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.

More cyclist victim-blaming

This afternoon I met a friend of a friend, and we discussed her experiences of driving in London, having moved here from China a couple of years ago.  I sympathised with her nightmarish experiences of driving lessons involving the enormous roundabouts in the part of East London where I grew up, and related to her feeling unconfident in navigating London’s often hectic streets.  

She then told me that she’s failed her test four times – but in the same breath, added with outrage that two of these failures had been due to cyclists.  I raised my eyebrows.  It seemed harsh for a driving examiner to fail her for a mistake that was someone else’s fault.  On the other hand, I could imagine a learner driver not having the experience to deal with out-of-the-ordinary situations, and panicking during interactions with other road-users behaving in unexpected or selfish ways, leading her to feel cyclists were to blame for whatever the incident was.  (Notwithstanding the fact that she felt that failing her driving test four times was an injustice against her, rather than an indication of her ability as a driver.)

She elaborated on her story.  The first time she failed, it was because she was asked to pull over when she was in front of two cyclists.  When she indicated and slowed down and, she incorrectly anticipated that they would undertake, and waited in the middle of the road for them to do so.  Instead, the cyclists (correctly) just waited patiently behind her for her to pull in.  She ended up stationary in the middle of the road, for which she was failed. 

I asked what the cyclists had done wrong.  Her response was that if they hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t have failed. 

In the second story, she overtook a cyclist on a relatively quiet road.  The examiner soon afterwards asked her to take the next left – which she immediately did without checking her mirrors, cutting up the cyclist who was now just behind her, and who she’d now forgotten about. 

I asked how the cyclist was to blame for her cutting in front of him without looking.  Her response was that he should have used a different road.  I said, ‘What, the other London roads, with no cars on them?’  To which she responded ‘yes’, before going on to say that on a policy level, “They” shouldn’t be permitted on “Our” streets, thus enabling better overall road safety . 

I didn’t ask her any further about why she used the words ‘them’ and ‘us’, or about her use of the possessive ‘our’ – ie why she thought the road belonged to her, but not to cyclists.  But I was quite sarcastic in pointing out that she blamed the cyclist for her own driving test failure, even though it was her behind the wheel, and furthermore it was she who nearly killed the cyclist.  However, she remained adamant that the cyclist was at fault, and that she had done nothing wrong.  

For her, the idea that the cyclist must have been the one in the wrong was closely tied to the idea that cyclists don’t belong on the road.  This gave her the right to drive exactly as she pleased, as cyclists are only temporarily permitted to ride there by the good grace and patience of the car drivers who legitimately inhabit it (ie her). 

The explicitly espoused views that 1)  car drivers are the natural owners of the road, and 2)  cyclists are in an ‘other’ category that has no rights either as traffic or as human beings, seem to be heavily connected, and apparently remain prevalent among London road-users.

The segregated city - urban taxonomies

The city is full of boundaries.  Messages about the space we are inhabiting, telling us where we are allowed to stay put, and where we should keep moving;  where we can and can’t enter, and under what conditions;  messages about how we should behave once inside. 

Sometimes these signals are obvious – a fence with a locked gate tells us we are not meant to enter somewhere.  Some signals are more subtle – a change in the texture of the paving tells us that we are moving from public space to private property, where our legal rights are very different, dictated by the landowner instead of a democratically accountable council or government.  These messages are sent out by urban infrastructure like radio waves, and continually reinforced in our minds by the behaviours of those we see around us.   

And they are indeed messages:  not accidents of construction, but actions carefully considered  by town planners, architects, corporations, local authorities, etc. 

We now rely on a complex web of signals and signposts to guide our interactions with the city, and with each other.  Road markings, traffic signs, positioning of kerbs and speed humps, bollards, railings, fences, walls, the design of junctions and roundabouts, phasing of traffic lights;  anti-skateboarding devices, anti-pigeon devices, anti-youth devices that emit a high-pitched noise, benches designed to repel homeless people;  anti-climb paint;  positioning and availability of facilities such as street lamps, public toilets;  the design of buses and bus stops, and the layout of their routes.  There is even an example of a town in Essex that painted yellow lines on the pavement to guide where people should walk.

These layers of mediation between our inner thoughts and our external environment have the cumulative effect over time that we stop making decisions and relating our judgements to our direct experiences of the place and our memories.  Instead, we check the signals.  Or rather, we don’t stop thinking altogether – but our thoughts maybe lack nuance, and our ability to critically interpret and respond to new situations is diminished. 

Our diminished ability to think critically about situations leads to our becoming isolated from other people in our immediate surroundings.  People stop being individuals, and become specimens of a given category.  When we drive along the road, we’re looking out for drivers in front and behind us, checking to see if they’re indicating, whether they’re speeding up or slowing down, performing pre-determined movements that imply particular patterns of behaviour.  We’re not thinking about what that person is like;  what sort of day they’re having;  how they’re feeling;  etc. 

And fair enough – if we spent all our time wondering what the driver next to us was going to have for dinner, I’m not sure it would help our driving.  But I still think it’s important to note the trade-off that we make in this process of dehumanisation.

Our removal from other road-users is all the more stark in relation to people in different categories.  People on the ‘other’ side of the boundaries that mark up the city.  For example, if we travel along the road in a car, we are not only bodily separated from the outside world through the physical fact of the car’s shell.  We also a gulf apart from pedestrians inhabiting the parallel dimension of the pavement. 

The visual language of the division between the road and the pavement is powerful enough that we are able to drive along and see people on the pavement in a completely different category to those driving the car directly in front of us.

We’re aware of those pedestrians in our peripheral vision, but as long as their body-language doesn’t indicate they’re about to make a mad dash into the road (into our world, colliding with our reality), we are able to ignore them. 

This isn’t an argument that we should abolish kerbs, and there are many good and helpful reasons that symbolic and physical signs and barriers  – though there have been some interesting experiments in removing these.  But I do think it’s interesting to interrogate the effects of excessively taxonomised mindsets on the relationships between different users of urban space. 

What makes us visible? Perception vs the physical

My friend Katie recently posted a link to a tutorial on how to make your own light-up cycling jacket.  You basically sew a load of LEDs into a(n otherwise perfectly wearable) jacket, hook them up to some batteries, and wire an on/off button into the cuffs. 

This got me thinking about what it is that makes you visible to others on the roads.  Is it simply about some part of you being brightly lit?  Or is there some interpretive element to how we see, and respond to, other road-users?  How does your ‘physical visibility’ relate to your ‘interpretive visibility’?

Katie’s hi-vis jacket provides the wearer with two light-up arrows, pointing left and right, which can be switched on independently, allowing the wearer to signal when they’re about to turn left or right, in the same way as a car’s indicator lights. 

Or does it?  Although the designer and wearer of this contraption knows that the arrows mean ‘I’m turning right’, what does the car-driver see?  I suspect that – at least initially – they’ll just see some flashing lights.  Maybe if the cyclist is slowing down and approaching a junction, the car driver will – in a few seconds – put two and two together, and consciously think “Oh, they’re signalling”.  But this calculated mental reaction is very different to their response to a car’s orange indicator light, which all drivers the world over know – without even consciously processing it – to symbolise ‘I’m turning’.

I think the ‘arrow jacket’ also contains a second barrier to the process of realisation, as the driver has to process the symbolic meaning of the direction of the arrow.  Car indicator lights, kind of ingeniously, don’t require the observer to make this mental calculation – they just rely on the orange light being on the side of the car that the vehicle is about to move towards.  Arrows require an extra layer of decoding – and if the observer isn’t expecting to have to do any decoding of new languages invented by other road-users – which they’ve never seen before – then I wonder what impact it will be on their perception of what they’re seeing.

This is no criticism of the jacket or its designer.  I think it’s quite a clever idea in many ways, and I find something about the craftivist / hacking element kind of aesthetically appealing.  But I do think it raises interesting questions about visibility in urban space.

I think similar issues are at play in other new lighting contraptions I’ve seen emerge recently.  Revolights insert hoops of LEDs into the wheel rims, which are synched to the speed of the bike to only light up only the front half of the front rim, and the back half of the back rim. 

But what do your eyes and brain do when they see two 2-foot high arcs of light glide along the road surface?  What does it mean? 

More prosaically, a friend recently pointed out how weird it looks when you see orange pedal reflectors bobbing up and down.  Similarly, we’re used to seeing jackets, bags, lycra gear etc, with all sorts of patterns of silver reflective material built in.  We suppose that it makes us more visible.  But when I ride along wearing my black leggings with the silver writing on the calves, what message does it send to someone behind me when they see the disembodied word “Altura” bobbing up and down in front of them?  Maybe they correctly interpret this signal, and perceive a cyclist whom they should treat with caution and respect.  Perhaps they muse upon the spectacle of a ghost whose only connection the earthly realm is a shining brand name? 

Admittedly these symbols are never static – if enough people start adopting these technologies and forms, they will over time become their own visual language.  Perhaps one day everyone will become used to seeing a red and white arc, or a flashing LED triangle, as ‘cyclist’ without thinking about it, just as we see a pair of disembodied headlights and think ‘car’. 

But I think that in the meantime, the cracks in the continuity and clarity of this language can act as useful tools to help us consider what it is about our physical form that allows us to be processed as symbolic forms.  This in turn will help us to think about how we can start to construct cyclists not just as objects that can be seen, but citizens who are treated with respect and humanity.