back it up ten steps, sorry.
1. i am not american and i am not an 'indie kid' -- while that might accurately describe a huge portion of pitchfork's readership, i don't write with that audience in mind -- i don't identify with either, so it would be silly to try.
however, because pitchfork is pitchfork and not dissensus or heronbone or gutterbreakz, i did consciously make the decision to write this review assuming that the majority of interested readers would probably only know grime through dizzee. yeah, the kids who listen to rinse every week will think thats a pretty boring starting point, but it's also kind of fucking insane to pretend that boy in da corner wasn't a launchpad for grime, or that dizzee was somehow outside of it. he/it is part of the story, and no amount of revisionist gatekeeping can change that.
2. i've lived in london for periods, but i don't have any deep knowledge of east london, nor do i pretend to. any cartoonish or imagistic characterization of grime's environment is, as simon says, my response to its manifest content. aside from the specific mention of bow (in the context of a dumb joke which i deeply regret), there is no mention of physical location in the piece; it's hardly a safely-distanced love letter to "the mean streets of bow."
3. i don't pretend to be an authority on grime - i fear i am far too much of a dilettante to be an authority on anything - but i do listen to an awful lot of it, mostly in my private time and mostly alone. the last thing i want to do as a writer is contribute to the fetishization and marginalization of music that means a lot to me. i literally felt queasy after parts of this thread, almost guilty. certain people had me feeling like i didn't have a right to this music or, worse, that i'd been swindled into repping for it. thank god that feeling went away quickly.
my interaction with grime has been and always will be from a distance. that's a given -- i'm a whiteboy from canada for god's sake -- i'm aware of my separation from it even when i listen to it in the privacy of my headphones. maybe the problem is that there's an inadvertent element of ownership that enters into the equation any time you get evangelical about something? in which case, i'm genuinely curious: is it possible to be evangelical about a music that isn't 'yours' in any way without triggering landmines?
mark p.
