In recent times grime, once regarded as anti-music for lumpen proles, has been glittering. Its performers have headlined rock festivals, won the Mercury prize, and, after some of them campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn at the last general election, been hailed for repoliticising pop. Producers who used to flog 12in records from their car boots have their business models celebrated by trade weeklies. Tinchy Stryder collaborates with Premier Inn, Lethal Bizzle with Mattesons, and Airbnb offers three-day “grime experience” vacations. It’s quite a turnaround for a genre that Dan Hancox describes as “a sonically violent enactment of the claustrophobia of the inner city”.
Grime used to be seen as a transmogrification of garage and 2-step leeched of those genres’ groove and sensuality, the sound of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop if it had been hijacked by the droogs in A Clockwork Orange. In Inner City Pressure Hancox characterises the music as “a time-travelling experiment gone horribly, fascinatingly wrong; a broken flux capacitor glowing amidst the smouldering wreckage, a neon light pulsing in the mist”. Early MCs, he says, were “possessed” by the beats that summoned up a “kind of macabre, horror-show minimalism”, “a tension headache you can dance to”.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
