you! i think alex was referring to the new generation... more analyis and less clamouring to be the first person to post skepta's new video please.
Ha, just checking... NO EGO ;)
Lol. I want to see indirecting/sending indirects adapted for other contexts, because it's a lacking in the english language, outside of grime. Think about it: "David Miliband was accused of sending indirects for the Prime Minister today with an article in The Guardian about Labour's urgent need for renewal."
yeah be good to see the word 'ind-i-r' in OED within a decade...
u guys and need to seckle. this guy knows what time it is ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPk31epH3Xo
Padraig speaks truth I think, grime's clearly related to hip hop, and I think any music could be jacked for beats whilst keepin it "real" lyrically. Authenticity musically in hip hop was never that important anyway - look at Run DMC sampling the Monkees, Public Enemy sampling David Bowie, Jay-z sampling the Annie soundtrack ffs, before we even move on to the more pop orientated tunes of the last ten years. Think grime is just a continuation of that original irreverent attitude in a lot of ways - both seemed to have some kind of wierd love affair with 80's soft rock samples a few years back
which made me chuckle/shudder in equal amounts.
It's odd that so many people that want the authentic, purist genres all seem to be so far removed from the roots of that style, ending up acting like nothing but curators when the originators clearly didn't give a toss for strict blueprints.
It's been going on at least since Eric Clapton neutered the blues
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