Who said Grime doesn’t pay?

The current British music scene is fertile ground, and British youth culture, for want of a better metaphor, is its manure. All the rallying and raging against Cowell’s stale television formats aside, the Facebook Generation is an exciting bunch. The tribal divisions of the Nineties and early Noughties are now a distant memory, no longer do grungers in Nirvana hoodies, or bookish Bob Dylan fans have to keep it a secret that they thought Chronic 2001 was the shit, nor does a teenage hip-hop fan fear admitting that Classic FM is worth a listen when there’s revision to be done. Casting an eye down the Copper Rooms listings for this term, I was struck by some of the names scheduled to perform; Griminal, Skepta, Tinie Tempah, Bashy. All established and respected names in Grime, but none I’d have expected to raise an eyebrow amongst university students, say, five years ago. The implication is that in the current musical climate, where genres jam and kids don’t care, these are artists who are finally able to do their thing without fearing the wrath of a closed minded audience, which makes Grime a ripening genre with unrestricted creative potential.

Moving into a decade where discerning music fans are ready to give anything a listen, keep an eye out for some of these names, and with SU literature, always read the small print. It is sound advice, when it comes to new artists it is easy for a star to slip under the radar without the kind of feverish exaltation of disposable chart filler that so often puts mediocre names up in lights. But every now and then, raw talent and a killer track are all that are needed to get the flashbulbs popping and lure a fresh and innovative artist from the shadows. The case in point is an upcoming Copper Rooms gig where a supporting artist, Tinie Tempah, three names down the set list, might just find himself outshining the emboldened, capitalised headliner, Chipmunk.

For most of the past decade, names would come and go with alarming regularity on the embryonic Grime scene, with an underground hit here or there, some Channel U coverage, and perhaps some limited airplay on 1xtra or 6music, before fading into obscurity. Only in the late Noughties did the genre begin to receive deserved attention as an exciting, creative movement with a uniquely English sound firmly rooted in garage, jungle and drum’n’bass tradition, whose gritty lyricism proliferated with the battling braggadocio of East London’s teenagers. A number of mainstream crossover hits, collaborations and radio-friendly albums from the likes of Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Kano, N-dubz, Tinchy Stryder and Chipmunk brought those youngsters to the fore and made the genre arguably the sound of English youth culture in the early twenty first century.

Yet there is no doubt that with Elton John samples, Kate Nash collabos and oopsy-daisies comes a dilution of the kind of viscerality and intelligence that drew me to the genre when a seventeen year old Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in Da Corner delivered a menacing account of paranoia, casual violence, hope and despair in the city, or Kano’s Home Sweet Home coupled his slickly inventive storytelling with the swagger of his grimy beats. Chipmunk and Tinchy Stryder are two such cases, whose prodigous freestyling abilities and realism still kick around in the backstreets of the Youtube universe, but who needed a Sugarbabe or something catchy but mundane to build a mainstream fan base.

Let’s allow for the closing years of the Noughties as a necessary struggle for recognition that saw many artists compromise their heritage for the sake of record sales, and it becomes increasingly evident that, with the firm establishment of Grime in our collective musical psyche, artists are finding themselves able to express themselves lyrically and musically without having to offer dull pop tunes as a rite of passage.

When Wiley, the Rakim-type pioneer styled by the media as the “Godfather of Grime”, was dragging Roll Deep crew around a rainy New York in 2005, in a premature, but perhaps soon viable venture for international recognition, he envied the creative freedom of US hip-hop counterparts, in the presence of their guest rapper Juelz Santana. “I like their independence…No one tells them what to do.” Arguably, the time has come where Wiley and his fellow artists can exercise the same liberties. Giggs, the gloomy, measured South London lyricist, wasn’t hampered by his dark tales and unique sound when placed on the BBC’s Sound of 2010 shortlist, nor was Devlin; Kano’s follow up to the commercially successful but disappointingly middle-of-the-road London Town was an emphatic return to “140 Grime Street” and some grime artists, in sating the commercial appetite for all things Grime, are now able to take ever more creative routes to success.

This is where Tinie Tempah comes back in. His latest track ‘Pass Out’, initially put out as a feeler for audience responses, is blowing up and receiving endless airplay on Radio One on every show from the eclectic Zane Lowe to the crowd pleasing Fearne and Reggie. And it is a huge track. Not released until March, its shuddering bass and addictive hook will be heard all over before then; it’s a dub-step, drum’n’bass, grime triple-decker sandwich and a bone-rattling introduction to British urban music in the Twenty-Tens, and Tinie could well be a household name before he gets it out there. His lyrical ability was already obvious in the successful underground hit ‘Wifey’ in 2006, and his image has since shifted to a post-nu-rave English Kanye West, all Buddy Holly glasses, garish hoodies and big, big party tunes. And still he is able to retain the synthy super-nintendo sounds of early Grime, and its cheeky, oxymoronic quick-fire bars “I live a very, very, very wild lifestyle/Heidi and Audrina eat your heart out…I’ve got so many clothes I keep some at my aunts house.”

Video cameos for other veteran Grime artists JME and Wretch 32 are just as promising as the music itself; If he finds a receptive audience, such exposure might see fans delving into older stuff where they’ll come across some of those names who’ve been, gone, or are still here, Ghetto, God’s Gift, D double E, or even a completely different sound from the bigger names (see Boy in Da Corner and Showtime for some of Dizzee’s best work). Tinie might be the one to have Grime as it was meant to be heard delivered to a mainstream fan base. And he knows his audience; “And there aint nobody fresher/semester to semester, raving with the freshers.” Keep an ear out.