the main thing is that it's reductive and, honestly, quite fucking stupid to blame any form of music for any kind of behaviour. seriously, if music "makes" a listener behave in certain ways, i'd be running down the road outside of my moving car, showering people with homophobic abuse, while spazzed off my tits on cough syrup most days.
needless to say, i do none of the above and disagree profoundly with many of the sentiments expressed in the music i listen to. a lot of people have very similar relationships with their cultural choices. music *does not* make people do anything. if you think that, you're heading into territory where it's perfectly legitimate to ban certain forms of expression for the benefit of wider society.
this is crazy and dangerous. music reflects the lives of its creators and its target audience, so in the case of inner city musics like grime, the things being said won't always be nice or palatable, but that doesn't alter the fact that music is a constructive, safe, liberating outlet, not a catalyst of voilence and crime. lose sight of that and you've lost all connection to all understanding of the situation.
i'd say that the main reason this particular case is provoking such a reaction is that it's so completely and totally outside the vast majority our experiences that we can't begin to understand how the hell it happened. we've not come up in a world where behavior like this is seen as acceptable, right or inevitable and, accordingly, solve our problems in different ways. no matter how much many of us love this music (this is debatable in some cases after the comments i've seen here), most, if not all, of us here will only ever be tourists in such lives (would you agree, logan?), be it either by listening to, or even direct involvement with this culture. to distance ourselves from this music, though, and stand in enlightened middle-class liberal judgement as soon as something bad happens is sheer hypocrisy, though, given the thrills we've all got from grime's toughness and grit.
a better thing to do is to realise that shit is seriously fucked up in inner cities all over the world and unless you've lived that life or know people who have, you'll never understand how easy it is to get sucked into really destructive behaviour as a matter of course. it's a desperate, desparate waste, something needs to be done about it, and it's caused by many, many different things. music is not one of those cause, though, nor is the tertiary culture attached to any kind of artistic expression.
the culture of disaffection, dislocation and abject fucking hopelessness that so many people grow up in needs to be examined here, not the culture of a music that comes from this enviroment - that's just totally asswards.
creating an environment where this kind of thing doesn't happen and where people see their lives, and the lives of others, as something to be lived and cherished, rather than something disposable, takes a lot of work on any number of levels. it won't be easy, and in many cases won't be pretty, either, but it needs to start in schools, homes, be reinforced in communities and seriously funded and supported at local and national government level, otherwise we'll just see more and more of this tomorrow, next year and long after grime has been and gone.
