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# 4 Grime music reception in the UK

This section looks at the sub-discipline of music reception – the way in which music is understood by groups of people at various times following its dissemination to a public. You will explore the idea of media representation using grime, a musical genre that emerged from the UK’s garage music scene in London during the early 2000s, as a case study. It highlights how meaning has been ascribed to grime by various groups of people, providing an example of the kinds of cultural and behavioural associations that music can acquire.

Figure 4 Wiley with members of Roll Deep crew performing on stage. Photo: Debbie Bragg/Everynight Images/Alamy

Beginning as an underground music scene that had associations with street violence, grime achieved mainstream music success with its artists such as Lady Leshur and Dizzee Rascal even receiving a BEM and an MBE, respectively. Grime’s image is complex and multifaceted. The genre initially spread through pirate radio stations and live video streaming websites such as AxeFm (McGrath et al., 2016) and has been popularised by artists such as Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Lethal Bizzle, and later in a second wave from around 2010 onwards by Skepta, JME and Stormzy. It is often characterised by a ‘do-it-yourself’ approach, having taken advantage of the rapid development of audio software and social media platforms that took place in the early 2000s; it is a product of the digital era and has subverted traditional music industry methods of production and dissemination (Woods, 2020).

While the genre is male dominated, grime does have a significant number of female artists. This is something highlighted in Ellie Ramsden’s project ‘Too Many Man: Women Of Grime’, a project consisting of ‘portraits, interviews, handwritten lyrics, live music shots and urban landscapes’ that attempts to bring greater visibility to the many women active in the scene (Ramsden, 2017). Ramsden self-published a crowd-funded photo-book of the project available to purchase directly through her website.

The following sections look at how grime’s image and reception have been affected by its media portrayal, further demonstrating how hierarchies of power can emerge and the impact that they have culturally. Specifically, the examples focus on race and the more negative aspects of the genre, rather than gender or the awarding of MBEs. This is intentional and male grime artists take the foreground here, which in itself will have an impact on your own reception of what grime is and the culture that surrounds it. By examining lyrics, media reports, scholarly articles and interviews you will encounter viewpoints as wide ranging as the genre’s image.

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OpenLearn - Introducing music research
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