New Cities/New Soviets

February 14, 2005

Grime & Snobs

One of the things I've been doing to waste my time recently is visiting a bunch of mp3 blogs. It's the form music criticism has been waiting for -- descriptions of a song or album, coupled with something you can actually listen to, so you can find out if the author is just blowing smoke.

Some of my faves:
Music for Robots (my entry point into the form)
The Tofu Hut (voluminous linkage and mp3 blogger interviews)
boomselection (off-the-hook U.K. site featuring mashups and more)
MP3MIX.DE (a message board more than a blog, with lots of great downloadable mixtapes)

One of the windfalls of my tooling around is discovering "grime" music, as UK rap is now called. I'd heard two of the prominent artists, Dizzee Rascal and The Streets, who have tried to make a crossover into the US market in the past, and I wasn't impressed. What I found out, though is that beyond these two (who I'm still not fond of) there are a number of artists I really enjoy. I particularly like Lady Sovereign (Shh! is my favorite song, if you can find it).

For years, the UK music scene has been a bit of a puzzle to me. It is simultaneously hugely innovative and monstrously self-destroying. I could never figure out why genres were so mercilessly rejected only a few years after their invention. Try to talk to a UK music geek about Jungle, for instance, and watch out!

And then I heard this anecdote: Grime, for a number of years, was a genre without a name. There was a substratum of Garage music (even as it evolved into 2-step) which, although it shared influences, had an increasing antagonism with the culture of expensive clubs and elite DJs. A number of names were tried, from the idiotic ("Urban") to the bizzare ("Eskimo Beat"), but nothing really stuck. Then, in an offhand comment to an interviewer, on of the two top-paid DJs said that he didn't play "none of that grimey Garage." And the name was there.

And that's what I like about Grime. It opposes the snobbery of the British music scene. And there, too, is the answer to my puzzle. Why does it become neccessary to continually purge musical tastes to the extreme of generating a "new genre"? When the hoi poloi start to come on board -- abandon ship. Exodus to the new style. This is simultaneously a winnowing away of musical substance, and also a spur to innovation.

I must not underestimate the power of snobbery, or the wonderful violence of the reaction against it. Because this is also a spur to innovation -- smash the snobs! Grime kills them with sound.

for more on Grime: Chantelle Fiddy's World of Grime

Posted by Sam at February 14, 2005 07:17 AM

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