Music

Garageland

Inner-City London Takes the Mediterranean

By Andy Capper


Photo of Kano in Napa 03 courtesy of N.A.S.T.Y Crew.



British people who work in the media will tell you things like "The UK underground is dead," but that's because they get all their articles and ideas by googling their lives away on friendster.com and gayclub.org.

Anybody who actually lives outside of the ridiculous world of fashion-culture magazines or the totally out-of-touch mainstream radio and TV will tell you there's a million different underground scenes going on all over England all at once.

Just look at the young, black, violent MCs of East London's Grime/Sub-Lo/Eski garage scene (known to most as simply the underground garage scene circa right now). They've created an underground so alive and thriving that it's a mystery why the entire world isn't taking lessons on how to be like them.

Even though Dizzee Rascal made it quite big recently and the liberal Guardian newspaper just wrote a story about Grime, Dizzee and our boy Mike Skinner are like trillionaire violinist pop stars compared to the thousands of underground MCs who make the garage music of today. In fact, most of these MCs have never heard of The Streets and see Dizzee as a successful rapper who used to do garage.

Made by some of the poorest kids in inner-city London, the new music consists of rhymes and beats so bristly and violent and fucking brutal and totally unplayable by any radio station ever that the first time you hear it you go, "errrrwoaah phheeeeewwwwwoooooohhhh," like when you've had too many Es and you're trapped in a scary place between ultimate joy and lust and total fear for your life. Some of it's like Napalm Death (first album) crossed with dark fucking rock-slinging East London grimness and The Specials, and it makes Luther Vandross-sampling American hip-hop like Kanye West stand in the music-for-parents corner like it should. MC/producers like Wiley—who used to be Dizzee Rascal's right-hand man in the Roll Deep Entourage—make simple, two-note, minor-chord beats out of Playstation 2s, and then press up white labels and sell them out of the boot of their cars at raves. There's no chains or ice, just black Barbour jackets and Evisu jeans climbing up to the top of 38-story tower blocks to place a radio transmitter out of the way of the cops and the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry).

If you live in London, there are so many illegal pirate radio stations that it's almost impossible to get the main radio stations on your dial. The stations are hidden away in council-estate kitchens and factory tearooms and underneath railway stations. They're where MCs and producers make their names by spitting lines like "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings/And I'll slap the fat lady/And if she gets up BLAM BLAM! I'll shoot her back down again" (that's a Ruff Squad lyric).

The MCs and producers all have to pay to play on the stations, and they get nothing back from it apart from love and respect from their fellow kids, so it's clear that nothing really matters to them besides their scene.

Now the story here is that these kids work harder than most of their parents, and they need a good vacation now and again. Britain is cold and rainy 363 days of the year, and the working-class tradition of cheap package holidays to the Mediterranean makes life worth living for a lot of us, so that's how you get places like Ibiza, where the faggy, white, Ecstasy-riddled, facile house scene still thrives.

But while Spain gets didgeridoo-playing, technical-sandal wearing E casualties chewing their faces off and dancing in the sea to Judge Jules, the violent-digital-cacophony scene of new garage goes to the Cypriot island of Ayia Napa. Because the police there are so strict on drug use and the garage scene used to be ruled by rollneck-wearing DJs like Artful Dodger and Dreem Team, Napa was once quite a happy, trouble-free, completely boring place to go.

Mainly, it was a lot of fat middle-class white girls out for black cock and tons of embarrassing red-wine-and-shagpile-carpet people in fake Moschino jeans.

This year, though, the Grime garage crews are going to descend on Napa in all their spitting glory. All drunk on Alizé and high as fucking kites on skunk with zero females anywhere to take their bloodlust out on, they're going to tear Napa 10 new assholes and then piss all over its bleeding sores and laugh like hyenas.

"Grime is just bare noise, bruv," explains ex-N.A.S.T.Y Crew MC Dee Double E. "It means ‘dark.' Just spitting bare anger. I reckon Napa is grimy. They always hold grime back, put it with some R&B, but when grime comes on pure it gets the crowd shock."

The whole island is a powder keg waiting to go off. Most of the Grime kids are going to be living in cheap-ass, self-catering, package-holiday accommodations, where the food tastes worse than the supermarket shit in the East London ghetto. They're also going to be deprived of sleep thanks to the constant, unforgiving sound of 10,000-miles-an-hour music battering their brains all day and night for four weeks.

MC Dee Double continues, "The food in Ayia tastes fucked up. The clubs are all tight. The police are a bit crazy out there. I was on my moped and the police was following me, shouting bare [ed.: "bare" means "a lot"] shit at me. They tried to get me to the police station, but I got away. There's going to be random trouble everywhere next time we go."

"Grime brings out the anger in MCs," said N.A.S.T.Y Crew MC Ghetto when Vice spoke to him and rhyming partner Kano recently.

"In Napa, everyone is drunk" deadpanned Kano. "Everyone's having a good time, traveling round in cars or on their mopeds. There's always trouble. One of my friend's friends got stabbed and they had to extend their tickets. This year there'll be N.A.S.T.Y Crew, East Connection, Roll Deep. I would like to see Eskimo [Wiley's rave] out there. A lot of kids in England can't get to Eski in London, but in Napa you'll have people from Manchester, Cardiff, Leeds, Luton, everywhere. It's mad, cuz they can't get our records or hear us on radio, but they all come down to Napa."

Shit. We feel a little bad writing all this stuff down, because we don't want to be harbingers of doom or see the Grime kids—some of whom have written stuff for us and played our parties and helped us out—stabbed or shot or fucked up in any way at all, but everybody we spoke to about this year's Napa seemed to say the same thing.

Like UK garage bible RWD and their writer Rosa Ahmed said: "Grime music creates a tension in the clubs because you can't really dance to it."

"It creates a different kind of mood than the garage music that Ayia Napa is used to," she told us over the phone. "Grime makes you want to punch somebody in the face, or else just sit in a corner and smoke weed and get paranoid. The old Ayia Napa crew was the Artful Dodger brigade, where all they sang about was girls and stuff, but grimy lyrics is all about violence and keeping it raw and angry. The kids are 21 and 22, and it's always tense at those raves."

We then proposed to Rosa that if all the rival gangs on mopeds are racing down to the beach and staingy out all night dancing and getting tense, Ayia Napa 'O4 will basically be the black sequel to Quadrophenia, only twice as intense and potentially culturally relevant to Britain—i.e., it could signal the start of a new musical movement as invigorating to bored working-class Brits as ska, punk, or two-tone was.

"What's Quadroplegia?" she replied. "I've never heard of it."

ANDY CAPPER
GARAGE
Named after Manhattan's Paradise Garage, this fast-paced form of dance music has changed drastically since its inception. Most recently it's gone from bourgeois turtleneck funk to catchy urban underground dance (The Streets) to minimalist rap (Dizzee Rascal) to pure digital cacophony (what it is today). Though definitions seem to change daily, and it is often called things like eski beat, down low, and grime (the genre's latest hero Wiley, just recorded a track called "What's It Called?"), the garage music of today is just a few spacious beats laid out on a Sony Playstation with a barrage of lightning-fast MCs screaming out what appears to be incredibly violent ragga. Most of the tracks are too loud and raw to be released, so they can only exist live. That is to say, the beats are made in some poor black kid's bedroom, then played on an illegal radio station where an MC can rap over them live. If you're at home, you can hit "record" on your tape player and, bang, you have the song—nobody else does. Despite most of these tracks never being released, most kids at "raves" (any organized garage night) know all the lyrics. About 70 percent of young people in London listen to underground garage even though it has virtually no commercial appeal.

PIRATE RADIO
Most kids get their music from illegal radio stations. It is the only way to hear today's underground garage. A bunch of young kids (usually white) take over a small residential apartment in the ghettos of East London. They build a soundproof room and set up 90 percent of the station––the turntables, microphones, link box, and antennae. The antennae then sends a microwave signal to the transmitter, which is usually miles away on the top of a tenement flat (see the cover of Original Pirate Material). The transmitter is far away for two reasons: 1) it can be placed on the highest building in London and can therefore broadcast much farther than the flat they took over, and 2) when the Department of Trade and Industry finds the signal, it can only confiscate the transmitter (worth about $600) and will still have no idea where the actual radio station is. The biggest expense a pirate radio owner has, by far, is replacing confiscated transmitters. The DTI contends that pirate radio stations inadvertently scramble emergency-services signals and people are dying because of it. We think that's malarkey and they're just trying to justify their government-funded jobs.

AYIA NAPA
A small Greek village that the underground garage scene has randomly chosen as their summer home. Where the faggy house scene has Ibiza, these kids have Aiya Napa. You have all the pirate radio owners and DJs, all the MCs, all the fans (not just from inner-city London but from all over Britain), all the crews, and all the criminals. These are the poorest and most dangerous kids in London, all drunk and high and ready to rumble. Dizzee Rascal was stabbed here, and plenty more people will inevitably go down this summer.


The UK Garage Beefs

Dizzee Rascal vs. Vice
Vice wrote about Dizzee back in April '03 for the "West Is The Best" Issue. We took photos of Dizzee boxing, punching holes in walls, and finally, holding his knife. Dizzee's manager, Nick Cage, asked us not to use the picture of the knife, but we used it anyway because we're not a PR agency. When he saw the article, Cage hit the fucking roof and threatened to rip our UK editor "limb from limb." Dizzee got stabbed about nine months later, and Cage sees that as proof that he was right and that Vice endangered Dizzee's life by not following his instructions. When anything about this story is mentioned, Cage turns beet-red with rage and runs out of the room. Most recently, he was in the offices of a large American record label talking about it and he almost punched a hole through the wall. Meanwhile, Dizzee is shrugging his shoulders in the background and telling us, "It was the realest article anybody wrote about me."

Dizzee Rascal vs. So Solid Crew
As we just mentioned, Dizzee Rascal was stabbed numerous times in broad daylight by somebody who was allegedly upset that he allegedly pinched the ass of the first lady of So Solid, Lisa Maffia, in a club the night before. While Dizzee doesn't really roll with that much of a crew now—he split from Roll Deep on signing to XL—there's still bad feeling over the incident.

So Solid Crew vs. New Garage Everybody
Because they inadvertently invented Grime garage by introducing gangsta elements to a previously "red wine and roses"–obsessed scene, So Solid feel pissed off that none of the Grime kids take them seriously. The 29-strong Brixton crew also owns a villa in Napa and its members have various beefs on a weekly basis with everybody. When Grime invades Napa this year, So Solid is going to be ready and waiting for it to go off. So Solid (mostly in their mid-20s upwards) and the young scamps that make up crews like Ruff Squad and East Connection are going to make them look old and redundant and nothing's meaner than an old dog who can't get it up any more.

Marcus Nasty vs. Dee Double and Jammer
N.A.S.T.Y Crew founding member Marcus Nasty was in jail for a while, so a dreadlocked producer called Jammer took over the beats/management of Forest Gate's premier crew. When Marcus got out of prison, he sacked Jammer and dissed him in the garage press. Dee Double, N.A.S.T.Y's most popular MC next to Kano, also left in loyalty to Jammer, and MC Munkee left too. When this happened, Marcus Nasty went apeshit and even slapped Dee Double on stage at a rave in East London in January. Dee Double and Jammer are now working together with Munkee, while N.A.S.T.Y is now Marcus Nasty, Sharky, Kano, Hyper, and Ghetto. Both sides of the split are going to be in Napa this year. Look out.

Wiley vs. Everybody
Everybody's saying that Wiley's Eskimo rave will be at Club Ice this year, and if this happens, there's going to be beefs every night. Not so much violent beefs, rather, every new MC who wants to make his name usually does it by dissing Wiley—considered the Dr. Dre of Grime—and then having a face-off with him on the mic. This is how Durrty Dugz made his name. Recently, Wiley broke his hand single-handedly taking on the security at one of his own Eskimo Dance raves because they wouldn't let one of his boys in.

Right now, Wiley=God.
By Andy Capper 7 years ago

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