Hattie Collins - This is Grime
Hattie Collins is a journalist and author. She’s the Music Editor of i-D Magazine and her book ‘This Is Grime’, featuring images by award-winning photographer Olivia Rose, is an oral and visual history of grime music.
The book weaves together extensive interviews with originators like Dizzee Rascal, Kano and Wiley as well as some of the more recent artists such as Stormzy and Novelist – who talk about how the form is evolving.
In this episode of the MTF Podcast, Hattie discusses the political, technological, geographic, cultural and social aspects of grime, and does so in a way that not only opens up new insights for fans, but also makes it accessible to newcomers.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
grime, people, music, lots, dubstep, hip hop, skepta, scene, wiley, writing, book, started, worlds, london, rap, podcast, bit, hattie, album, places
SPEAKERS
Hattie Collins, Andrew Dubber
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. UK journalist and writer Hattie Collins is the music editor for i-D Magazine. She writes for The Guardian, the Sunday Times, Condé Nast Traveller, BEAT and more, and she has ghostwritten books for the likes of Tinie Tempah, Jessie J and Dynamo. You’ll often hear her contributing as a cultural commentator on BBC Radio, and she consults to brands on youth lifestyle trends. He’s the author of This Is Grime, which features incredible images by award winning photographer, Olivia Rose. And it’s one of those rare books about a music scene that has universal and unanimous five star reviews all over Amazon had it is pretty much the world expert on grime and she writes about it in a way that’s accessible, engaging, and also lets the subjects of the book The artists speak for themselves. This is grime is an oral history. Now, full disclosure. I know and like some grime and can probably name a handful of artists, but I am not an expert in any sense of the word. So I caught up with Hattie in Manchester a couple of months back and we sat down for a chat so she could fill in some of the gaps. This is Hattie Collins, and this is grime. Okay, first of all, what’s grime.
Hattie Collins
grime is a type of music that came from East London, originated in East London around the early noughties around 2001. One around at the time, it doesn’t do, essentially speaking, it’s around 140 BPM. So it’s faster. It’s a bit more I guess you could almost call it dance music, but it features MCs rapping over the top of it.
Andrew Dubber
What’s the relationship? I mean, you hear rapping? What’s the relationship between grime and hip hop? So
Hattie Collins
there were I mean, there were elements I suppose that borrowed from Hip Hop with the fact that the MCs rap, but there’s probably more in common with things like Jamaican dancehall, which was very much rooted in clashing. So there’s a lot of clashing in grime lots of like, battles. But yeah, in terms of the BPM, and in terms of the relationship between artists, it’s has more in common, I’d say with Jamaican dancehall music than hip hop, but yeah, obviously they rap. So there is there are there are those similarities.
Andrew Dubber
Okay. So let’s just talk about how you got into this because obviously, you’re you’re a writer, you What’s your background, what led you to this?
Hattie Collins
Well, I long story short, I wanted to go and live in New York. And I thought if I was able to do that I could, the way I was able to do that would be to get a degree in hip hop, because I was just a big hip hop fan and have been for years. That didn’t exist. But I started writing some reviews of stuff to try and get a stronger scholarship to go to NYU. I didn’t get the scholarship by not getting published. And then I had the very good fortune to meet someone called Chantelle Fiddy at my first job at touch magazine, where I was writing most about us hip hop and r&b and she introduced me to grime. She introduced me to Dizzee Rascal a really early Dizzee Rascal record, which I thought was absolute shit. But then a couple days later was like, Oh, that shit song you played play again. And yeah, that was that was my introduction to grime. I didn’t know what it was. Didn’t understand it. Didn’t know if I liked it. But something drew me in. And that was around 2003. I think well,
Andrew Dubber
really early on. Yeah. Long time ago. Yeah, I’m old. Can I just just backtrack a little bit then because there’s, there’s obviously there’s a long journey that gets you to that. I’m kind of interested. What do your parents do? And how did that affect what you ended up becoming?
Hattie Collins
I mean, none of my family. None of my parents have nothing to do music. My I don’t really know what my dad did. He sort of like a stock controller, he took stock of like a white collar job. I’ve no idea. And my mum went back to university in the 30s and went on to become a lecturer. Uh huh. But I think the music side for me came from my older brother, jazz, and my cousins, Mark and Loz, they just all used to collect music. And being from an Irish family, you would go over Christmas, there was always you’d have to sing, whatever, you’d have to sing a song, whether it was like summertime, Billie Holiday, whatever, like everyone had to do a turn. So there was just yeah, music was just very much a part of the family makeup. And so I guess I can credit it really thinking about music in a sort of, I guess, critical sense as I started to as a journalist, and collecting music that definitely originated I’d say from my older brother and cousins.
Andrew Dubber
So the trajectory could have been that you became a musician yourself.
Hattie Collins
Oh, I did play guitar for a bit. I was terrible. So no, and I can’t say I think it was just I think it was the journalism aspect. I like to write I really like writing like writing as a kid like to do lots of like, sort of, like imaginative writing, creative writing. There was a bit there was a bit do that. And it was a love of hip hop. And somewhere those worlds collided and somehow it made sense mystery journalism, but it was it was never planned. What I thought was gonna be was an actress. wasn’t very good at acting. So luckily, I decided to not do that anymore. And yeah, it sort of came back quite accidentally really there. So there was a creative
Andrew Dubber
thing that needed an outlet, basically.
Hattie Collins
Yeah, yeah, there was some sort of great urge, I guess. And perhaps Yeah, there was definitely something in me and I couldn’t sing or rap and write about it.
Andrew Dubber
Okay, so how did grime happen?
Hattie Collins
Well, it kind of came. I think it came about from a sort of sense of rejection from the UK garage scene. A lot of new people were coming through a lot of young lovely young boys are kind of, you know, in their mid to late teens, and they wanted to make music but the UK garage seem like you know, no new guys are all this sort of very ragtag, you’re wearing like trainers and tracksuits you know, these are kids literally from states and, and quite tough areas of East London. And garage at that point was very flossy very shiny, very Moët very Hennessy very Moschino very designer. And I just didn’t want these kids to so that kind of rejection, I sort of feel like it spiralled them into another direction. And slowly over time, through various different people there. Obviously, Wiley is quite often rightly credited as being the Godfather guy, and he’s the one that kind of brought it all together. But different people started to make different sounds, they started to speed up beats, like they start to remix drum and bass and garage and jungle and all these different sounds. And we became known as eskibeat and sublow, and eight bar and all these different kind of different names until it’s all coalesced. And I’ve officially became grime around 2003 or four. But it was the I think that sense of rejection from from the garage scene. Also, you know, if you look at that time, 2001 911 just happened. And lots of kids that were making grime lived right by Canary Wharf, right in the middle of Limehouse. So they would look out on Canary Wharf and one they would see the symbols of huge success and wealth that they were looking at everyday. But no, no, no way able to touch. And to these were the symbols that could at any point, get planes crashed into them, right. And so I think there were lots of things like that there were lots of social problems at the time, and his London youth clubs are closing down schools, terrible, healthcare was awful. There are lots of problems. And so they started to make music that sounded like the despair. And the anger, the frustration, I think that they felt at that time, was my understanding from from talking to people. That’s hopefully not me just making up with that school, during the courses in the book, and just having done interviews of people over the years. That’s kind of what I’ve taken away from it from people that very much were at the heart of the scene. That’s kind of how I believe it all kind of came to be. There’s
Andrew Dubber
one genre of music you haven’t mentioned, which is dubstep and 140 BPM thing and I wonder is that coincidental? How much overlap is there between those
Hattie Collins
with lots of people in dubstep wearing grime like people like postition had his feet in both worlds, the night forward past it people was like a dumpster at night. But then, you know, lots of grime MCs would turn up there like the double would turn up there to emcee because there was nowhere else for them to play really or just to spit so they would go to places like forward just to practice alongside but lobby blindness dynamite. So there were the worlds of really overlapped and it was the same sort of culture is all very much based on record shops for dubstep it was big up in Croydon for grime it was Rhythm Division up on the Roman road. So the same sort of culture and the same sort of people and the same sort of thing. It was a bunch of mates making music, which is what grime had been and certainly with with dubstep, you know, Skream and Benga, and all those guys down in South London, like that was the same thing of just a bunch of mates making music and so yeah, dubstep sort of sprang out of grime, and I guess was a lot more instrumental lead was was instrumental. And but the worlds are certainly very related and very close. And lots of emcees ended up kind of finding careers in that dubstep world for a long time. And then obviously, like Diplo, and people like that came along and ruined it and made it EDM. But what are you gonna do?
Andrew Dubber
Well, I was gonna ask you a question about that the sort of the, I guess, would you call it the maturity or the sellout or whatever, where, where something starts really, really underground and then becomes hyper mainstream?
Hattie Collins
Yeah. And the changes and the sacrifices that are made along the way? I mean, is there still this kind of grassroots going on there, or has grime changed grime changed massively. I mean, it’s changed many times as well. It’s sort of first wave of success. It absolutely sort of threw everything it stood for in the bin a little bit in the BPM when, you know, these were commercial hooks came about the clothing changed, you know, it all became pretty clean. And lots people made some good money for a little while. And then I think there was a realisation that actually, no one actually like to me that they were making enormous particularly happy creatively, they made money but it was, you know, not necessarily satisfying. So when Meridian Dan made German Whip I think Skepta was like, okay, there’s still something here, this grime thing. And that sort of started the wave of people returning very much to what grime had been, which was the bpms and the tracksuits and stormzy obviously became hugely successful. But you know, you see the same thing again, stormzy’s album, which I love isn’t a strictly grime album, it’s not boy in the corner that Dizzee made as gospel known as r&b. So the same things have happened again, you’re seeing you know, Skepta doing a lot more kind of rap and drill. Now not really drill but like a lot more rap than grime. So, you’re sort of seeing again, as the success happens, you see people then explore another revenues. So it’s interesting with growth because it does seem to sort of make the sound of its mistakes. But it seems to repeat the same patterns that it has in the past. So yeah, there’s there’s still very much an underground scene happening. But it’s much, much more than it was in 2003 2004.
Andrew Dubber
Right? would you classify it as a political music? very political?
Hattie Collins
Yeah, it’s completely political. And I think there’s always been the idea that grime was violent and negative, but, you know, misogynist, etc, that you actually that there were songs that were like that, but actually, really, it was much more, it was much more political than it was ever given credit for. And much more political than perhaps a drill is these days is a whole different thing. But grime was definitely, you know, having the site there’s so much politics and grime someone like Wiley is a perfect example. His his lyrics are littered with, you know, really potent powerful messaging about racial identity and social politics. Someone like stormzy I mean a really obvious answer, but when he used his data at the Brits, he had one shot to point the Brits and he took that opportunity to directly address Theresa May and Granville. So, yeah, it’s in its DNA. I think grime is political because it’s, it can only be political, it came from politics, it came from, you know, this Tory government that had kind of taken away and stripped everything down, you know, the 80s all the crap that come in, in the 80s and decimated whole communities. The factories are closing down in East London and diagram plays like that, which happened in the again again in the 80s and brewing documentaries and the impacts on that basis like Bose Yeah, I mean, it came from lots of political and social issues that have kind of blighted I suppose the country over the last 30 years. How uniquely British is it and and within that how uniquely London is it? It’s hard to say because you can’t you do now fine Korean grime and obviously, you know, grime MCs from Nottingham, Glasgow which is brilliant, but I guess it’s a bit like hip hop. You know, hip hop has huge influences from Jamaican hip hop climb essentially was sort of taken from the idea of Jamaican music when call her come over to New York. And you hit everyone up but hip hop to me is always going to be New York and grime is always going to be not just London, but he’s London. These things are like a perfect storm, aren’t they? I think so many different things happen to help build a musical scene which then becomes a cultural brand recognisable kind of a cultural is a culture now so yeah, it’s it’s uniquely the slang the clothes the way the clothes are worn. The sound of the beats you definitely would never get an American making a beat like a grind be absolutely no way. I could only be British. I can only be London. It could only be is London.
Andrew Dubber
When it comes to growing a scene one of the people who gets credited a lot for this as Mary Anne Hobbs. What’s what was her involvement in influence?
Hattie Collins
I would say Mary Anne Hobbs and dubstep 100%. I mean, she was she was the Chantelle Fiddy of dubstep, although in a different way, because obviously she was she was on the radio and Chantelle is journalists. But yeah, Mary Anne, I would say more with dubstep. She was certainly someone that championed it. nourished it, as from what I understood, she was very much an advisor to lots of people she spoke to as well as she helped otherwise in different ways, you know, behind the scenes. Huge part. Yeah, huge part of sort of disseminating and explaining this incredible music to perhaps people that were new to it. The grime have a champion like that. Well, I’d say Chantelle Yeah, so she was supposed to put played me grind First of all, so she was Chan is was a journalist. She is I guess and Martin Clark as well is what it’s hard to know what it’s hard. It’s hard to say but because Mary Anne obviously was on the radio, I mean, there’s lots of champions intended like DJ target on the radio or like rinse fm. I suppose we grime that there were so many different people that were photographers that you could credit that really helped to sort of visualise what grime was and, and take that to places. So yeah, I don’t know if there’s more any one person but certainly shanto was someone that again, like Mary Anne Hobbs didn’t just write about grime, but was very much a part of connecting different people. So like Mike Skinner wanted to remix and she was like, Oh, you should get this guy called Skepta to be on the remix. And there’s a guy called Wretch 32, he’s quite good. You know, like, I mean, these are completely unknown at that point. Right. So you know, there was there was a lot going on behind the scenes, I’d say Chantelle unofficially was kind of like an a&r. In that sense. And
Andrew Dubber
pirate radio, things like rinse fm obviously. Yeah, huge. Yeah,
Hattie Collins
yeah. So you know, again, it’s super important. Sarah Lockhart was part of rinse. And she was also had a publishing arm, I think is EMI. So lots of people suppose publishing checks were directly graded by Sarah and lots of people. I think in the book I wrote I think quite a few people mentioned her like, that’s the first actual serious check. I got some people yeah, Sarah was super influential and important as well.
Andrew Dubber
What’s really interesting as most of the names you’ve given me, so far, a woman’s
Hattie Collins
I know Well, there’s Rebecca as well, and I can’t pronounce her last name Rebecca Prochnik. One of the live agents she again was she took she took the fact the boys on their very first trip. I think it was target was up there was three or four of them turned into. That was a song grime had left had left London. What had left suddenly left England. So yeah, there are lots of really key women and people often do say Oh, it’s so it’s It’s such a male genre, and why aren’t there more women. And like there’s plenty of women and there was lots of women female MCs as well. But women behind the scenes, I would say have been hugely influential
Andrew Dubber
question about the internet, how much has that played a part and you know, what have been the sort of online scenes that have really helped crime?
Hattie Collins
Well, grime was, it’s interesting because initially with them, how it was spread was through old fashioned tapes. So you would listen to rents or days or whatever on and record it, record it. And then you might pass that tape around your school and your that someone might pass up to their cousin. And that will eventually find its way up to Manchester and Birmingham and places. That’s how originally so very much rooted in very old fashioned ways. But very quickly, the MSN messenger came in, and that was one of the first technologies that grime really took hold of, it also really was, you know, lots of between on PlayStation as well. So, again, really from its very beginning, it was utilising new technologies. And it has continued to do that through MySpace, like Jme was huge on MySpace. And I think a lot of the success of from 2014 to now are people like Skepta and stormzy, who aren’t signed to a major label, a lot of that is through social networks or their own social networks, and the scene around it, so if someone releases his truck, now, Giggs puts out an album you’re gonna see 300 to 300 people posting about that as well, his peers and his friends. So grime is a hugely utilised that. And was, in the early days, I remember, you know, we would get people from like, Japan and New York wanting to talk to us. because they’d have to do hard stuff central line wire. So yeah, all these things, I think Brian was like, at the time of the music industry was panicking about about what was going to happen with the internet was going to do to grime. grime was like, This isn’t boring at all like this, let’s let’s utilise it and really get behind it because it was they could see how powerful it was, it was helping to spread that music.
Andrew Dubber
What’s happening now that’s exciting and the same.
Hattie Collins
With grime. It’s tricky. It’s gone into a bit of a funny place. Again, I think, after the huge success of stormzy and Skepta. There were a few new artists that are coming through, but there aren’t enough. What was great about the skepta sort of resurgence was that stormzy was right behind the minimalist bonkers, there was a whole load of new talent, and it doesn’t really feel the same. What’s happened now is his drill rap. Afro beat is really dominating. I don’t know, yeah, black British music that that’s the story at the moment. So grime, it’s fine. It’s been through, it’s been through, it’s down to four, it’ll come back again. But at the moment, I’d say it’s a little bit dormant. And it’s sort of in the shadow slightly of drill. when my book was for the scene, it was just for that those guys, I just wanted them to, like all that moms or whatever, to go into library in 20 years time and pick it off the shelf and be like, well, look what my kids did, or my dad did or my mom did. I just want to document it in some way for them. And that’s why I did it as an oral history rather than me saying what I thought grime was I just took the words from everybody and rearrange them in nice order. Let them tell their story.
Andrew Dubber
Here’s your book for Yeah, yeah, I think it’s a really interesting thing to do. But I imagine it’s something that’s going to be picked up and studied. In the kind of context where you were originally going to go and study hip hop music. Now people are gonna be able to go and do a master’s degree in grime, and you’re gonna be the cortex. That’s funny, isn’t
Hattie Collins
it? Yeah. So it kind of in a way, I ended up going to NYU and doing an MA in hip hop, except now, maybe people are gonna do a degree in grime. It’s kind
Andrew Dubber
of interesting.
Hattie Collins
Yeah, interesting. So what’s next for you? Um, I want to write a film. I’ve sort of started writing a film, but not about grime or anything. Um, and I don’t know, I’ve got two jobs at the moment. They’re both finishing the summer. So who knows what’s going to happen was quite exciting. I’m quite looking forward to not knowing what’s next.
Andrew Dubber
It’s interesting because grime starting to be portrayed in film a little bit as well.
Hattie Collins
There’s lots of Yeah, lots of them, like targets made is making a film based on his book I think Dan Hancock’s is, Wiley has a film coming. Obviously, top boy, which isn’t grime, but top boys coming back, which will I’m sure will touch on grime and rap and drill. So yeah, we’re seeing a lot more on screen. And we’re only going to see more and more. I think, maybe I should write film on ground and I can’t be asked, I know what I would do. If I did it, though. I’d have a woman at the front of the story. That’s what I do.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah. If you were to say there was there was kind of a legacy of grime what’s what’s it? What’s it given us?
Hattie Collins
I think it’s hard to explain the, the sort of the black working class experience in the noughties and onwards, you know, over the last 20 years, I think, if you want to understand what people from and it’s not just from London, but from places all over the UK that are living, you know, below the poverty line in quite crappy circumstances, with not much hope you can listen to Wiley’s gangsters or Rico’s chosen one. You you so many songs, you know, you’ll get the breadth of experience of what was happening in those last 20 years to those people. A lot of it was really sad, but or worrying but lots of it was really funny. There’s a lot of humour and grime. I mean, it’s, it’s incredible. It’s you know, there’s hip hop, there’s jazz, and now there’s grime. You know, it’s a whole musical genre. It’s a whole culture that’s been created. So um, I think it’s really great for British music as a whole As important as trip hop or Uk garage, whatever you want whatever your Britpop whatever, like Italy is leaving that legacy as those other scenes have, if someone was brand new to this, where would they start? I would start Well, I just got dizzy boy in the corner, because it it’s still the best grime album, art hands down. No one’s touched that yet and suddenly it was made in 2003. So hopefully someone will better that somewhat. There’s been other great albums albums actually love Kano and Skepta and stormzy. But it’s it’s the perfect grime album, it’s pure, unadulterated grime, and you will, I think listening to that you’ll understand a lot more about what it is. It’s kind of blue for grime.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, yeah. Well, sadly, yeah, isn’t it? Thanks so much for being so welcome. Thanks. That’s Hattie Collins, author of this is grime and that’s the MTF podcast. Hope you enjoyed. And if you did, remember to share, like rate review and tell your friends. If you want to get involved in Music Tech Fest, go to Music Tech fest.net slash register. And if you want to subscribe to this podcast, which is totally free and just means you’ll get each episode delivered to you as soon as it’s ready. You can do that in your podcast player of choice or just go to Music Tech fest.net slash MTF podcast and hit the subscribe button there. Have a great week and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.
