From the backstreets of Bow to Brit Award winner and broad mainstream acceptance, grime has found remarkable success in late years. Dizzee Rascal and Tinie Tempah have constituted themselves as bona fide pop stars, while the music`s rougher edges were sanded down, lyrically and sonically, and remoulded into playlist-friendly singles that retained enough spike to crop the listener`s ear with a hint of the 21st century British inner-city experience.
Yet listening to the disco bounce of Dizzee`s Holiday, we`re tempted to leave that before the celebrity and wealth he was eking out a life fraught with danger, an existence documented on his first album, where his concerns were more immediate: the charge of force on the streets and the petty bellicosity of local gang rivalries. Many not yet fortunate enough to bring a record deal remain in the like situation.
Simon Wheatley, a Magnum alumnus, was originally drawn to east London in 1998 to shoot the architecture, but soon changed his centre to the nascent musical subcutlure. In this book, the culmination of a 12-year project, he captures it all: the crumbling council houses and teeming groups of MCs battling for the mic, the cheap chicken and camaraderie, the run-ins with the law. His focus isn`t, for the about part, on those who have the Mercury shortlist but chiefly on those remaining behind with aspirations and frustrations. The ticket line between the two worlds is perhaps epitomised by the book`s cover star, Crazy Titch, a promising rapper who flirted with mainstream success in the mid-2000s currently serving a life sentence for murder.
The word is a fine document on the seeds that gave birth to London`s urban music scene, and it is to Wheatley`s credit that his study doesn`t come across as patronising or exploitative.
Don`t Call Me Urban! The Time Of Soil is out now from Northumbria Press.
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