grime/dizze rascal is crap

He said: "Dizzee's rap is fantastic, it's fabulous - 'you ain't gotta feel guilt just selfless, give a little help to the helpless.'

"What a brilliant line, help to the helpless - I've never heard that used ever."

hahha dude yr gonna get crucified.

I bet it was guerilla marketing...that sounds like a Rhymesayers type thing to do....funny, though.

For the record, I like Atmosphere.

I would actually quite like to fuck Dizzee! he's really cute. before that I had a mild crush on Oxide, out of Oxide & Neutrino, but he's white. Bruza looks kind of cute in the Run The Road inlay too.

Two outta three ain't bad.

that's cool...critics have been wanting to fuck underweight white british guys for decades, so i'm glad the brother are getting a little action now.

Mark P,

um....Loretta...um....ya know....she don't look too bad for her age, nowhutimsayin?

hahahah

xpost

maybe they will get to see some authentic council estate stabbings as well!

Hey critic hater (plus others): has it occured to you that some of us "critics" might have lived in actual British council estates? Didn't see one stabbing, though. That happened more at footy matches.

This thread is funny.

Ding!*

*I don't know how to make the sound of a cartoon lightbulb going on.

(xpost, haha)

you may well ask what the real reason for me moving to Bow was (nb this is a joke, semi)

Fear of harrassment from horny critics?

it will certainly not be just harassment if I get my hands on the boy Dylan!

i wasn't saying that critics want to f*ck dizzee rascal, but they probably have fantasies about being his best friend and walking the "grimy" streets of bow together.

did you not read my post? the critics DO want to fuck dizz! with good reason! don't you? if not you have rubbish taste in men.

So the one grime article said this. . .

amazing cheekbones, gorgeous eyes and fantastic blow-job lips. what's not to love?

Dom, knives can be sexy. just ask Angelina Jolie.

http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/images/030407.jpg

yeah that's what I meant, not that they were actually nice places to live....like here's an example...I didn't realize that council estates meant projects, so Morrissey had this B-side last year called "Teenage Dad on His Estate" and I was all like, "Damn that's some rich teenage dad"....I guess I think of estates in the U.S. as like big mansions with a lot of land around them....or fancy suburb developments with made-up pretentious names like "Summerland Estates" or something like that....

(gah xpost)

Believe me, I know.

(are there any grime tracks about knives/fights? "Mi Penknife Weighs a Ton" or something? Seriously?)

Lovely-jubbly! See what I mean! That's precious!

I imagine a Mobb Deep spoken interlude using this:

"Word...dunny....come up to Queensbridge, you straight get shot or stabbed, one of the two....shit ain't all lovely-jubbly, dun. I'mma start punchin' blokes in the bottles and stoppers just for livin'"

It was a graffiti kid from New York (I think) whose tag was NEXT, apparently unaware of the Minneapolis group of the same name, ha ha ("Too Close," "Wifey"). NEXT bombed the facade of the beautiful Uptown Theatre, which was all it took for me to hate his guts.

This is really good news for the cafes in my neighborhood!

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahaha

-- critic hater

I was wondering how the pitchfork readers might react to the compilation actually.

Do you ever get that strange feeling with grime - esp. after you read comments like critic hater - are people really listening to same stuff as I am? Can't you hear how absolutely jaw-dropping, mind blendingly awesome this CD is?

It's like Sunil Chauhan's comments in Hip Hop Connection (as reported by Chantelle Fiddy) about Roll Deep's newer material as "shiny pop-rap and leaden, almost bog standard hip-hop like Let It Out, rather than anything truly grimy." Say What? That track's fucking ace! And the Creeper Mixtape's got some crazy moments on it too! It's like it's backwards day.

i do sympathise with people saying this though:

"i don't get why the critics love all this stuff though it's probably for similar reasons to why they like mia ie they want to look cool."

for fucks sake...

i never said that.

most people have never fucking heard of MIA. if i said, right now in my office, 'i like MIA', no-one would know the fuck i was on about. what are you saying if not that people don't *really* like it, from which it follows they have no reason to like it, and thus that it is not likeable?

anyway, just as equally, its not too difficult to grasp that theres a lot of hipster bandwagon jumpers too who dont like this stuff in sincerity. i think that smacks of pomp and pretentiousness. but who am i to say they cant enjoy listening to it or even just listing it in an attempt to look cool?

fuck it, i dont care anyway, like what you want, if you want to like every single bit of crunk or grime or eski-desi-reggaeton-crunkhall, grimeasalsa, to appear cool in front of the blogging community or other music nerds or if you genuinely like it, whateverthefuckever, go ahead! the more buzz MIA gets, the better.

xp innit

i do not know (who) these people (are).

granted, people get over-excited about scenes, and i've said before on the electrohouse thread i would've liked to hear about what sucks and why, for perspective and clarity.

For chrissakes, I didn't say it was inherently some form of fetishisation. I said there was an element of fetishising. Along with all sorts of other elements. And I also said I didn't necessarily think it's a bad thing. I don't see how that's a whisker away from suggesting that people should only listen to music made by their own kind. I just think a certain amount of self-knowledge about what is happening is no bad thing.

ditto.

i'm not convinced this isn't just because they're able to recognise and appreciate the music, what the people involved in the scene are trying to do, and the reverence of it all - that kind of critical analysis/dissection and 'intellectualisation' is beneficial to the scene in boosting it's profile to a wider audience.

what's wrong with that? other than that perhaps there aren't as many black 'underclass' people enthusing about it intellectually on the internet (or so it tends to seem - excuse stereotypical image), so we get a skewed view?

NRQ, why indeed shouldn't people like grime. And no, I'm not sure if anyone is harmed in the transaction. Look at my original post. There's an element of fetishising going on, in my opinion. Also in my opinion, that's NOT NECESSARILY A BAD THING. But the denial of it is interesting.

they seem inter-linked. i don't think that is what is happening with grime appraisal much though.

also check all the shout outs belle and seb have gotten from dizzee, kano and davinche. jammer has also said that nothing moved him more than tigermilk in the last two decades.

From a non-rockist perspective, how are they interlinked?

uh, kinda, except amid all the praise for grime i haven't really seen this at all. where are all these pieces saying 'grime is a bit primitive but hella authentic'? i think you've made them up. as stevem said, 'authenticity' usually is something to do with the sound anyway.

dont the broadsheet ejaculations over dizzee and grime and how they 'represent the real voice of inner city youth' etc etc enter here? theyre not saying its primitive, but that it represents true 'social value' etc, with seemingly little care for whether its much good. or rather, the first thing gets priority over the second.

well it does seem as if you're basing your entire critique of grime hype on the broadsheet angle. and the thing there is, while it may not be the most well thought out or accurate or even well-written analysis of the scene, broadsheets have to write for their audience.

also it's easy to forget that while in London/on ILM, it's easy to be all hyped-out, it's still not that massive a scene nationwide and any broadsheet press is a good thing. and it'd be silly to mention any grime duds when that sort of press is so limited!

TRW, I understand your logic, but if you don't think this fetishization is bad, exactly what point are you trying to make? Practically all music 'fandom' involves fetishization on some level. Besides, this 'authenticity' trope is so common amongst all musical scenes that I don't think it's all that helpful to think of it in racial terms at all.

unless they're Girls Aloud whom the media seem to love quite a bit? and a fair few middle-class white people wear 'ironic' chav clothing &c - I mean, the whole Madonna-in-adidas-tracksuit thing a couple of years back. There's certainly guilt there in terms of fetishising the culture positively while treating the people who actually live it with contempt. However...

You don't need a sociological argument as to why black kids are listening to grime because they've created the culture. That's not true for middle-class white people.

...this line of argument is bollocks, you don't need a sociological argument to explain why anyone likes any music at all.

i'd dispute this. black kids *from east london* maybe, and then i would put emphasis on 'kids' too. i hear what your saying, but musical taste isn't totally subjective. i would say that a lot of the attention paid to grime is in a strong tradition of music press attention to a certain idea of street-level avant-gardism -- it's reynoldsism, i guess. but that's not subjectivity. (it might be ahem perspectivism.)

but this is unfair to ilm:

"At the moment, white working-class culture mainly gets negatively fetishised (chavs etc.) and black council estate culture is the focus of the real or the authentic (in this small subculture obviously, not in wider Britain)."

a lot of people call girls aloud or the streets chavs, but ilm has fetishized 'em positively all the same ;).

Well here's where I disagree, kind of. I'm a white, middle-class grime fan and I bear absolutely no guilt over this whatsoever, chiefly because I feel comfortable that I'm not listening to this music simply *because* it's made by black people/poor people/whatever. Maybe people do think like this, I'm not sure. I've certainly never met one. Not living in London, I don't even know where i'd find one.

Like I say, I don't think you're entirely wrong but I think you're drawing too many assumptions about why people gravitate towards music. The complexities of musical taste can't always be pinned down to a sociological argument.

xp

Fair points about Girls Aloud and white working class culture, maybe I'm wrong there.

But I think it's ridiculous to say you don't need a sociological argument to explain why anyone likes music. What, musical tastes develop out of thin air? Sociology is not going to explain everything but it explains some things. And when you have a long, long history of white people listening to and embracing black music it's pretty silly to say there's nothing sociological going on.

it's a bit complicated to do any sort of sociological analysis for me: mixed-race (though this was not acknowledged by either parent so effectively 'white'), middle-class, gay. I never really get further than 'gays like dancing, I like a lot of music you can dance to plus some angsty female types'.

i think the word 'tourism' kind of says 'bad', and i think it's actually 'good' all things considered. sometimes i think GA lyrics are actually meant for music journalists and ilmers -- the bit about tight jeans and high heels, for example. but for all that i think ilm genuinely loves their music, because people i meet outside ilm (who are by no means all white middle-class graduates like most ilmers) are really nasty about 'chavs' and girls aloud. it's a funny kind of tourism if you have to keep quiet about it.
but yeah there must be some kind of tourism. i would guess many ilmers are interested in grime but have no idea where they might get hard-copy recordings of it, for example. when i was told to buy dillinja records as a teenager, i was taken aback to discover that they just weren't in most shops. there's that kind of distance.

No accounting for personal taste, I agree. But you've still developed that personal taste within certain parameters. If you were a working class guy from Wyoming instead of Liverpool, chances of your being a dancehall fan would be diminished.

Modern 'white' culture has always been appropriating stuff from 'black' culture, Picasso was doing it a century ago etc. It's not a bad thing, but it's a complex thing and involves all sorts of projections on the 'other' culture.

And on that note, I must go. Thanks for the discussion.

Haha like anyone is gonna believe that.

you are very rude. please learn manners. thanks.

Also M.I.A. is great and you are wrong, Dave (also what did you think of the article in the Voice on "Stop Murder Music"/Jamaica/Et all--it's linked from /rupture's blog.)

Gangsta Gangsta.

oh wait: "(Hey guys, i was just trolling btw. Wasn't it obvious when i mentioned fucking Atmosphere? I was very bored at work, sorry. nice arguments though.)"

hahahahaha, never mind, it doesn't matter. he wuz just da grist fer yer mill!

yeah i know shes gimmicky and raps like a baby, but i still like something about her.

Maybe I should do a blog like that.

(re 50 interview)

Poor Dizzee hits some US indie trifecta by being somewhat like an alternate take on what's popular (hip-hop), being British (indie loves british!) and not selling a lot in the US.

And I don't really care - I'm echoing Titchy's argument upthread:

fuck it, i dont care anyway, like what you want, if you want to like every single bit of crunk or grime or eski-desi-reggaeton-crunkhall, grimeasalsa, to appear cool in front of the blogging community or other music nerds or if you genuinely like it, whateverthefuckever, go ahead!

I'm just saying that in my personal experience, people use it as a fashionable accessory. They can do this if they want, I do the same thing with other non-musical shit.

in Britain, indie IS British.

72 results found:

seriously, can someone explain the appeal? especially of dizzee?

i have the original grime comp on rephlex and i like it. reminds me a lot more of older industrial stuff than anything else. i also have the impression the artists on that comp are a bunch of white-guy bedroom rocking outsiders. but i can't find anything appealing about this squeaky-voiced dude with no rhythmn and lame rhymes (like rhyming 'there' with 'their').

i was really excited about this genre when i first heard of it. i was prepped for it when i heard it was similar to the streets's first album, which i liked alright... but once i heard it, the love for dizzee's first album just threw me for a loop. if i tried playing this stuff for any of my american hip hop friends, they would laugh me out of the party.

this message isn't meant to be a troll. i really would like to know what it is about the actual music that people like. convince me this stuff isn't all just wack-sounding rappers, rapping over fruity loops beats some stoned guy came up with in 15 minutes. there are too many people i respect who are into this stuff for me to just ignore it. the first thing i'm going to do is check out that compilation, mentioned above, that got the good review on pitchfork.

-- NRQ (parsethi...) (webmail), February 17th, 2005 7:08 AM. (link

THAT'S BECAUSE IT'S "M.I.A." DUH!

Ugly and Mean otm. I've only listening to a bit of Grime in passing and I enjoyed seeing Dizzee live, but its mostly been a bust for me. Soverign is good though.

so you dont fuck non black guys?
racist.
youre probably white as well.
traitor.
anyway, youll have to join the queue for white female journalists wanting to fuck grime MCs.