Apparently some of you ignored my advice earlier this year to get to the Showtime event. It was one of those legendary evenings that I can now taunt you about for the rest of your lives. But all is not lost – you can now shock out to its ridiculous line up in the privacy of your own home.
The footage of hype MCs is interspersed with some great interviews.
Rollo Jackson has excelled himself this year with this and Tape Crackers (also now available on DVD from TTT) – both films documenting UK soundsystem / ‘ardkore continumm music in their own sweet way.
Showtime is a fantastic calling card for The Heatwave, who have taken things to another level in 2011. Check the trailer and then order from here.
I wrote quite a lot about UK policing earlier in the year in relation to the failure of policing (at best) that lead to the death of Smiley Culture. News about that case was always going to ebb and flow, not least because it is now in the bureaucratic hands of the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
But… it was never just about Smiley Culture. Since Smiley’s death a number of other people have died in suspicious circumstances in police custody. Many questions are being asked about heavy handed policing at demonstrations against the austerity measures being introduced by the UK government to pay for the banking crisis. In recent weeks London’s Metropolitan Police have been implicated in the “Hackgate” News International scandal.
Jody McIntyre’s series of films touches on some of the issues, asking the right questions and making the right links. The first episode is above and includes involvement from Benjamin Zephaniah, Merlin Emanuel (both of who have lost family members in police custody) and victims of police crime. The soundtrack includes contributions from grime artists Ghetts, Logic, Mic Righteous and DVS. A future episode will deal with the coalition government’s budget cuts.
The terrible truth is that hard times can bring people together. Four years ago it would have been inconceivable that student protestors and grime artists would find common ground.
More seriously, Mark Duggan was fatally shot by the police in Tottenham last night, about a mile away from where I am typing this. Unusually, the IPCC were on the scene within hours – perhaps as a result of the scrutiny they have found themselves under this year?
The film’s chronology ends with the beginning of Grime, and I was left fair gasping for a sequel that did this era justice.
Now The Wire’s Derek Walmsley has stepped up to the plate with an excellent Resonance FM show featuring Michael and Rollo from the film – and their cassettes, vinyl and minidiscs from the dawn of Grime. It’s as good an intro as any to the early days the genre – done by proper hyped up enthusiasts interspersed with proper hyped up music.
If you have even a passing interest in this sort of thing, then you need to check this.
My article for Datacide issue 11 is now online. I wrote it a couple of years back in preparation for the talk I did at the launch event for the previous issue.
But actually it has stood the test of time quite well, anticipating some of the recent debates about multiculturalism. It was quite gratifying to see Professor Anthony Glees spouting yet more nonsense on Channel 4′s “Ten O’Clock Live Show” last month.
Obviously I’d be interested in any comments or criticisms people have of the piece.
A double whammy from Dan Hancox on Grime and the recent London protests:
Lethal Bizzle’s Pow! (Forward) was the unofficial song of the recent student protests. Dan Hancox charts how it went from grime-scene scapegoat to righteous rallying cry:
Following the lazy misrecognition of the ‘bunking’ EMA protesters from various quarters of media and government, Dan Hancox sets out to explore the complicated and contradictory soundscape of these urban motley crews:
Well, looks like grime is still full of surprises! Most of the CDs I’ve checked recently have been too much on the vocoder/funky tip, but there’s still a ton of interesting things happening under the surface.
In the last week all the producers have been going potlatch crazy and giving away tons of tunes for free. Dot Rotten has given away seventy instrumentals today, apparently!
I’ve not got time to wade through it all to be honest, or even check radio shows. But when Stinky Jim posted a link to Footsie from the Newham General’s new EP, I was drawn in like a moth to a flame.
It’s FREE and you get four wicked grimey reggae refixes, including the Cuss Cuss riddim and Barrington Levy’s “Under Mi Sensi”. Download from the link up top.
A surprisingly sensitive article on youth violence and “postcode wars” in the right wing London evening newspaper.
“Asher Senator, CEO of Code 7, regularly sees the problems at first hand. ‘The other day I took a couple of youngsters to a meeting and stopped off at a shop. When I came back they were lying down in the back of the car, hiding. They said it was a peak [dangerous] area for them and they couldn’t be seen there.
‘I grew up on an estate in Wandsworth. There was another estate over the road and we all used to link up and do things together. Now the people on my old estate can’t go there at all. They literally cannot cross the street without putting themselves in danger. We need to tackle the mindset of this generation. We need to introduce more London-wide initiatives so that youths from different areas have the opportunity to interact in a way that brings them together instead of pushing them further apart.’”
Of course, Asher will be better known to readers of this blog as one of the finest London reggae MCs of the eighties, as covered in Born To Chat: The Asher Senator Story.
Director Franco Rosso is on form as ever, with some nice comments about Jah Shaka’s cameo in the film. But it was this parting shot which got me most excited:
“Three decades later, Rosso is planning a sequel. The picture will have black writers, a black director, and a black DOP [unless Menges comes back]. The music, this time round, will be grime.”
A few films like Bullet Boy and Kidulthood have tried to document the London of grime, with mixed results. (Bullet Boy is my personal favourite of the two, and not just because it’s set in East London as opposed to Kidulthood’s west…). But the more the merrier – and if the sequel is half as good as the original it will be well worth seeing.
