There is a scene in 24 Hour Party People in which Tony Wilson goes to see the Sex Pistols play in front of about 40 people, half of whom are actively uninterested in the band. The other half of the crowd is composed of punk kids, music journalists, and future members of the Buzzcocks. The audience for last Saturday’s release party at B-Side for the stellar VICE records grime compilation Run the Road had fewer punks and many more music journalists, but it held the same wary, uncertain, and adventurous spirit as an early Sex Pistols gig.
Grime is the emerging genre that arose from the council houses of East London. It’s a blistering and fearless combination of dancehall, U.K. garage, and American hip-hop. Until recently, the only grime heard outside of England was rapper Dizzee Rascal, the scene’s biggest (and so far only) star. The Run the Road CD compilation seeks to change that-it serves as an appealing entry point for would-be fans of grime, collecting all the scene’s biggest names and best tracks in one place.
Saturday night was the first chance for audiences outside of England to hear the hungry MCs of grime (although Toronto audiences have seen Dizzee-who makes his local return at the Opera House in April-and heard some grime-y joints during the much-buzzed about M.I.A./Diplo show earlier this month) in person. It was also a chance for three artists from Run the Road, MCs D Double E, Ears, and producer/DJ Jammer, to convince the audience that grime really is the new sound.
D Double E, and Ears, his 17-year-old protégé, spent most of the night throwing out slick, fluid rhymes over Jammer’s belligerent cellular-hop, teasing the hesitant crowd forward after every song. Injecting frequent calls of “energy” into the gaps between songs, the artists attempted to translate some of the aggressive spirit of London grime to the Toronto audience.
Ears and E would frequently trade verses and riddims while hyping up the crowd, although Jammer’s tendency to run the record out before it was finished was disconcerting for anyone not familiar with the dancehall tradition. This was compounded by early technical troubles, and a number of the tracks seemed to be played on CDRs, lending the set a skeletal and incomplete sound.
Right now, grime is another media movement, profiled in the The New Yorker and praised on Pitchforkmedia.com-it’s the Next Big Thing before audiences have even had a chance hear it. Run the Road represents a chance for that larger audience to hear what grime has to offer. Saturday’s show was a chance for a couple of artists to bring their talents to a new audience. There was a palpable sense during the performance that the small crowd was on to something-that, like Tony Wilson, we were in on the ground floor of a new direction in music, that we may have just heard and seen something truly vital.
With D Double E and Ears expressing amazement at the amount of snow in Toronto, a city so far from home, you could almost hear what was once strictly a local movement going global.
