The music of London

Artwork by Jennifer Oguguo

Our Culture Editors look at grime, jazz, and spoken word through the lens of bricolage.

Grime

“Grime is a way to vent, a way to express yourself. It’s a form of release. Grime is still developing and defining itself, and I think it can only go from strength to strength” -Rage from SlewDem Crew. 

Grime music evolved directly out of, and in opposition to rap music in London in the early 2000’s and has since become a potent and popular art form. It is a predominantly British commodity, prizing content about London and the experiences of young people in a gritty urban city. The style traditionally has around 140 beats per minute, focusing on syncopated ‘breakbeats’ for the main rhythm, a style of electronic/dance music that itself utilises genres of the past such as jazz, R&B and funk. 

Grime artists often desire to distance themselves from traditional ‘rap’ music. Akala says in his song Shakespeare: “Don't ever compare me to rappers/I'm so quick-witted that I split em like fractions”. There certainly is a need to define themselves against what has come before even whilst building on the influences of the past. These older influences include UK jungle and garage music, as well as hip-hop and R&B from America. Grime is not just a combination of different musical genres but also of countries and their cultures. A main influence on current Grime music is Afro-Caribbean music, including reggae and dance-hall. Reggae music widely proliferated in the UK music charts in the 80s, coinciding with a movement of acceptance towards the mixing of cultures and influences. Those of the Windrush generation, from 1948 to 1970 were more integrated into society and thus so was the music they brought from Jamaica. 

The standout artists from the Grime movement are Wiley, Skepta, Stormzy, and Dizzie Rascal. Wiley has been coined the “godfather of grime” and Skepta is not just a performer but a producer too. His most recent album Konnichiwa not only takes inspiration from the past but references another culture even in the title. Grime has the ability to represent not only one's own culture but to look outside yourself and take influences from other places. Stormzy is probably the most well-known grime artist of all time and works to promote black culture and black opportunity through his music, being both political and powerful. Dizzie Rascal’s album Boy in da Corner was a breakthrough, winning the Mercury Prize in 2003 and has since been transformed into a theatre show Poet in da Corner at the Royal Court. Kano writes in his song This is England that he's from “where reggie Kray got rich as f**k”, and that in England “you can be a villain or a victim”. Kano proves that, although taking influences from various countries and cultures, Grime is in fact very London-centric, it is the place where it was birthed and that is where its heart lies.

Olivia Olphin

jazz

Jazz originated from New Orleans, in the United States, emerging from the African-American communities who bonded traditional and popular music as well as European tunes. A remarkable blend of the New World and the Old, with America and Europe amalgamated in a genre that’s best known for improvisation at its finest. It’s then no wonder that circa 1920s-1930s, it travelled, like many people of multicultural backgrounds, to the United Kingdom. What does this mean for music in a country like Great Britain? Why do we still enjoy jazz today, frequent jazz bars, clubs, festivals?

It’s because jazz represents movement: the diachronic, dynamic musical movement of the different instruments (piano, horns, double bass, drums) of a unique cacophony, and also the movements of people, whose imprint has changed and is changing the jazz scene, much like the ever-changing harmonies of jazz. Even the origins of its name, jasm, signifies “pep, energy.”

Jazz is a burst of energy, a flexible genre with a lack of inhibition, rules and strict conventions that pigeon-hole other genres. A jazz song is like poetry. And it has adapted with our times just as poetry has. In each era since its birth, jazz has commingled with its new hosts. The huge influx of Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados into the United Kingdom after World War Two inevitably changed the culture of this country- not to mention British jazz. 

The Windrush Generation of Joe Harriot, Harold McNair, among others, let jazz roam freely. With their ideas of the abstract and free verse, Jazz became like modernist poetry, fitting to the “pep” of the 60s, the smooth freeness of the 70s and continues today as an ever-changing, experimental genre.

How can something that seems as disjointed, blended and well-travelled as jazz still be in favour today? The London Jazz Festival and famous Ronnie Scott’s Jazz bar are still widely popular. I’d wager that its uninterrupted popularity is founded on its jumbled, fragmented constitution. It was born in a time of division, but somewhere along the line, after much travelling, much fracturing and experimentation, it became the unifying symbol of a cosmopolitan culture. When we peel back the multicultural layers of jazz, we’d see that it’s very similar to London’s own culture of united difference.

Kirese Narinesingh

spoken word

Invigorating, testing, liberating, empowering: Spoken word blankets a wide range of genres and forms from poetry slams to poetry readings, prose monologues to hip hop, musically accompanied or unaccompanied. The deep connection drawing a link between these diverse works comes from an inherent and unstoppable pleasure taken from the sound of words. Having started with the first humans’ utterances to the now vastly popular and ever expanding spoken word scene, the genre has developed alongside the evolution of storytelling. A space in which individuals can share their thoughts and feelings to ear pleasing rhythmic pentameter, spoken word is used by many artists to explore, create and solidify community and individual identities. 

Spoken word has been most recently popularised by Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution will not be Televised, released in 1971. As an anthem for the African-American community, Scott-Heron expounds how the “revolution” cannot be televised and so must occur within a different space away from the crazed commercialism of 1970s America. As he so famously explained within the poem: “The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal / The revolution will not get rid of your nubs / The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner”. Speaking in a later interview, Scott-Heron explains that “The revolution takes place in your mind. Once you change your mind and decide that there’s something wrong that you want to effect that's when the revolution takes place.” It is not something to be bought or shown off but internalised and deep. Such a profound comment could only have been effectively conveyed by the form of the spoken word.

Similarly up-and-coming British poet, Kate Tempest, uses language set to hypnotic beats to comment about the state of Britain post-Brexit in her piece Europe Lost. Explaining the sense of loneliness, futility and fickleness of modern society, the poem seems both a personal account of Tempest’s fear for the future and her desperation with the society she sees around her. It is a wider comment on the social ills that need to be addressed collectively. Whether that be the warming climate, the unhealthy desire for physical perfection or police brutality, Europe Lost points at all the nation’s faults in an attempt to raise awareness and enact change. 

And so through spoken word the very personal process of writing poetry is shared and experienced with the society as a whole. Whilst reading poetry is a similar experience, one cannot compare it to hearing the anger, fear or excitement within the voice of the writer. No matter the diversity of the cultures or causes who use spoken word, the effects are the same. Inherently anti-establishment and political, spoken word allows for a candid and uncensored comment on the prevailing social order. An interesting intersection between literature, music, hip hop and traditional poetry, spoken word uses the intensely personal act of storytelling to explore and solidify the community’s identity. 

Laura Toms

This article was originally published in Issue 725 of Pi Magazine.