SHISTY - "I Luv U"

apart from the bit where he's yelling about being from bow e3 and bigging up the hackney massive (of which i am one)...

i also call him a cross between ghostface and paddington bear

that's fair enough, but he's still not hip hop...

hell, i don't even know if the ghostface reference will pass the "american-readers-are-idiots" alarm

spesh when she's doing dancehall - my spine still crawls w/ horror at the memory of listening to this...

Of course US hip hop is actually a lot more like this cross-section now than it has been in a while, but it's been around for long enough that its image of itself is watertight and a couple of bhangra beats aren't going to damage that too much. Garage is too young though to be tied comprehensively to another genre with all its baggage in tow - if garage rap becomes "UK hip hop" I can see it easily drifting towards DJ Premier style hip hop claccisism.

One of the values of the current "riddim" style arrangement is that it helps to remind us that this music is developing on a dual tract - on one hand there's changes to MC-ing, and on the other hand the music is constantly developing and mutating. The sense of the music and the MC being equally valued and emphasised reminds me of dancehall, and like dancehall the scene is caught halfway in development from a former style (let's call this style "rave", but obv. I'm meaning the hardcore continuum up to and including 2-step; in Jamaica's case it's reggae) and hip hop.

I think dancehall has managed to find a really healthy position where it can continue to constantly accrete and accumulate hip hop ideas and influences, while working that successfully into a framework that is firmly tied to the roots of its own culture (I can imagine garage being like dancehall as well in that, despite being MC dominated, the scene will continually produce "throwbacks" to earlier stages of the hardcore continuum in the same way that Sizzla will record lots of "traditional" dancehall/reggae songs). If dancehall hadn't been able to retain this independence, its relationship to US hip hop wouldn't be nearly so interesting or productive, because beyond the Diwali riddim and bhangra beats, the real lure of dancehall from a US Hip Hop perspective is its essential alienness - an alienness that must be stronger than the novelty of regional hip hop stylings (eg. Dirty South), for why else does dancehall sound so utterly fresh every time it makes a periodic assault on the national consciousness?

I think this is the basis for a lot of the anxiety that many feel over garage rap becoming "UK Hip Hop" - the sense that this music taken in context of its historical development has always been sufficiently connected-but-detached that it acts as a continual wellspring for new ideas and new approaches, in a way that actual UK Hip Hop, however meritorious, has not been able to do so. Some may argue that this is because actual UK Hip Hop has not been up to the task, but I think the truth is more fundamental: having defined itself as standing in the shadows of Hip Hop Proper, how can it possibly do anything else?

I finally found a copy of the Dizzee album meanwhile and I'm a bit underwhelmed.

but any hip hop from a country outside the US would've been seen that way i think, unless you just mean how British rappers sounded on record - but fake American accents? i dont think this was actually that common - and if you listen to late 80s/early 90s hip hop from London, Manchester or Bristol that doesnt seem to be the case at all. the dismissive assumption that British hip hop has always been crap for whatever reason is a view i do not share (it was at least mediocre dammit)

C90: UK hip hop - the definitive retrospective

i just keep thinking about that Ruthless Rap Assassins/London Posse/Gunshot period around 10-13 years ago and some good tracks came out of it...they probably wouldn't impress anyone now of course but whatever. i think Roots Manuva may be a tad over-rated just because he's not too versatile, but 'Witness' is still one of the best hip hop (whatever that is) tracks of the last 5 years imo.

The value of a semantic separation from hip hop is the chance to form or retain separate core musical values - see for example Miami Bass, which couldn't really have developed the way it did if it had come under the umbrella of hip hop. Of course, its development filtered back into hip hop via dirty south/bounce, but would that shift have seemed as exciting as it had if there wasn't that level of distance and separation beforehand?

this coming from a man that thinks, and i quote, that we're "a funny little island"!

did anyone buy the 12 of i luv u?

"A whole album is in the pipeline. The b-side to ‘I Love You’ was produced by the Streets and I’m working with him again, as well as going on tour supporting him, I’m really looking forward to that."

(also: maybe this has been mentioned before, but i was reading an interview w dizzee somewhere and he said he almost titled the album "dizzee new heights" - maybe just an obvious pun but maybe an explicit streets reference?)