do you need to be an expert in dance music to 'get' grime?

no

could you rephrase that please

I'd say the answer is "no". In the same way you definitely don't need to know dance music to "feel" electro or jungle.

Perhaps it's different for house music, though. But grime, you just need to be into it really.

many of the people making it or djing it don't have this kind of pedigree so i don't see why you should have to.

there's a decent interview with d double in LOTD2 where he talks about how he lost interest in the pirate scene during UKG's heydey, describing it as "proper mersh" but then detailing how "mans started building big beats" and getting back into it.

I'm a fan of techno and dnb, but I haven't really been able to get into grime, although I admit to not having listened to a ton of it. Part of that is because I've become less and less interested in MC oriented music over the years and part is that I have a hard time relating to the "Britishness" of it, that is, the particular vocal cadences that remind me of dancehall and jungle MCing. Not sure that it has a place in my particular constellation of musical obsessions.

Grime is going to be harder to get into if you've been indoctrinated by the rules that its breaking. When it came out, I played Dizzees first album to a couple of hiphop heads, and I was all "its so damn fresh and raw", and they were all "the beats are wack like The Streets and his voice sounds wrong".

You just have to open your ears a bit eh?

bleep said:

Grime is going to be harder to get into if you've been indoctrinated by the rules that its breaking. When it came out, I played Dizzees first album to a couple of hiphop heads, and I was all "its so damn fresh and raw", and they were all "the beats are wack like The Streets and his voice sounds wrong".

You just have to open your ears a bit eh?

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yeah it completley baffles some hip hop people who don't get it at all - others are fascinated by the fact that it's quite different from hip hop - my big hip hop mate said that if a hip hop mc and a grime mc battled they would just end up confused and confusing each other.

i would say that it probably helps most if you are 16 or so to totally get into grime and have no real dance music weight on yr shoulders.

mms said:

my big hip hop mate said that if a hip hop mc and a grime mc battled they would just end up confused and confusing each other.

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Haha... I picture the 8 Mile emcee showdown with Dizzee and Em and the party is all amped, and then they go entirely across one another, and the crowd turns confused and is standing around looking glum by the end. Fizzle...

I like it sometimes how two things can be so close and worlds apart.

do you need to be an expert in dance music to 'get' grime?

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I'd almost say the opposite is true. If you've been listening to (mostly) dance music for the last 10 or 15 years, you may even need to change the things you look for in electronic music to get grime. The production values and layered sonics of techno, the euphoria and urgency of movement of house, and the technical complexity and driving rhythm of drum+bass are often absent or unimportant. The fact that live MCing is a primary component makes mixing and progression much less important. What kinship it does seem to have to dance music is to the bang-it-out DIY aesthetic of early house and jungle / jungle tekno. That and the "who says you can't make proper beats with Fruity Loops?" frame of mind are the main things that makes it appealing to me. They also seem to be the things that make it difficult for people who thought they knew the 'rules' of dance music to get into.

When Boy In The Corner started to get a bit of a buzz about it in the US, there was a big debate on a hip hop production forum that I used to frequent for MPC programming tips. There was a general lack of understanding about how anyone could like the album. The biggest criticism after the beats was that they couldn’t understand the words Dizzee was saying and that it sounded like nonsense…which I thought was pretty funny 'cause that's what my mom says about hip hop.

gumdrops said:

or do you have to be well versed or 'qualified' in dance culture/music/history etc to understand its context, its place in british dance lineage, and to basically critique it properly?

if you come from other musics, like hip hop or dancehall, does it prevent you from fully appreciating certain signifiers, developments, references and other various minutae in the music? should you need to know those things TO enjoy it? if i didnt know all this backstory/history, would it affect the impact of the music?

basically, im not a dance head or a 'raveist' like most of the people on this board seem to be (although i have done a lot of catching up and always paid attention to what was happening in D&B/UKG etc, i just never really dove into them headfirst as i was into other stuff), so am i missing out on vital details/context?

does the fact i wasnt a huge dance fan during the 90s at the time (dis)colour how i appreciate/enjoy/critique grime? does it disqualify me from evaluating it properly? if youre someone who never really paid attention to hip hop or dancehall, does that mean youre missing something in your 'reading' of grime as well?

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well i suppose the pat answer is "no, of course not...."

however i think youve hit the nail on the head in some ways because Grime lies in some fairly fragile space between hip-hop/drum and bass/techno/house/dancehall and is at any moment about to have its identity subsumed by those largers bulwarks.

grime in some ways is like gaelic or welsh or (forgive me oh people of france) french. it seems like the appreciation of it as it has panned out over the past four years (cos lets face it there are very strong signs that its crumbling) has taken a similar route as something like the academie francaise (which acts to support the french language against terminolgy like "le weekend") its risible of course, but in response to this inherent fragility, much of the discourse around grime has centred on what qualifies as grime....

so people (like me) complain about the invasion of hip hop or croydon techno into the genre. its a really ironic position of course. kind of defending bastardasisation. treating a bastardised form as though it were a pure form. holding it sacrosanct at the same time as pretending to be in favour of impurity (see blissbloggers old defence of ardkore as a pulsating mutant strain, healthy by merit of its heterogeneity)

so to answer your question again in maybe a less guileful manner than i did last time, i'd say that YES to really appreciate grime you need to know all about that stuff you profess ignorance of. though, to be honest, i'm certain that these criteria ive brought to grime will almost certainly destroy it for me as they did for jungle.

funilly enough (on a tangent) there was a sensation i got buying records like dj krust's "warhead" (which along with the first release on valve were the last drum and bass records that i bought) that this was the very essence of what that music was about. simultaneously becoming aware that i was struggling to get anything out of the records.

WOEBOT said:

it seems like the appreciation of [grime] as it has panned out over the past four years (cos lets face it there are very strong signs that its crumbling)

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elaborate, please! i thought grime was stronger, better than ever? napper's not on the radio incessantly, for one thing...

WOEBOT said:

it seems like the appreciation of [grime] as it has panned out over the past four years (cos lets face it there are very strong signs that its crumbling)

Click to expand...

elaborate, please! i thought grime was stronger, better than ever? napper's not on the radio incessantly, for one thing...

WOEBOT said:

it seems like the appreciation of [grime] as it has panned out over the past four years (cos lets face it there are very strong signs that its crumbling)

Click to expand...

elaborate, please! i thought grime was stronger, better than ever? napper's not on the radio incessantly, for one thing...

poor Napper, Simon has to insult him not once but three times

Pearsall said:

poor Napper, Simon has to insult him not once but three times

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i just wanted to make sure that he was well and truly merkled.

haha, merked off. napper gets slew more than any MC i swear.

but truthfully simon, doesn't it seem like the scene is taking a real-shit kicking this year? non on a micro level i suppose (there's still amazing beats / moments happening) but more on a macro level. rinse is the only pirate holding it down, i guess if you count the internet stations there's a few more shows but to me that just signifies a retreat. i mean, there's no raves or anything, even kano got his show cancelled, and he's a "proper" artists on a proper label...