Tom Wilson's online emporium of fun

Moral Decline

This week I decided to undertake in an experiment. Both of my two favourite records at the moment contain some of the most exciting music I’ve heard in a long time. They also contain some fairly objectionable content - though this wasn’t enough to stop me from listening to them for the past seven days. Would my moral decline ensue…?

The first record is a compilation called ‘Run the Road’, which brings together the new rappers and producers that have been crafting a brand new British sound – ‘Grime’. Roughly translated as ‘***’, Grime is the new dirty sound coming out of London at the moment. Aside from the capital, there are virtually no other places where you’ll hear this music, which is being made almost exclusively by young, black kids in bedrooms across a number of deprived London boroughs like Bow and Battersea.

*Balls. I don't know how to translate it. Wait a tick and I'll ask my friend...

In terms of the music, think Aphex Twin rather than 50 Cent. Some of it is literally un-danceable. It’s full of silence, gaps, and empty sounding tracks, often barely contain rudimentary bass and drums. It’s produced with a real bedroom naivety, with samples being taken from the most unlikely sources. Heavy-metal guitar snippets and even the sound of dripping water provides the ultra-minimal background for some of the tracks. While much ‘urban’ music has seemingly been about making big party tunes, Grime’s leading producers have seemingly set out to make something that sounds just plain weird.

It’s this frighteningly empty canvas of crunching, aggressive beats that a new generation rappers are working on. The most famous is Dizzee Rascal, whose lyrical wit won him the Mercury Music Prize for best album in 2003, the first rapper and the youngest person to receive the award. The rest you almost certainly won’t have heard of. And their shared subject – the reality of urban life in London – is what makes their narratives so frequently discomforting.

“Freeze – nobody move!” Against a track made from the sound of guns been loaded and fired, rapper Hyper tells us “for what I’ve just done, I could get years.” The whole song is basically an extended boast by 5 rappers about how unafraid they are of shooting people. “I got red heat ready for violence,” he spits. Of course, we shouldn’t listen to this without a keen sense of irony. A lot of what we’re been told is simply taking the ‘bay-boy’ street persona to its logical conclusion. “I’ve been cutting them down for about 15 years” is a claim that we’re hardly expected to take seriously. However, Grimes fascination with guns doesn’t end there. In another track, MC Shystie, a phenomenally gifted angry young black woman, brags about “carrying a piece under her sweater”, and MC Kano suggests that the only kind of pop music he makes is the pop pop pop sound of shooting people.

If you hadn’t guessed it already, it’s all a fair representation of life in gun-crazy London at the moment. But in a musical scene so dominated by violence, it’s got to be asked when simply ‘representing’ the way things are doesn’t cross over into glamorisation. In 2003, Dizzee Rascal himself was stabbed, and rapper Asher D was sentenced to 18 months for carrying a firearm. With gun violence currently tearing apart black communities all over Britain , can I really justify listening to this stuff?

The second record I’ve been eroding my moral sensibilities with is a Dancehall Ragga LP. Riding on the back of artists, like Sean Paul, who have successfully crossed over into the pop world, Jamaican singers like Beenie man and Elephant man are increasingly hungry for international success. And one thing that has been causing them serious problems is their lyrics. As someone whose been buying Jamaican music for years, I’ve managed to collect enough deeply homophobic records to keep a Republican Party conference dancing for days. One of my favourite Jamaican records exhorts it’s listeners to “bun up de chi- chi man”. In case you’re not familiar with Jamaican patois, were talking about setting fire to homosexuals. No joke. Another track suggests "Tek a bazooka and kill batty-fucker" (Take a bazooka and kill gay men).

Again, lyrics like these paint an accurate picture of the situation in Jamaica at the moment, a country where (thanks to laws left by the former British colonial administration) gay sex could land you 10 years in prison, and where homosexual contact can even be punished by hard-labour. Openly gay men and women are frequently murdered – exactly what appears to have happened to Brian Williamson, Jamaica ’s foremost gay activist, killed at his home last year. Gay rights campaigners have singled out Beenie man, the island’s most successful artists (he’s had more than 60 number ones), but this seems to only be because they don’t know enough about the scene. I can barely think of a Dancehall artist who hasn’t released a homophobic record… yet I still spend money on this music.

A week of gun-crazy, homophobic music might not have brought about my ethical downfall. However, it should be cause for concern. Would I be equally happy to start listening to “Oi!” music, racist, white-power punk made by working-class kids in the 70s and 80s? Definitely not. For me, and clearly for a majority of music purchasers, there is a kind of double standard applied when it comes to black music with objectionable content. Too often a white audience is prepared to tolerate violence, sexism and homophobia as being part of black music’s ‘authenticity’ and street appeal. Musical ‘white guilt’? Probably. Still, right now, I can’t recommend the ‘Run the Road’ compilation enough… just don’t listen to it with a gun in the house.