street knowledge
sorry chaps you're all talking out of your arses
have you ever actually listened to a grime lyric?
90 percent of grime lyrics, the manifest content is:
--- street soldier bizniz (grisly threats, my crew's ruffer than your crew)
--- assertions of knowing the streets, coming from the streets, and other urban surroundings type stuff
--- expressions of hunger to make it, uncontainable and explosive drive to succeed and get out of the ghetto
if journalists are writing about this stuff, they are simply responding to the MANIFEST CONTENT of grime, writ large in not just the lyrics but the name artists choose or their label names etc etc
if these things are cliches, it's because they are grime's OWN CLICHES (and very potent, and compelling, and sadly abiding, and resonant cliches)
i would further argue that the actual sonics of grime are inseparable from its urban surroundings, and in some ways reflect or are twisted by the experiences of living in a city most parts of which is by and large pretty fucking grim (especially in winter, which means the whole year really apart from a few months in the summer)
as for the other line of argument in re. Lady Sovereign... apart from her being great and there being room in grime for a bit of quirkiness and different kinds of character.... well it's just funny to see the self-appointed custodians of the scene getting a bit worried that their preciously accrued subcultural capital is
going to be devalued because finally, after several years of faffing about, the scene looks like it finally might make it. And deep down you don't really want it to make it, to get what should rightfully be its, do you?. And so it starts, all the bollocks about "who's real grime", and who should cover it, and how.... you'd rather have the media ignore it so you can complain about being excluded... typical UK undergroundism self-sabotage. except that the people who ARE actually in the scene all want to make it and cross over, they practically talk about nothing else!