BETWEEN A ROCK AND A DUBPLATE FULL

In a review of that New York show, Noisey described “the genre’s unrelenting rise in the US.” Hip-hop megastars such as Drake, whose transatlantic alliance with London MC Skepta has been key, act as conduits. These days, young American tastemakers are all over it.

Secondly, there was the surprising choice of location: This event, billed as a milestone for grime, was happening not in London, the city of its birth, but in the Music Hall venue in Williamsburg, New York.įifteen years after British music journalists first started writing about it as London’s hottest new underground genre, and eight years after an attempt to create an American crossover (via collaborations between Dizzee and UGK) had sputtered out, grime’s time has come.

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A DUBPLATE FULL

First, the realization that a genre predicated on the spontaneity and unpredictable energy of pirate radio clashes and freestyles had gone heritage: The practice of performing albums in order and in full had been popularized by All Tomorrow’s Parties’ Don’t Look Back series from 2005 onwards, and had so far seemed the domain of classic rock or staid indie acts. Last March, the news that Dizzee Rascal was going to perform his classic grime debut album Boy In Da Corner in full for the first time was, for long-term fans, slightly surreal.

Between a rock and a dubplate