To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Dizzee Rascal’s Mercury Prize winning album Boy In Da Corner, Julia Toppin, Lecturer in Music Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, explored in an article for The Conversation how the record ushered in the era of grime. The article has reached far and wide, reaching readers in Australia, France, Germany and India.
In the article, Toppin looks at how Dylan Mills, aka Dizzee Rascal, was a pioneer for grime, using his music to represent what it was like to grow up in East London in the early 2000s. She likens his debut studio album to a distress call as he highlights the dangers of day-to-day life.
She said: “The hyper-local dangers and complexities of the council estate, whether interior (mental health, envy, teenage pregnancy) or exterior (unemployment, racist policing, knife crime), make the tracks sound more like distress calls than semi-autobiographical accounts.
“It is clear that Mills is yearning for a better future. His delivery is introspective, brutally honest, audacious.”
She also explains how grime emerged in the UK. As many people were growing up in the late nineties without a sound to express themselves, they turned to the most basic DIY music technology and made tracks with sparse melodies and raw vocals. This sound would go on to become grime, with artists like Dizzee Rascal paving the way for others.
Toppin concluded: “The rapturous reception Da Boy In Da Corner received from both the estate and the establishment illustrated that black British stories (and therefore black British lives) were important.
“It ushered in not only a new exciting sound but a generation of black British artists like Tinie Tempah and Tinchy Stryder. Laying the foundation for them to achieve phenomenal chart success in the music industry mainstream. Not bad for a black boy from Bow.”
Read the full article on The Conversation’s website.
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