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Emerging music scenes traditionally generate
exposure through their own DIY media formats. The mixtape remains
the key vehicle for breaking hip hop artists, and underground indie
continues the punk protocol of self-promoting through fanzines.
For the new MC stars of Grime, this year’s breakthrough urban
genre, the phrase ‘straight to DVD’ isn’t so
much an pejorative as an aspiration.
A raft of DVD titles like Lords of the Decks, Practice Hours,
Risky Roadz and Aim High currently sell in thousands through independent
record stores like Rhythm Division on East London’s Roman
Road. Combining shaky csamerawork, amateur promo shorts, explosive
MC battles, ad-hoc interviews and in-situ documentary, their production
values are million miles from the lavish of US hip hop videos they
superficially appear to mimic. More Nick Broomfield-goes-ghetto
than the P Diddy-goes-to-The-Hamptons fantasia of ‘Bad Boy
For Life’, the soundtrack is routinely muffled or blaring,
footage is of the wonky holiday-in-Lanzarote kind and the backdrop
is inevitably a rave, record shop or council estate thronging with
kids in hoodies and pitbull terriers. Credits are hardly up there
with the opening of Star Wars. Grime DVDs are the opposite of glamorous,
yet their embedded immediacy and combination of moving image and
music is precisely the key to their appeal. They function as audio-visual
albums the viewers can almost become part of.
On Troy Miller and DJ Target’s ‘Aim High II’,
for example, we trade rhymes with producer Jammer in his studio,
join MC Flow Dan interviewing MC God’s Gift through ganja
fog the back of a Peugeot 205. In a thrilling sequence, incensed
members of Wiley’s Roll Deep– east London’s answer
to So Solid Crew – are marched out of the Victoria Park’s
Respect festival by a ring of coppers. On ‘Conflict’,
Dizzee Rascal battles MC Kano in a pirate radio studio, eventually
spilling out onto the towerblock roof and into a near-fight at
the climax of an unbroken 40-minute shot. The sense of energy,
danger and fun is tangible and intimate.
Grime artists increasingly know that a direct route to their audience
is via DVD, and are eschewing traditional artist album for appearance
of the leading titles. Twenty-eight-year-old Troy Miller’s
MediaGang Inc is one of a number of outfits producing titles. He
began by filming Eski Dance, a rave organised by Wiley, the leading
grime MC, producer and scenester. ‘My girlfriend gave me
a consumer-level DV camera for my birthday,’ Miller say. ‘First
thing I filmed was Eski Dance on night – the next day, everyone
who wasn’t there wanted it on disk. The day after Heartless
Crew’s Slimzee told me Rhythm Division wanted to sell some.’
The DVD format shares a deeper synergy with grime, since it’s
both an exhibitionistic, oral culture – MCs just need a beat
and an audience to showcase their skills – and it’s
a milieu populated by larger than life characters with a substantial
claims to their ‘realness’. Roll Deep Crew’s
MC Riko, who looms throughout Miller’s ‘Aim High II’,
rapped many of his ‘bars’ literally from behind bars
in HMP Brixton. Playing up to the limits of available media, they
want to be seen and heard at a time when the music business remains
shy of investing time and money in grime.
Their appeal at a time when returns on traditional music-only
LPs are falling is clear. Cheap-to-film and cheap-to-reproduce
DVDs eclipse LPs since they show how an MC sounds, what he looks
like and, in the era of reality TV, where he lives, what car he
drives and how his mates skin up. They also provide sociological
insights into Grime’s inventive language, where ‘jawside’ describes
excellence, colleagues are ‘brehs’, where people no
longer rap but ‘merk’ , and everything un-grimy is ‘nekkle’,
no less. But that’s perhaps less interesting to fans than
identifying Tinchy Stryder from Crazy Titch, Danae’o from
Kano, or Dogzilla from Flirta D, the scene’s proliferating
dramatis personae of pin-ups.
As its name suggests, grime fetishes street-level life, anti-glitz
localism and the notion that anyone with a clever line in rhyming
skills can be the next Dizzee Rascal. DVDs are one way of breaking
down artificial barriers between artist and audience.
The same idea comes powerfully alive on Channel U, Sky TV’s
urban music-oriented channel that is increasingly eating into MTV’s
audiences share with an agenda to showcase the best, but also the
realest of ‘UK tings’. Alongside the regular diet of
clips from the US commercial rap machine, a proportion of U’s
programming features videos of Grime DVD-like quality, and lower,
a glimpse into a kind ‘Urban Idol’ underbelly of aspirant
MCs who shoot their own videos in stairwells, youth clubs and bedrooms.
A unique paradigm of two-way TV in that its viewers are substantially
the same as the people on the other side of the screen, new ‘street
media’ channels like U realise the notion anyone with a half-decent
flow and a grasp of video production can showcase their skills
on the box. ‘It’s just like talking to a mate about
music rather than to you dad,’ says MC Ace, one of U’s
presenters. ‘People don’t want to be told what they
should like by some big record company – they want to decide
for themselves.’ The same definitely can’t be said
of ailing institutions like Top Of the Pops.
Music’s future, for now, looks shaky, amateur and handheld.
It looks grimy, but sounds all the better for all.
© Kevin Braddock 2005
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