london belongs to me

Together with The Streets Dizzee ushers in the second important element: an unfeigned lyrical style that risks ridicule or commercial humiliation in its unashamed sense of place and specificity. After all the vast majority of british hiphop acts - and rock and pop groups, for that matter - have always hidden behind americanism. In The Streets we have a hybrid brummie-essex boy, and now Dizzee, with that brutal East London twang.

Stil,l Dizzee's single just didn't do it for me at the time. Unaware that it was the atypical soft centre of the album-to-be, and distanced anyhow from the capital, pirate radio, and cutting-edge musical trends, I slept on.

In September I see him on TV collecting the Mercury prize; no concessions to the event , he insouciantly drawls his big ups and slinks off the platform. But it still takes another event to make me sit up and listen.

***

Oct 19 '03 : I'm getting neckache watching a perspex box suspended over Southwark. There's someone in there, and good god, he's having an experience;! Thousands look on, transfixed. After forty days of being ogled, abused, worshipped and pelted by Londoners, it's nearly comedown time for postmodern magus David Blaine.

The day is memorable for a strange convergence of borderline artertainment events with religious overtones. Each features perspex boxes, prerequisites for contemporary happenings in which, whilst panoptical transparence to the point of obscenity is de rigeur, inner spaces remain glazed-over, occulted by uncertain factorings of fame, money and desire.

At midday then, I was gazing through someone else's pane, this time blood-spattered, attempting to fathom the opaque ruminations of Damien Hirst. His latest inelegant conceit, to employ the sombre gravity of greying cow's heads in the service of an unlikely new interest in biblical studies. One plexi-cubed hundredweight anvil of pickled beef for each apostle, and an accompanying pamphlet of poems, breathless art-student epiphanies thickened with nihilist oaf grit.

Religion is always suspect in modern art: A lazy burrow to profundity, it smacks of laziness and desperation. And the work itself is all-too-familiar. Given the long hiatus since his last work, it seems Hirst is becoming a self-parody, becoming what the bitterest elements of the media always longed for. Not that it makes a difference; he's long-since been admitted into the world of self-fulfilling profits: a name, an investment. Besieged by the invisible denizens of Tessier-Ashpool-world, Matthew Mark Luke John and all the rest have been sold before the exhibition opens.

Up on the top floor of the White Cube, through whose executive floor-to-ceiling windows a sun-raked Hoxton Square seems a no less revolutionary site than Tiannenmen, a foul odour taints the clinical precision of the glass partitions, the costly interior marriage of chrome and restraint. Strictly ten people allowed up at a time, to 'meet' the artist. He's grinning (well he would be wouldn't he). A thoroughly down-to-earth sort, his optimism is not even shaken by countless embarrassing moments with people from another planet. Mine, though to me cringingly awful, is probably not exceptional, as I inevitably struggle with the impossibility of saying anything intelligent during a brief encounter across the great divide. A signed book as salvage from the wreck of my self-respect.

What is; that stink pervading the the art-world's premier penthouse crib? A hired industrial fan at the window can't evacuate the odour which at first, cognitively wrongfooted by an irresistible pull of metaphor, I automatically assume to be the stench of filthy lucre. Entering the inner sanctum and examining the unassuming black canvases reveals a ghastly chitinous texture suggestive of immense opened-out garibaldi biscuits; each black square is encrusted an inch thick with dead insects.

With his sticky black-syrup traps for stateside collectors (all due attention to archival considerations? How does one preserve squashed flies?) Hirst is hammering on at his grand theme -- the recession of death in the face of attempts to (re)present it. But Blaine's forty days in the wilderness are far more authentically religious - for Blaine, anyhow. The real show, a one-man-show with a one-man-audience, was Blaine's subjective experience. The cameras were there merely to fund his personal trip. Harmony Korine's mess of a film, in-between Blaine's feeble mantras ('it's so byoodiful up here'), captures one poignant speech where Blaine reflects on the ineffable nature of experience, his high-rise epiphanies already being beaten into recession by quotidian reality. He bemoans how even now, one day on, hospitalised and drip-fed, he's losing focus. When he was up, he was very very up, but now he's down, he's down. As the crane lowered, the cosmic insights turned to dust, leaving only fatuous scribblings in a yellowing notebook. Communication was impossible. Did he know now how Jesus felt? Would he die? The forlorn hope he embraces is that by doing even more stupid stunts eventually he'll bring that expanded consciousness back with him into everyday life (of exactly what use it would be, no word). It all evaporates into silence and pious platitudes.

Maybe those on the ground got a better deal after all. On the last night a sizable crowd of revellers are gathered on the bank of the Thames and across Tower Bridge. Some have been there every day. Some did Michael Jackson dances for David. Some held up signs, some shouted for a moment of recognition. Unsportingly, but gratifyingly to me, Blaine says that the ones he liked the most were those who just looked, for a long time. Wondering.

Considered as an entertainment, from the audience's point of view, it was the stillness, the slowness that was the revolutionary aspect of the whole show. At the endgame the proprietors are betraying it, with a final blast of showbiz to make it pay.

But even this loud and gaudy finale is trumped. Just before the clock strikes 00:00:00:00 an immense barrage of militaristic beats wafts over from the north. Sparring with the media-whipped but still tepid murmur of the crowd as the perspex box threatens to lower, softly cut-up by a gentle breeze off the thames, it comes on like a brutal remix of the Omen theme, a dark bombastic choir heralding the entrance of some demonic hip-hop hero. Unsure as to whether the soundtrack is part of the performance or not, we try to concentrate on the matter in hand.

Once back on earth, The Famished One's emoting, relayed onto giant plasma screens, can no longer disguise the obvious anticlimax. Blaine's absent thunder is less stolen than relieved of its embarassment, by a further repetition of the stentorian chorus. Churlishly I suspect a cheap PR trick, a shoreditch misappropriation of Blaine's demographic. But once Blaine's been tipped out of the tank and hospitalised, we naturally head over to the bank where a bunch of Hackney homegirls are going nuts.

Buzzing back and forth beneath the homeward-jostling masses on Tower Bridge we spy, apparently, a jubilant Dizzee Rascal and entourage caning 'Jus' a Rascal' repeatedly at impressive volume from a motor yacht that obviously has the edge over two policeboats fruitlessly looping the stanchions of Tower Bridge in pursuit of the megaphone-wielding MC. Respec'!

***

A couple of months later I finally get given a copy of the album, and have to try and make sense of it all.

One reference that quickly springs to mind is Eric B & Rakim's 'Chinese Arithmetic' track on 'paid in full'. That early hiphop has an external similarity to the Dizzee sound, in its manifest awkwardness. But on the Eric B track you can just imagine the sample button being stabbed manually in a primitive studio. It's the sound of someone doing their best (and frankly it's a bit crap) With Dizzee, in a world where you could remake Bohemian Rhapsody with a computer retrieved out of yesterday's garbage, it's the fruit of a concerted effort to create an awkward, flat monotony. It's the sound of someone doing their worst.

It's can't really be described as harshness; rather the sounds seem to be an abrogation of all sonic qualities. On further inspection, however, I decide that they're neither harsh nor mellow, they're alternately flat and hollow.

Is it just because of my familiarity with the form that everywhere I hear elements descended from drum and bass? I'm taken back to a time in drum and bass history when these peculiar bass sounds first started to emerge; One of my all-time favorites is Ray Keith's Society; 12" on Penny Black; there's an astonishing bass sound which has - if this is possible - a leaden bouncy feel, and ends with a dolorous aftertaste as the note droops downward before expiring with a soft blunt cut-out. There's something peculiarly cold and unforgiving about the sound: the frequencies have actually been split in half and hollowed out.

You can feel the difference. In the days of 'Jungle' (the quaintness of the term now!) the bass was most often a pure sine wave: given the super-low frequencies this made the experience of the bass at high volume wobbly and overwhelming; round, dark cotton clouds drifting through the body.

An inevitable growth and exploration of sonic science then proceeded not by scientific method, but via crowd-controlled genetic drift. Blending relatively high frequencies into the bass sound made it possible for the bass to become a more accented punctual, percussive element. Now you felt the impact of each bass hit. The coldest, the rudest bass sound is the hollowed-out evil sound; mid-frequency sawtooth or square waves buzz through the upper ribcage like a haywire powertool, whilst the soft sub-bass, sneaking in under cover of the punctual high-frequency hit, infiltrates the pit of the stomach and the groin. In place of the all-over permeation of dub-descended junglist bass you get a terrorising kick in the gut. There's no doubt that the emergence of The DeathBass is down to selective pressure, plus the self-reinforcing loops as crowds' obvious enjoyment of the thanatropic buzz spurs producers on to perfect the sound; and as a result the general atmosphere of the scene becoming darker and demanding MORE. In a related d&b-descended trope, on 'Stop Dat', the bass suddenly jumps ridiculously high, two octaves up, yet in this ludicrous register still remains menacingly aloof. With sinister barrel-organ indifference it grinds on. Such bass-escapes were in commonplace use to break up drum and bass tracks, winding up the fever to another level.

Meanwhile in Eskiland, rhythm ruefully swears off every comfort that loops and breakbeats ever offered, becoming both more; metronomic and less; regular. No doubt, things get easier with each listen, but still you get thrown by the total disregard for bass-snare patterning (on this score 'Fix up Look Sharp' seems totally out of place).

Dizzee's voice meshes with this sonic landscape absolutely. The dark punctuated mellifluence of his choked-back whine is as rude as the bass. The Queen's english is all articulated at the front of the mouth, teeth and lips. Vowels are closed off politely. The Dizzee drawl is an occult emanation from the back of the throat, its very escape from the oral cavity perplexing. Vowels are fattened, chewed, spread wide; plosives live up to their name, crackling with percussive static. Like Eski, the voice is uptight; brutal restraint is its essence, so much so that even in the absence of any threat, its evasive inflection still gives the impression that it's cagily fostering something dangerous.

LONDON TING:It's well-attested that those who arrive from outside seem to be able to express the inner magic of the capital more eloquently than those who grew up inside the grind. The Streets' Mike Skinner, a brummie incomer, can imagineer London as a hybrid of kung-fu epic, playstation RPG and local boozer pissup. But to hardcore londoners like Dizzee there's no romance in a travelcard.
Skinner's vibe is generous, wistful, playful. You get none of that shit here.

As with The Streets, accent and frequent anglicisms offer a welcome contrast to the polished finish of even the most supposedly edgy US hiphop (masculotronic, gang-solidarity, nothing out of place, letting nothing slip, a rock wall of hardness and impermeability). With Dizzee it's not exactly a vulnerability though; the overriding sense is is one of exposure only to the extent that exposure can't create any more damage than what's already there. A don't-give-a-fuck confidence in his own groundlessness allows Dizzee not to pretend to anyone else's model of 'the street'. There's definitely a charm in his disregard for attitude-armour when he declares he's 'flushin MCs down the loo'; and all self-deprecating brits can only nod in recognition at the fact that an MC can't even get hold of the most basic ghetto accoutrements, and cheerily admits it: 'I ain't got a .44, I'll have to make do with an iron bar'. In US Hiphop, ghetto poverty is always gilded by the American Dream, even (especially) if it's the supposedly flipped playa dream of Bling. In DizzeeWorld, escape is slow, painful, disheartening, and ultimately perhaps impossible.

The level of nihilism casually on display here make the motorcycle-jacket sneer of rock'n'roll, the spite of punk, and even the cold robotic takeover of techstep, look obsolete and naïve with their reserves of positive energy. By comparison, everything that's gone before appears compromised by its qualities, its enthusiasms, its direction. Cos in Eski coldness reigns supreme. And yet...there is an impulse to bring the coldness into the world.

Simon Reynolds argues that the humanity is to be sought precisely in the inhumanity of the sound. That the brutal anger of Wiley's sound portrays the thrashing impossibility of making sense of a world in which you are 'the product of society'. The hopeless headbanging sonic spasms perhaps hammer against the frustrating irreconcilability of the determinism of poverty with the 'freedom' that the 21 st century western individual supposedly basks in.
And maybe this material can truly be called tragic, a precise portrayal of the brute fact of the continuation of life under existentially unfeasible, absurdly amoral conditions. What more chilling illustration of the indifference of the gods than the emptied-out mockery of the sampled female voice: I....luv....U....I..I..I.....luv....U. Or the cycle of anemotional gameplaying in Round we Go. Refusing both melancholy and redemption, Just sittin there, Dizzee resounds with tragic overtones : 'I must go on, I can't go on....I'll go on.'

Hiphop is a moribund form, there's no escaping it. The omnipotence of glossed-up hiphop is a testament to the tungsten-carbide stomach of Kapital, able to digest anything and turn it into a procedural machine stamping out hollow gloss-encapsulated placebos. Hiphop is dead inside, but its shiny surface can be preserved indefinitely. Whilst over in the US proliferating crews shine up the surfaces, Dizzee faces the death of hiphop head-on. The mashed-up clunkatronic spasm of Dizzee is the sound of the meat inside the hollow shell rotting out. Paradoxically, after all the clinical gloss, it's like a breath of fresh air.

Demonic minstrels inside the evacuated body politic. The sheer desolation of Eski sonics, incorporating the voice as pure sonic blunt instrument, screwing your neck back to face your own emptiness.

Evil stuff. Ringtone existentialism. Something's rotten in the state of hiphop. The grime's real. Worrying at the wound, picking at the scab. Must listen, Can't listen, Will listen.