Some 15 years since the seething fusion of rap, dancehall and UK garage first burst from the sink estates of London, grime has finally found an abundance of mainstream attention and admiration. Now MCs such as Skepta, Stormzy, JME and Novelist are as likely to be dominating Reading and Leeds festival or appearing on Later… with Jools Holland as they are to be found fighting for the mic at a pirate radio station.
While grime has been slowly travelling from London streets to home counties suburbs, for those growing up in the inner-city sprawls of Hackney, Peckham, Lewisham or Tottenham, a different genre has dominated: the slower, menacing sounds of UK rap. XL’s Giggs was the first to popularise the sound around 2009, with the Peckham MC intoning tales with a deathly slow delivery. A slew of rap artists followed – K Koke, Benny Banks, Sneakbo, Krept and Konan – but faced with a combination of mainstream radio stations potentially wary of supporting artists who they think glamourise gang lifestyle, and sustained police harassment surrounding these artists, none seemed to be able to convincingly break into the mainstream.
Now, however, the old gatekeepers of the media are beginning to fall away. While the press has been excitedly reporting that grime MC Stormzy broke into the charts with an independently released freestyle, another, perhaps more remarkable independent chart success has gone under the radar. In August, the Hackney based UK rap artist J Spades decided to sell his latest mixtape. Entitled More Money More Pagans 3, it is an uncompromising listen, 19 tracks of doom-laden street anthems and Auto-Tuned hooks, drenched in the wit and nihilism of east London’s manors. Remarkably, with no press campaign and little radio support, Spades broke into the iTunes top 20, leading to the surreal sight of MMMP3 featuring on a chart that included the Maccabees, Lianne La Havas and Now That’s What I Call Music 91. With the breakthrough, Spades was proving what the underground has known for a while now – that there is an untapped UK rap scene with a burgeoning fanbase. And it’s starting to look like they don’t need the mainstream at all.
“For me, it’s more finances over recognition,” says J Spades. “We’ve all seen artists get signed and we’ve seen them get dropped. K Koke is a good friend of mine. I saw when Roc Nation came, picked up Koke and weren’t sure what to do with him. I got offered deals and I was like nah, leave me out. If I can put myself on a platform to mirror the financial situation of a signed artist’s bank account, then I’m good. The money you get when you sign is a loan. A lot of people don’t understand the game, they think you get the dough and it’s all yours.”
For many acts, there is sense that by aligning with a major label, an artist may lose his or her integrity. In the case of grime, a scene predominantly started to express the frustrations, dreams and humour of young, black, working-class Londoners’ daily lives, there is a great fear that the music will be denigrated into a pop disaster of crap 90s trance samples, with videos shot in Ibiza and guest verses from Dappy. This is something Spades is all too aware of – and something he has no intention of allowing to happen to his brand of UK rap.
“Once labels get an artist, they destroy that artist without even knowing it – they just do everything that’s gonna get a quick buck. And every time they do something stupid, you lose 10,000 fans like that. By the time they’re done with you, do you have the finances to back yourself? Cos no one’s booking you for shows any more …”
The solution has been the creation of a cottage industry. UK rap now has its own YouTube channels full of homemade content. Tracks are recorded in bedrooms and videos shot in the street. Content is shared across social media and streaming services such as Soundcloud. A well-made video can easily pick up more than a million views in a month – if an indie band pulled off such a feat, they’d have record labels falling over themselves to sign them. But in the insular world of UK rap it often feels like the only people outside the scene paying attention to the increasingly impressive figures are the police.
“I did a freestyle called Hustle Hard,” Spades remembers. “It had 800,000 views on YouTube, then the police shut down Rap City, the channel I had it on, so we lost pure views. The police said the website was inciting crime and it had too many videos that were pushing an agenda, it was inciting too much gang culture. Pure videos got lost, I lost millions of views. All the videos got reuploaded and we had to build the views again.”
“I think it was an abuse of power really. It wasn’t a site that you’d go on and see someone getting shot. It’s music from an environment of people that you lot [the police] developed, and this is the platform where they get to voice their opinion or showcase their talent or whatever it may be, and you shut that down? So now what are you doing? You’re breeding even more contempt from people who don’t necessarily have a liking of you in the first place. So now when you wanna approach them and give them a stop and search or whatever, when they see you they’re gonna make your job even harder, cos they can’t do anything without you getting all up in the mix. We’re not even able to shoot a video! I didn’t have firearms or offensive weapons in the videos – the worst thing I had might have been some weed smoke or something, and these videos weren’t even meant for TV. It was just art.”
Yet despite these setbacks, the scene has continued to grow. Whether UK rap can cross over into the pop charts with regularity looks increasingly irrelevant – as Spades points out, he makes more money off selling merchandise on the back of his free releases than he did from hitting the top 20 – and with no major signing him into a 360 deal where they take a percentage of everything he earns, he is working from a new independent model where artists are retaking commercial and creative control, and speaking directly to their audience. He is not alone either: here are some other names pioneering UK rap.
Section Boyz
The closest thing UK rap has to a boy band, these six MCs from south London are stars of the scene. After building an underground heat with a string of YouTube videos, last week they broke into the top 40 with their independently released debut mixtape Don’t Panic.
Key track Trappin Ain’t Dead
J Hus
Stratford’s J Hus mixes a West African flow with east London slang. He’s as comfortable with making hook-filled tracks for the dancefloor as he is on dark street tales, and recent mixtape track Guns & Butter – a reflection on the legacy of colonialism – suggests that among his chat about girls and thuggery, there may be a conscious streak struggling to get out.
Key track Dem Boy Paigon
Nines
A couple of years back, Nines was in Wormwood Scrubs for unspecified crimes. This month he’s been nominated for a Mobo for best UK rap artist. It’s fair to say he’s turning things around. Consistently racking up millions of hits on his YouTube videos, Nines has been the street pick for a while now, although presumably having Jamal ‘SBTV’ Edwards as a manager has given him a strong advantage.
Key track Money on my Mind
Geko
The youngest MC to appear on 1Xtra’s Fire in the Booth section, Mancunian Geko was bought into the spotlight as a member of K Koke’s USG crew before leaving acrimoniously last year (Koke branded him an “ungrateful little shit”). Geko is increasingly turning from UK rap to more pop-friendly R&B and Afrobeat sounds – with huge views on the videos he’s made this year alone, it’s fairly likely you’ll be hearing a lot more from him in 2016.
Key track Baba
