oh, and one last thing on the sonics - I was listening to Company Flow the other day & thinking that El-P’s old productions from the mid-late 90s really prefigure both grime & dubstep - he always cites the Bomb Squad as a big influence though being in NYC in the 90s perhaps he was listening to Todd Edwards cutting up samples as well? I guess we’ll never know.

a quick, respectful counter-point to spotted-g - I understand what you’re saying but I just can’t agree. there’s the technical aspects; double-time flows have always been a part of US hip hop - Das EFX, Freestyle Fellowship, Bone Thugs etc. - and the production isn’t so alien either - not just the usual stuff mentioned like Miami Bass/crunk/Timabaland but also a lot of the synth based stuff that was coming out of the Bay all through the 90s, or J Dilla’s more electronic side (see “Go Hard” by Q-Tip for example, or “Raise It Up” by Slum Village). more importantly though all the grime “pioneers” grew up listening to Nas, Biggie, Wu-Tang etc. in addition to jungle and later 2-Step. I’m not trying to downplay the importance of dancehall or jungle or UK garage at all but it seems more than a little nuts to suggest that hip hop hasn’t been ONE OF, if certainly not the primary, influence on grime. another thing I think you’re ignoring is the somewhat incestuous relationship between dancehall & hip hop. the influence of JA soundsystem culture on the birth of hip hop is well documented but for there the last 30 years there’s been a pretty fair & steady amount of crossover between the two, from KRS-One making frequent use of a chatting style & sampling Yellowman to Bounty Killer releasing an LP w/guest spots from Raekwon & Jeru the Damaja to Jay-Z jumping on a remix of that Mavado track. my point being that it’s not easy to just separate out which bits of grime came from dancehall and which from hip hop.

also there’s a good reason why grime gets passed off as a mutant form of “UK Rap”, at least in the US. Whereas in England it’s probably just lazy journalism and/or a look to boosting sales, over here it just makes more sense - mainly b/c most Americans don’t even know what the hell the ‘ardcore continuum is, let alone enough about it to place grime in its’ proper context of the jungle-dnb-garage lineage. it’s much easier to just call it rap than it is to get into a lengthy, Reynolds-esque explantion about acid house & soundsystems & Todd Edwards or whatever.

Why belittle Dancehall’s indisputable influence on Grime by comparing it that of hip-hop? I would love to know what influence you think hip-hop has had at all? Certainly there are similarities with the the dirrty south etc but, as attested to by bloggariddim 11: Another Crunk Geneology, the similarities are probably due more to a process of co-evolution from a common ancestor than anything else. It’s one thing when the Observer fecklessly replaces ‘Grime’ with ‘Hip-Hop’ as if the two were synonyms, another when underground scholars start making the same mistake. Why does the obvious influence of early 00 Garage (itself wheened on Dancehall among a variety of disparate others) fail to get a mention? Everyone knows that Grime, Dubstep, Bassline are the enterprising children of Garage - Hip-Hop has never been embraced by this family.