Stand up tall: authenticity, the past, and the future

Dan Hancox’s recent e-book, Stand up tall:  Dizzee Rascal and the birth of grime, uses Dizzee Rascal’s first two albums as a prism through which to explore the history of grime, and the politics that underpinned its birth.  I found it compelling, as Dan Hancox’s approach made me reflect on my own, strange relationship with grime – but it also raised broader questions for me around authenticity and nostalgia. 

Not orientalism

I first encountered Dan Hancox a few years back when he gave a talk at the University of East London about the role of grime in the 2010 student protests.  I remember at the time finding it hilarious to hear someone talk about grime in that accent – this was something I’d never encountered before. 

I had mixed feelings about this.  On one hand, I found something uncomfortably anthropological about his insights and descriptions.  It reminded me of when I used to work in criminal courts, and would hear upper-class barristers trying to ‘translate’ slang used by defendants.  There also seems to be something slightly problematic about the mainstream music media’s attitude towards Hancox, positioning his writing as legitimating a whole culture by virtue of his writing about it as a middle class Oxbridge graduate. 

(Though I’m sure this is a mantle he would never choose for himself, and his genuine joy for the genre and its culture is apparent throughout – not least in his approach to interviews.  The end of the book describes with glee his various encounters with grime artists on their own terms – in the back of cars, in recording studios, in cramped bedrooms.)

On the other hand, I found it positive that here was someone with his background prepared to take the genre seriously, and unironically discuss it in the language you would expect to hear people use when talking about any other art or literature – a far cry from the derisive and smug tones of the TV show Rude Tube, serving up Jaxxor’s ‘Junior Spesh’ to a knowing crowd of chav-baiting hipsters. 

There was a notable lack of sensationalism or exoticism – something missing from most grime coverage.  I enjoyed his analysis of grime’s sense of humour about itself, which can be easy to miss or misinterpret.  I found his attempt to describe the possible joy of screwfacing at dirty basslines reminding me of my teenage self explaining mosh-pits to people who thought they were all about fighting and aggression. 

Rose tinting

However, I did find some of this approach overly rose-tinted.  While a lot of mainstream coverage of grime – and of urban and youth culture in general – focuses too heavily on gang violence, Hancox I feel reacts by down-playing it too much.  He talks about violent lyrics being mainly bravado, and describes the camaraderie of grime artists behind the façade of machismo – with the infamous exception of Crazy T’s murder conviction. 

But this ignores some very real problems, which grime music is famous for documenting – the postcode wars, frequent fights and stabbings, rivalries between estates and gangs, and occasional killings.  As Hancox rightly points out in the book, this doesn’t mean grime caused or was caused by these phenomena, and I’m not locating violence as part of the grime ‘scene’ exactly.  But grime is certainly the soundtrack to all that. 

This brings me on to my own weird relationship with grime.  Growing up as a middle-class kid in suburban East London, grime was definitely on my radar as a teenager.  I had friends that listened to it, and friends of friends who produced it, and who were fully part of that world.  But my response to it was always detached. 

There was something kind of absurd about grime, in the same way that probably most teenage sub-cultures are when you’re not part of them.  I remember sitting in my friend Ben’s car, and him playing me Pay As U Go Cartel on Rinse FM (back when it was still a pirate radio station), and at first being convinced he was listening to it ironically.  I remember us all laughing like drains at an Oxide and Neutrino lyric, “I'll break in your house, strip you naked and take your possessions, now that’s gettin jacked.  I shot myself in the leg, cos I’m crazy like that. ” – how could anyone say that and take themselves seriously? 

Grime was also strongly associated with the kids who’d rob me and my friends on the bus, and start on is in the street.  While clearly not everyone who listened to grime was a potential mugger, grime acquired a connection with something scary.  Going to the Stratford Rex – which Hancox describes as the setting for a bland live-set from Roll Deep – was a genuinely tense experience when I was a teenager.  It was only in my early twenties, when getting robbed or attacked by other teenagers became a much less frequent occurrence, that I actually started listening to grime on its own terms.  From Hancox’s anecdotes, including seeing Roll Deep in 2005, I’m guessing (though perhaps ignorantly or unfairly) that he had similar experiences to mine. 

Creating the past, destroying the past

I read this e-book on the day I returned from heatwave August France, after a fortnight cycling through sleepy rural Brittany, and staying at an anarchist permaculture farming community.   After living in utopia, this was a pleasing way to ease myself back into the grit of the city. 

I enjoyed the stroll through Thatcher and Blair’s legacies on the East End;  the politics;  the architecture;  the history of the Docklands area;  the impact of gentrification and the Olympics;  the relationship between the police and young BME people.  And I enjoyed that none of it was abstract, that it was all told from an intimate perspective.  I also – inevitably – ended up revisiting almost the whole Dizzee Rascal back catalogue. 

But all this created the strange effect of making me feel a glow of nostalgia for something I’d never (at least not contemporaneously) been part of.  It made me think of Mark Fisher’s writings about longing to recreate a nostalgic past that you’ve never experienced.  My friend Ishraaq has often expressed his pain at being in the right place, at the right time, but in the wrong social class, to participate in grime as a teenager.  And that however much he listens to it now, it will only ever be as an outside observer – it will never have been a part of his youth. 

This re-combined especially weirdly with Hancox’s own ideas about grime attempting to escape from a humdrum present into a dream-world future.  Like maybe I’d fallen through a hole into some sort of limbo-dimension, re-inventing a past that denied its own present by looking for a future that has never been. 

Although I’m actually undecided about the claims that grime denies its present (after all, what other genre speaks – in its own accent – about such minute details of quotidian life?), nothing demonstrates more clearly a desire to escape the past than the end-notes about Dizzee Rascal’s refusal to participate in the book, or talk about his roots in grime and pirate radio. 

In an uncomfortably hurt fanboy voice, Hancox talks about Dizzee’s refusal not just to talk to him, but to pretty much anyone about his life and music before a certain period.  (It can only have been these passage that spawned some rather beautiful slash fiction on Twitter:  "I... I... I luv u", sighed the cub journalist as Dizzee's toned arms wrapped around his quivering torso".)

Creating the future

Although it’s a shame that Dizzee sold old (and he definitely has), I can understand why by this point he’d be weary of repeatedly being expected to re-visit his past for the delectation of the mainstream media seeking orientalist thrills, the ‘urban safari’ satirised in Plan B’s Ill Manors.  (Again, I’m not necessarily including Dan Hancox in this milieu).  

Dizzee’s frustrations at this minority-pigeonholing are echoed in Kanye West’s recent interview with Zane Lowe, where talks about the barriers he has come up against as a black artist trying to take his work in new directions.  He finds that he can never simply be an artist, but must always be categorised as a black artist, and one who has a history of talking about the street. 

(As an aside, this explicitly voiced class-and-race-consciousness of Kanye West – rarely seen in modern pop music – is also expressed by Dizzee in Cut ‘Em Off, albeit more romantically, in a lyric that stands out for me above anything else he’s written: 

“Remember this:  I AM YOU.
So if you think you're real, do what you gotta do.
On a level, you’re just challenging yourself.
So if you’re feeling brave, go ahead and hurt yourself.”)

Dizzee himself has framed his new music not as selling out, but as a desire to create a more positive future by singing about subjects other than the negative aspects of street life, and not dwelling on a past that he no longer lives in.  Fair enough, though it’s a pity he did it with James Corden and Robbie Williams, given that he now has the power to pick and choose pretty much any musician in the world to collaborate with.

But there’s still no getting away from Dizzee’s incisive political insight.  Though many took the piss out of his Newsnight interview, his response to Paxman’s question, “Do you believe in political parties” - “I believe they exist, yeah” – was exactly the kind of thing I’d have wished I’d said if I’d been asked that question. 

And, while grime contains its share of political and philosophical and wisdom (though you often have to look pretty hard for it), Boy in da Corner and Showtime contain it in density that is rarely matched in any album of any genre of the last 20 years.  

Which brings me back to my opening sentence.  I found it in some ways limiting that Dan Hancox chose to use just two albums as his focal point – though I had to admire his discipline in not straying into the plethora of other artists he could have brought into the mix.

But it’s a testament to the depth contained in those two short albums that they were able to work as a lens to investigate not just a genre, but a whole era, place, political landscape and culture.