◄Previous: 4.1 Wot Do U Call It?

# 4.2 This is Grime

In Hattie Collins’ and Oliver Rose’s book This Is Grime (2016), community is a recurring theme that emerges from the many interviews conducted with grime artists. The interviews document the close ties musicians have through family and friends, but also how musicians rely on crews, self-organised events and social networking within a relatively small geographic area to create a music scene. They also reveal the social deprivation inherent in these communities at large, and consequently the day-to-day struggles interviewees face. Grime appears to have evolved out of a need to vent these frustrations, often through fast-paced shouted raps with direct reference to the urban environment.

Grime musicians generally acknowledge that the lyrics of their songs often discuss violence. Rather than encouraging violent behaviour, this is a response to their own lived experience that instead acts as a way to highlight the difficulties they may or may not have faced in day-to-day life. A superficial reading of this could suggest a fractured social group, though it’s important to note that without social cooperation and a common goal of wanting to express their frustration through music, grime as a musical practice would not have become what it is today. While in no ways the only artform to reflect the environment from which it emerged, grime is an expressive medium that presents a direct, raw and unfiltered picture of where it comes from. It’s revealing to hear grime MC Bruza’s view on this:

#### Extract

We didn’t have a platform, a means, a mic to shout to the world to say what was going on in our lives. We was hearing about champagne dances, but I couldn’t relate to that. That wasn’t what we was going through. We was in the council estates, spitting to each other, beatboxing, spraying lyrics. But no one could hear us, ‘cause we were trapped on this block, on this estate. No dad about, no guidance to show us that you could do something with your life. This was a platform for people to hear us, what we were going through. That’s how these tunes come about, so we could vent.

Collins and Rose, 2016, p. 24.

It’s a bleak description, and one that doesn’t reflect the playful, conversational style of ‘Wot Do U Call It?’. MC Bruza does, however, emphasise the importance of community music making – that is, grime – being at the heart of dealing with the harsh reality of life, something that is often lost in the genre’s portrayal.

◄Contents►Next: 4.3 Crazy Titch

OpenLearn - Introducing music research
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.