media magazine

UK hip hop, you don’t stop

Simone Baird argues that it’s about time we recognised the limitations of US hip hop for the corporate all-encompassing bling it has become, and turned to our own home-grown UK grime for inspiration.

For British students, there are few governments in the world as unpopular as the American Government is right now. In fact, American people the world over are getting pretty short shrift when it comes to being even socially acceptable. American-bashing is seemingly fine in our classrooms, offices, homes and on the telly; yet if you were to swap ‘American’ for ‘Jew’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Black person’... well, you’d be run out of town for being racist before you’d even had a chance to finish your sentence.

Despite the ever-increasing popularity of slagging off American politics, foreign policy and even food, the country’s urban music scene dominates our charts, record shops and iPods. While we loudly bemoan America’s all-encompassing influence, we devour its music at the expense of our own without a second thought to the anomaly of doing just that.

Arguments are put forward that American hip hop is one of the few acceptable faces of America: it’s street music made by people railing against the establishment, the often Black producers hate their Government as much as we do, right? They’re cool and underground, so therefore it’s okay. They’re not really part of ‘bad’ America. Anyway, it sounds way better than our own hip hop, doesn’t it?

This is the key point: American hip hop sounds glossier and better produced, and the artists look far harder and more serious than anyone coming out of the UK ever could. They’re dressed in diamonds and surrounded by gyrating women wearing, erm, not very much. We’re skinny, don’t get to see the sun and have no access to the source material (endless and hopeless ghettos and projects, a spiralling gun culture, ridiculously big cars...). There’s just no comparison.

It’s a catch-22 that the UK hip hop scene has battled against for around two decades. Yet it might be America’s obsession with bling and in-fighting with other producers that will give our own talent a fighting chance. The bloated American hip hop industry is now full of sucker MCs who work hard to look the part of ice-dripping superstar, but wouldn’t know innovative lyrics if they spelled themselves out using very small words. While Eminem, Outkast and the Beastie Boys do their bit, they’re hardly brand new. When was the last time you heard a new American hip hop producer and were blown away by the sheer excitement and newness of what they were unleashing? A brand new artist that truly didn’t sound like anything or anyone who had gone before.


It Happily, nothing coming out of America right now can compare with what is happening on our side of the pond, the sonic ride that is grime, and don’t the ringtone buying public just know it. The bastard offspring (or next evolutionary step) of UK garage and hip hop with a heavy Jamaican twist – all warp-speed spitting over raw and dirty beats – is tense and stripped back in a way that makes US hip hop look corporate and commercial. Yet despite the talent of the likes of Kano, Wiley and Lady Sovereign, they don’t stand much of a chance getting noticed when so many are happily force-fed American corporate hip hop. Our grime stars are happy if they sell 500 or 1,000 white labels in Bow’s Rhythm Division Records; how can that match up against the hundreds of thousands of units that even minor American stars shift around the world?

may well be that music afficionados will look back on this era of American hip hop as – bar some notable exceptions – a real lull. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, the likes of Afrika Bambaataa, Public Enemy, NWA, and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy really had something to say, and were discovering brand new ways of saying it. They were political and respected their roots, rather than desperately trying to convey their ghetto credentials. Who in the UK can really relate to rants about bitches, cars, plenty of cash and revenge in the projects? The lyrics of Dizzee Rascal, Black Twang, Jehst, Skinnyman or Ty are infinitely more real. So why do we continue to lap up 50 Cent or G-Unit who are all about having a blisteringly hard image over some heavy beats and not much else? While we happily hate neo-Conservative America and all it stands for, we’re complicit in being force-fed extremely corporate hip-hop-by-numbers at the expense of our own young guns trying to break through. It’s interesting that despite becoming more politically aware, the music we’re buying is still about ‘thirty-two shorts in the clip/hollow tips in the Mach/But when I come through, shh/The talking stop/My money long now/I can make the Pope get shot’ (G-Unit ‘Beg For Mercy’).

Until the day when UK hip hop is at least as respected as its American counterpart, when it is no longer compared like-for-like but seen as our own, perfectly formed take on the music genre, microphone botherers in Bow, Birmingham and Merseyside won’t stand a chance of being anything than PlayStation producers.

It could well be that there is exciting, fresh talent Stateside complaining that they’re not breaking through because of their hip hop industry and, of course, America will always be the home of hip hop. But as more and more UK producers show up on our own radars, hopefully we’ll give more and more homegrown producers a chance to shake up our stereos.

Simone Baird is a freelance journalist and runs Media courses for students in London.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 12, April 2005