Grime: Brit hip-hop or not?

WOEBOT: “If Grime came to be understood as UK Hip-Hop it’d be a disaster. Why? Because, put simply, Brit-Hop has never managed to get over being a inferior version of American Hip-Hop (Grime on the other hand seems mercifully oblivious of America).”

Excellent, excellent piece on this topic from Matt. Excellent because he’s not just commenting on articles in the mainstream press, he’s actually engaging with the authors. Excellent because he develops his point through detailed examination of specific, key records. Excellent because of an almost anthropological reportage on Mr Bongo. His argument is in essence that Grime shouldn’t be tarred with the UK Hip-Hop / UK-Rap brush because those genres do, basically, suck.

And quite right too.

However I feel that Grime can fruitfully be seen as being, at last, a decent British response to US Rap. As he was kind enough to point out, my view is that Grime and US hip hop are structurally similar — emphasis on the vocal rather than the backing, Black urban culture as the source, all that stuff. And, while Matt undoubtedly knows more than I do about Grime, it seems to me that Grime people do have US rap reference points. This is scarcely new. Plus uk garage crews went r&b as soon as they got popular — So Solid, obviously. Champagne garage and US R&B have always gone together.

The music doesn’t sound like US Rap though. It’ll get closer though. As I think I mentioned here before, Cameo is dropping grime tracks with girly choruses already — I preferred this to a lot of the more banging stuff FWIW.

* Cha Cha Slide looked great on the telly too.

* Oh, and great to see the Gothic Futurist article coming out, it’s fantastic. Essential post punk too.

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