The Default Tempo
Grime exists because of a software preset. In the late 1990s, FruityLoops, a freeware step sequencer developed in Belgium, shipped with a default tempo of 140 BPM. Wiley, a young MC and producer from Bow, East London, made his earliest beats without changing that number. Other producers in his circle loaded the same program and left the tempo alone too. By 2002, 140 BPM had become the genre’s fixed pulse, inherited from a default setting nobody questioned. The entire rhythmic identity of a genre, locked in by accident.
The software mattered because the people making this music had almost nothing else. Grime’s first producers were teenagers on home computers, many provided by school programs. Some discovered FruityLoops through Music Creation for the PlayStation, a console program that treated beat-making like a video game. Producer Darq E Freaker later recalled that at his school, “everyone had FruityLoops on their computers at home and making tunes was more like a game.” The results were lo-fi by necessity: tinny synth presets, crunchy drum samples, melodies that sounded like transmissions from inside a freezer.
Eskibeat
That freezer sound was deliberate, at least for Wiley. Around Christmas 1999 or 2000, he produced an instrumental called Eskimo: percussive clicks, sparse drums, an eerie glacial synth melody. He pressed it on white label vinyl in July 2002. It sounded like nothing in UK garage, the genre Wiley had come up in. Garage was warm: shuffling two-step rhythms, pitched-up R&B vocals, champagne-bar energy. Eskimo was cold, alien, and hostile. Wiley called his style “eskibeat” and followed it with Ice Rink, Igloo, Avalanche, each more minimal than the last. Ice Rink was drums that sounded like slamming car doors and his signature clicks, nothing more.
The infrastructure for spreading these instrumentals already existed. Pirate radio stations, broadcasting without licences from transmitters hidden on tower block rooftops, had served East London since the early 1990s. Rinse FM, founded by Geeneus and DJ Slimzee in 1994, was the most important. Slimzee spent fifteen years hauling transmitters onto rooftops. When the DTI tracked a signal, Geeneus countered by loading sets onto iPod Minis and placing them on different blocks, so raids would find nothing but an iPod. In April 2005, Slimzee received what is believed to be the first ASBO of its kind: a court order banning him from every rooftop in the Borough of Tower Hamlets.
Deja Vu FM hosted N.A.S.T.Y. Crew (Natural Artistic Sounds Touching You), a collective including Kano, Jammer, D Double E, Ghetts, and Marcus Nasty, broadcasting Monday nights from eight to ten. MCs clashed live on air, trading bars over instrumentals while DJs reloaded riddims, and listeners phoned in to declare winners.
Boy in da Corner
Before grime had its name, it had its masterpiece. Dylan Mills, rapping as Dizzee Rascal, was a member of Roll Deep, the crew Wiley formed in 2001 from the remnants of Pay As U Go Cartel, a garage collective that had pushed the sound darker with tracks like Know We. Dizzee produced most of his debut himself in sessions at Belly of the Beast Studios with engineer Nick Cage. Boy in da Corner arrived on XL Recordings on 21 July 2003. He was nineteen. The album sounded like a panic attack set to music: jagged synth stabs, lurching basslines, vocals ricocheting between rage, paranoia, and dark humor. The lead single I Luv U, made in about half an hour, had already reached number twenty-nine on the UK Singles Chart.
That September, Boy in da Corner won the Mercury Prize, making Dizzee only the second rapper to take the award. The win gave mainstream exposure to a sound that had existed almost entirely on pirate radio and white label vinyl.
The Name and the War
The genre still lacked a name. Wiley called it eskibeat. Others said “sublow” or “8-bar.” When Wiley released his debut Treddin’ on Thin Ice in April 2004, the lead single was Wot Do U Call It?, directly addressing the confusion. DJ EZ had been using the word “grime,” and it stuck.
Grime’s internal dramas were as volatile as the music. In summer 2003, Wiley and Dizzee travelled to Ayia Napa, Cyprus. Wiley got into a confrontation with a rival crew and escalated it the following day. The retaliation landed on Dizzee: four men found him and left him hospitalized with six stab wounds. Wiley left Ayia Napa while Dizzee was still in hospital. The two did not reconcile for years. Dizzee left Roll Deep.
In 2004, Jammer began filming MC battles in his basement. The first edition of Lord of the Mics, released on DVD, featured Wiley clashing against Kano. Jammer later credited their subsequent record label signings partly to the exposure the DVD series provided.
Backlash and Blockade
The establishment pushed back. The Metropolitan Police introduced Form 696 in 2005, a risk assessment requiring promoters to submit the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all performers fourteen days before any event, plus a description of the music and target audience. The original version asked promoters to identify the ethnic groups likely to attend. Grime nights were cancelled across London. Venues posted signs reading “All Lethal Bizzle tracks are banned from this venue (including instrumentals)” after his single Pow! (Forward), released in late 2004 with eleven MCs including D Double E and Flowdan, reached number eleven and was blamed for inciting violence. Form 696 was not scrapped until November 2017.
Revival
Grime’s commercial momentum stalled in the late 2000s as its biggest names chased pop crossover or went quiet. The revival arrived in 2014. Skepta, an MC from Tottenham and cofounder of Boy Better Know with his brother JME, had spent years on a major label making diluted music. He left, returned to grime’s raw fundamentals, and released That’s Not Me featuring JME. The video cost eighty pounds. It peaked at number twenty-one and won Best Video at the MOBO Awards.
Konnichiwa, Skepta’s fourth album, arrived on 6 May 2016, pushed back a week after Drake called to warn him Views was dropping on the original date. Konnichiwa peaked at number two in the UK and won the 2016 Mercury Prize, beating David Bowie and Radiohead. Grime had its second Mercury winner, thirteen years after its first.
Stormzy completed the arc. His debut Gang Signs & Prayer, released independently on #Merky Records in February 2017, became the first grime album to reach number one in the UK. It won British Album of the Year at the 2018 Brit Awards. In 2019, Stormzy headlined Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, the first Black British solo artist to do so.
Essential Listening
- Dizzee Rascal – Boy in da Corner (2003)
- Wiley – Treddin’ on Thin Ice (2004)
- Kano – Home Sweet Home (2005)
- Skepta – Konnichiwa (2016)
- Stormzy – Gang Signs & Prayer (2017)
- Ghetts – Conflict of Interest (2021)
- JME – Integrity> (2015)
- Dizzee Rascal – Showtime (2004)
- Wiley – Godfather (2017)
- Kano – Made in the Manor (2016)
- Skepta – Microphone Champion (2009)
- Lethal Bizzle – Against All Oddz (2005)