i feel reluctant to engage with you nomad cos you're so obviously being antagonistic but there is no uk jay-z. if you follow the discussion you'll see giggs is being treated as something new, boradly speaking. theres been other people doing simialr things, for example g-force from forest gate but no one who has made the impact giggs has made. the best mcs to come out of the uk have been grime mcs. (not including top cat, ragga twins etc) the one closest to jay-z stylistically is kano.
also if you are genuinely following the pop charts you'll know hip-hop sales have nose dived over the last few years. the lil wayne/jay-z/rick ross whoever is as worthy of attention as atcq argument was fought and one years ago also. you dont have to convince anyone of that.
UKHH that everyone is being (deservedly)disparaging about is things like this
or this, which im quite fond of
here he is with kano
i'm not trying to be antagonistic at all. i've always noticed on Dissensus that the UK dwellers here seem to have what seems to me like a) some sort of weird bias AGAINST hip-hop and its overall importance to popular music over the last 25-30 years, but especially over the past decade and b) a somewhat skewed view of US attitudes toward hip-hop. I'm just trying to understand why..
and it's simply untrue that hip-hop sales have "nose-dived" over the past several years, at least in the U.S. check out basically any quantification (by billboard, whoever) and you'll see this is not the case. not only have i watched the pop charts but in college a spent quite a while working for credits at a record company and it was widely acknowledged that hip-hop was radio gold.
P.S. Also, what I meant by grime's "Jay-Z" was not which grime artist was stylistically the closest to Jay-Z, but which one was the generally acknowledged "king of all grime" in the same way Jay-Z is generally accepted as the king of hip-hop, both in terms of popularity and respect for his talent.
I don't blame anyone who's from the U.K. for being really into grime or thinking it's really new sounding and vital, but it's kind of strange to me that this HAS to be at the expensive of hip-hop somehow. It's fine if you don't like hip-hop but for the love of god it's pretty condescending to insist that grime fills some void that hip-hop's "paucity" left. I have to say living in the US this DOES sound ridiculous to me, since like very few people here except indie kids who read Pitchfork have much of an idea that grime even exists.
also Klashnekoff reminds me of DMX, esp in the first one