Don’t ruin the Grime Scene!
I’m afraid I’m going to be having another rant-like post again. This time I’m not blaming us as supporters of underground music. I’m blasting how we let certain shit happen and turn a blind eye. Along with money, again conquering and raping a scene on the increase.
In a previous Small Talk podcast with KIITE he spoke about how big corporations are getting involved in music with the likes of the Pogba X Stormzy video which was heavily sponsored by Adidas. It seemed they delayed the announcement of Pogba’s arrival purely for this video. And when you realise the transfer was up to £85m+ then this sponsorship and link must have been very important to it.
I get that artists involved in a scene for a long time and put in the hours to help it grow need to pay there bills and support themselves too, but how far can they go before being labelled a “sell out”. Briefly touching on Stormzy again he mentions in that same Pogba video that he isn’t a sellout for collaborating with pop singer Nick Jonas, and I don’t believe he is. I think collaborating with artists over an array of genres is a good thing, when the said artist obviously loves the music. Look at Kendrick Lemar for example. He went and done a verse on Taylor Swifts “Bad Blood” it’s a very similar thing and as far as Pop music goes, it works.
Now skipping back to my beloved Grime music, that I’ve loved for the strongest part of 20 years. Also being from Essex myself, there’s Gatsby. If you don’t know him, he is TOWIES very own wannabe MC. Now don’t get me wrong, the business head on this guy is either on point (or his family are minted) as he has a pretty penny spare. He’s decided to try his hand at the Grime scene. I for one am all for new people getting involved in different varieties of music for passion and the love, but I just can’t seem to accept this guy in to the Grime scene.
Go check out him calling out Yungen after Yungen mentioned in a Chip Diss about him living in Essex. Its pretty amusing.
Right so the reasons I can’t accept him:
1: he has no immediate talent, and clearly hasn’t had any previous experience in MCing, no growth or building foundations for any form of flow.
2: I get the bad feeling of rich entrepreneur trying to essential pay his way in to a growing scene to try to be there to increase popularity and gain mass fame. Let’s face it, he doesn’t need money.
This leads nicely on to his track “Helicopter”. If you haven’t listened or watched the video yet then please do so now (or not)
Now, if you haven’t heard this before, you must be thinking the exact same thing as me the other day when I saw this for the first time. WTF D Double E? He must have got a nice bit of doh to do that right? Also, like Stormzy I don’t really blame D Double for it, he must have got paid nicely, probably more than any other track he has ever made. I just keep thinking how and why does this happen though? He doesn’t care about the real Grime fans, he wants the teenage girls to buy his stuff, that’s what’s going to make him popular. The vast majority of the Grime scene will turn their back on him and he will then be the forefront of the commercial side of Grime. A part of the problem that will take Grime, rip it off, chew it up, then like a tasteless Hubba Bubba after 2 minutes of chewing, he will spit it out. It will be exactly the same as what happened to our beloved Dubstep a few years ago. Thankfully it’s now not popular for the masses to like Dubstep anymore and us Bass loving fanatics can get back to enjoying the Dubstep we love, the one that came from the London suburbia, and not that EDM high pitched, ear wrenching rubbish. I fear this could happen to Grime over the next few years and we could really see the genre get knocked sideways, after all of this work and effort. It’s taken 10+ years to get Grime back in to a reputable state after the first time round. If you missed it the first time round, it was just as awesome! But negative press following violence in Grime raves (More fire Crew’s ‘Oi’ was banned in so many clubs throughout the UK for this reason) as well as a lot of poorly produced and regurgitated material. This time around, those issues seem to have been ironed out and have not been tagged along with it. People have now realised it happens in all cases of every scene. Watered down production is not a Grime trait, it is popular with up and coming scenes, when people try to bash out half-arsed tracks to get a reputation. Violence is also not solely a Grime or music trait either, the press blame many high energy genres and scenes with this, even if it is very minimal and rare. It’s easy for the media to blame music for violence, because music brings so much emotion, it’s a cop out and poor journalism on the press’ behalf.
This time round the Grime scene is solid and has so much positivity around it, let’s not let these people (like Gatsby) in who want to take it from us!! Support the real pioneers of this scene, theirs lots of them.
Go grab Butterz’ new Grime album compilation, go grab a ticket to P Moneys album launch next month. These are the sort of artists we need!!
On that note go listen to 3 pioneers in the scene! Bless!!!
