I was really excited when I first heard the Diddy/Skepta collaboration because it was somehow actually good, and Diddy was acknowledging the sound as grime and not as amateur hip hop with novelty value as previous hip hop heads have. However, after seeing the footage of the Diddy showcase party on Tim Westwood TV, I realize that I was being far too optimistic.
Somewhere between watching Skepta mincing around P Diddy like a groupie, and proclaiming to the crowd their hooking up to be the best thing to ever happen to grime, and Chipmunk hanging around in the background grinning like Jabba the Hutt's weird simian pet, and Westwood talking his regular but now strangely appropriate brand of over-enthusiastic words with no real meaning, I realized that this is not good for grime at all. It was a big celebration for some kind of achievement that I don't think anyone really understood. It basically felt like a time-warp back to the uninspired America-or-Bust days of "In At The Deep End."
Thank god grime remained strong enough to produce the current generation of youngers that are about. Without them, I think I'd be feeling a lot worse about what I just saw.