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Music

Bard in Da Corner: Drawing the Line Between Poetry and Grime

The poet Kayo Chingonyi explains why D Double E and Dizzee's flows aren't just for bobbing to, they are for studying.

Kayo Chingonyi was born in Zambia and moved to the UK when he was six. He burst onto the London poetry scene in 2003, won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2012, and is currently serving as an associate poet at Institute of Contemporary Art in London. After hosting a panel titled 'The Poetics of Grime', we asked him to write a feature highlighting both grime's poetic qualities and how the genre influences poetry.

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Ever since grime first emerged in the early 00s, people have been asking questions about how to define the genre. Is it a style of hip-hop? An offshoot of UK garage? A cousin of jungle? Perhaps answering these questions conclusively would chip away at the sense of freedom that has drawn so many people to write bars and make beats. But for me though, the appeal of grime has always been about the lyrics. The focus on words—not just the meaning, but the actual sound too—shows such a strong affinity with poetry that still hasn’t been truly explored.

This was an idea first put forward by poet and grime MC Eklipse through his Bars and Stanzas event back in 2008. At this event, Eklipse brought together young poets and grime MCs on the same stage. Earlier this month, I embarked on a similar mission and invited Eklipse to join me at the ICA in London for a panel about the poetics of grime, to further explore this pronounced but unstudied affinity between London’s fiercest street expression and probably the oldest form of literature on earth.

My first brush with underground UK music was in the summer between primary school and secondary school. My cousin used to walk around repeating the same lyrics over and over to himself. For a while I didn’t know what the song was, but it actually turned out to be DJ Luck and MC Neat’s classic UK garage track “A Little Bit of Luck.” When I eventually heard the real thing (and not just my cousin’s warbled repetitions) it blew my mind. There are brilliant, murky depths within the instrumental that I’d never experienced before, but it’s the vocals which really hit you like a bus.

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Looking back, it’s that style that strikes me as one of the things that make both UK garage and grime poetic. They both use subtle nuances in tone to make something memorable with words, and as such, a number of poetic choices inevitably go into the making of every song. But there are big differences between the two genres. When grime first broke out—a handful of years after “A Little Bit of Luck”—it represented a musical shift from the club to the street. It was music for those too young for clubs, or who wouldn’t be allowed in because of the “no hats, no hoods” policy. It was, and still is, the music of alleyways, street corners, stairwells, concrete—and it sounds like it too. And once I started writing and studying poetry myself, I couldn't help seeing poetry in the songs I grew up with.

Boy In Da Corner artwork

One of my poetic moments in grime is Dizzee Rascal’s “Stop Dat,” when he spits, “Chucking MCs like stones / Bad boy forever like Sean Puffy Combs / Inside outside running all zones / Set trend get girls like Tom Jones.” Dizzee’s bars are broken down into short, sharp bursts, like trainers hitting the pavement. There is serious intention there—he uses words that are made up of one or two syllables, and the last word in each line is accented in performance to make sure it finds its mark. The resulting sound is distinctive and punchy, and because Dizzee is warding off would-be assailants (lyrical and otherwise), he chooses words that sound like pre-emptive blows.

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He isn’t the only grime MC with a flow you could describe as poetic. In D Double E’s “Colours,” the East London MC uses different colours to guide the story in an unexpected way, which allows him to use a deceptively simple rhyme scheme, rapping: “Got woken up by my orange line about nine / Some girl Caroline, she wants to link and bump and grind / I said ‘That’s fine, I don’t mind.’” This repetition of one rhyming sound over successive lines is known as “monorhyme.” You’ll find it in a bunch of grime tracks. But the thing is: monorhyme can get really predictable very quickly. It takes a particularly adept MC to make it sound unexpected, and in this particular track, the way D Double E refuses to follow every twist and turn of the beat adds that element of surprise. Instead, he flows around it. By hitting the beat at key moments, instead of the whole time, there’s a shift that adds enough tension to keep you hooked.

While D Double and Dizzee’s tracks stood out to me, my favourite poetic moment in grime lyricism comes from the Stockwell MC Dot Rotten. Where D Double E opts for a monorhyme scheme, Rotten goes for a different tack, often using complex rhyming patterns. In this freestyle for Ghetts’ birthday, for instance, he raps, “Think you can beat me and test me, no chance! Try eat me in E3, I’ll pull out the streezy, and make Eskimo dance!” He carries the rhyme across the whole bar, echoing “beat” with “eat” and “E3” with “streezy.” The craziest bit is the rhyming of the phrases “Test me, no chance” and “Eskimo dance”—ending a four-syllable-multiple-rhyme takes guts, but it also takes an exceptional ear. You have to balance the words perfectly, so that they don’t sound clunky. In his performance, Dot delivers these intricately woven lyrics with such ease that their meaning is easy to follow even though the wordplay is complex.

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From Boy Better Know to Wretch 32, it’s clear the lyrical structures of grime have some foundation in poetry. It’s perhaps not surprising to see that grime has started to influence poetry. The poet Debris Stevenson has started up a project called Poet in the Corner, which celebrates Dizzee Rascal’s seminal album by taking the rhyming schemes from Dizzee’s songs and using them as the structural bedrock for her own work. She’s not alone, either. As a relatively new genre of music, it has found its way into the work of many young poets, who are clearly influenced by the genre and the youth movement that lays deep within its roots. Kareem Parkins-Brown’s performance of his poem “I Know” is a perfect example of this:

Parkins-Brown doesn’t necessarily adopt a lyrical style borrowed exclusively from grime, yet there are unmistakable grime tropes throughout his performance. Note the focus of the poem on the black male body under threat, the emphatic delivery, the references to the effects of poverty on a community, and the direct reference to the work of Skepta. Clearly, grime has provided Parkins-Brown with a means of looking at the world and writing about it.

One of the things that came out of the event I hosted at the ICA about the poetics of grime was that the genre has given people a vehicle to express themselves, often in a language that’s radically different from standard english. Of the genre’s many gifts to UK culture, I think this is one of the most important. By the time I started writing poetry, I’d moved away from an estate. But I still remember what it was like to look out onto a grey, angled concrete world from the seventeenth floor of a tower block. I grew up listening to Nasty Crew and Roll Deep, too. So, when I write my poems, I try to bring aspects of that concrete world into my work. Whether they're writing books or writing songs, I'm sure it's the same for others too. Grime's originators laid a foundation that is helping a whole generation express themselves and document their lives.

I guess it’s only natural that today’s young poets have been influenced by grime. Both art forms give the world another perspective from the middle class lens through which so much of life is mediated. So by re-opening the conversation between grime and poetry, the relationship between poets and MCs will only grow. Together, the two art forms will blossom into something new, inspiring one another. Because what is grime, really?

Follow Kayo on Twitter: @KayoChingonyi