Keywords

The popular electronic music genre known as grime emerged in the early 2000s, produced largely by young, black, working-class men in London’s council estates (Charles, 2019, 108). It was always a disruptive, hectic and ‘unruly’ genre (White, 2020, 250), featuring ‘squelchy’ deep bass, trebly computer game samples, fast-paced rapping, skittish high-hat rhythms and rapid syncopated breakbeats. Grime grew, in its early years, out of rap battles or ‘sound clashes’ that took place within and between different crews of performers, and this turn-taking, participatory, semi-competitive, do-it-yourself crew culture gave grime its ‘lo-fi, gritty, raw, grimy and unrefined sound’ (Charles, 2019, 107). Grime music is often described as darker, less polished, more urgent and less ‘cool’ than precedents and comparators such as UK garage and US hip-hop. As a genre it built upon London’s existing reggae, dancehall and jungle scenes and, as Joy White has explained, grime ‘pushed back the juggernaut that was US hip-hop and rap and replaced it, in London at least, with a black-English aesthetic’ (White, 2020, 266). Despite initial suspicion from the national media and suppression by the London police, grime is said to have ‘independently emerged as a force that now defines urban Britain’ (Woods, 2020, 300).

One characteristic that grime shares with hip-hop is its emphasis on local urban geographies, although grime is distinguished by the intensity of its fine-grained, postcode-scale locality. For many influential hip-hop artists, the neighbourhood ‘is enunciated in terms that elevate it as a primary site of significance’ (Forman, 2002, xix). This local identification with a relatively narrowly defined home place—often using references to specific streets, intersections and US dial codes—was always a means for creating a ‘self-produced communal history’ (Rose, 1989, 43), part of ‘poor young black people’s need to have their territories acknowledged, recognised and celebrated’ (Rose, 1994, 11). Murray Forman, in his influential study of hip-hop’s ‘cultural production of urban sites of significance’, identifies rappers’ lyrical construction of ‘the extreme local’ (Forman, 2002, xix; xvii), arguing that they draw on narrower spatial references than other American popular music genres. This ‘extreme local’ seems to come from lyrical specificity, that is, from rappers’ tendency to name identifiable places that are geographically smaller than cities, regions or nations. Grime artists do this too, but their localism is more distinctive and more ‘extreme’, not just in terms of lyrical specificity but also in terms of the aesthetic intensity with which they render their ‘local’. Indeed, to understand the construction and significance of the local scale in grime, it is necessary to look beyond the lyrical references to specific places. Other distinctive musical features of the genre are highlighted here, namely the fast-paced staccato rapping, the lack or selective use of echo or reverb, the repetition of distorted or chopped-up samples, and the song structures built around rhythmic intensification (often through increased rhyme frequency) rather than melodic or lyrical progression. These features of grime do not make it a genre that is more local than others, but they are part of why the genre is heard as distinctively, intensely local, and they are what produce the particular intensity and significance of the genre’s local scale. They are also what has given grime the power to intervene in geographies at different scales, and even to contribute to a redefinition of the meaning of the ‘local’ as a category.

Studies of grime have already highlighted its ‘intense localism’ (Hancox, 2018, 151). It is called ‘microscopically local’ (ibid., 154), even ‘hyperlocal’ (M. James, 2020; White, 2019, 23), with lyrics that go into ‘molecular detail’ (Hancox, 2013, 175). White suggests grime artists’ focus on ‘the lived experience of a specific and particular place’ allows them to ‘assert black urban identities that are hyper localised’ (White, 2020, 254). This intense/microscopic/hyper localism, as well as the fact it ‘sounds like where it is from’ (White, 2020, 250), is apparently essential and integral to the genre: a defining characteristic, and one of the reasons it is both so popular and so artistically innovative. For Dan Hancox (2018, 151), ‘Grime’s strength was always in its intense localism, more than its expression of universal truths’. Its localism may be explained by the fact that marginalised groups, such as working-class black people, are more likely to experience a ‘lack of access to non-local scales of social experience’ (McCarthy, 2006). Grime’s practitioners have been in various ways ‘excluded from grander national or civic identities’ (ibid.; for this argument see also Bramwell, 2015, 126). Grime artists have tended to have the legitimacy of their belonging questioned. There was the infamous example of grime’s most prominent star, Dizzee Rascal, being asked on a BBC news programme in 2008: ‘do you feel yourself to be British?’ (Dizzee Rascal was born and raised in Britain and his answer was: ‘of course I’m British man!’). Certainly grime musicians were initially marginalised, practitioners of an ‘outsider art’ (Hancox, 2018, 183), seen as a threat by the media and the police, and restricted from being able to perform even in their home city let alone represent wider national civic identity. Famously grime grew in its early years from a pirate radio culture, with illegal stations broadcasting from residential tower blocks in East London, often with fairly restricted broadcast radiuses that may have affected the ‘local’ nature of the music being produced—although in reality many of these stations could be heard up to 40 miles away (DJ Target, 2018, 158). (DJ Target (ibid., 140) also relates an amusing story about how the radius in which a record could be released was determined by how far an old Fiat Punto could get across London on a hot summer’s day.) Moreover, White points out that grime may have originated in pirate radio but ‘it came of age in the YouTube era’ (White, 2020, 251; see also White, 2017; M. James, 2020). Grime quickly reached a wide, even global audience through the internet and mobile technologies, influencing music cultures around the world, so the ‘local’ sound was not due to some merely technological restriction in the location of the audience. Its ‘intense localism’ was and is an artistic choice, culturally produced.

It is also important to acknowledge that grime is by no means narrowly ‘local’ in the sense of being limited to one social scale. Ruth Adams (2019) has argued convincingly that the grime scene entails expressions of multi-scalar identities—individual, local, national and transnational—and that grime artists are skilled in representing London’s multicultural and globalised dimensions as much as its particular local communities. White likewise describes how ‘grime operates at a local level, as an outernational space, and as a global enterprise’ (White, 2020, 268). Although grime songs may focus on specific roads or council estates, they might also take in large regions of London: BMD’s ‘North Weezy’ and Southside Allstars’ ‘Southside Riddim’ claim to represent the whole of Northwest and South London respectively, each with populations of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. Artists such as Lethal Bizzle have released tracks about ‘London’ as a whole, while Kano has taken on wider urban and national geographies in his 2007 ‘London Town’ album and his 2016 single ‘This is England’, among others. Moreover, grime is ‘simultaneously hyperlocal and international’ (White, 2019, 22), rooted in international live music destinations such as Ayia Napa, and with strong influences from Black Atlantic traditions. Dizzee Rascal, once an outsider, quickly won national awards and performed at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012, at which he sported an ‘E3’ jacket referencing his home postcode in East London. Dizzee Rascal is now a global star although his latest album, ‘E3 AF’ from 2020, still insists on that local identification. It is through the local specificity that Dizzee gained national and global fame, and newer artists such as Stormzy (who identifies strongly with his home estate in South London) have achieved similar large-scale success. DJ Target suggests Dizzee Rascal was able to appeal not just to people who lived precisely where he lived, but also ‘to kids all across the country living in similar circumstances’ (DJ Target, 2018, 114). According to Hancox, Dizzee’s identification with ‘ghetto wherever’ allowed him to speak to ‘the urban margins across the world’ (Hancox, 2018, 162). As Monique Charles puts it, grime’s ‘local specificity … create[s] spaces for national and international dialogue’ (Charles, 2016, 1). Grime now has a worldwide audience because of its intense localism, and there are versions of it and genres inspired by it in other cities and countries.

The point, again, is that grime music is not inherently more local than many other kinds of music. The E3 postcode area mentioned by grime artists is a much larger spatial unit than the Chelsea Hotel sung about by several artists over several decades, or than Ed Sheeran’s bedroom or the all-you-can-eat diner he references in ‘Shape of You’. The E3 zone is also among the most densely populated areas of the UK. Even the Roman Road that features regularly in grime tracks is both larger and more populous than the Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’. One reason that grime is commonly understood to be intensely/microscopically/hyper local may be because ‘gritty’ urban estates and street corners are commonly understood to be ‘more local’ than other kinds of places, or less generally representative of—even exceptions to—larger-scale social units such as nations (for a criticism of this tendency, see Mitchell, 2002, 71). But while grime’s focus is not necessarily ‘smaller’ or less civically/nationally/internationally significant than the spatial focus of other genres, grime artists do take a different artistic approach to rendering place, using aesthetic techniques for a specific purpose, and with specific political intentions and implications. It is not an inherently ‘more local’ music that results naturally from its practitioners living ‘more local’ lives. The distinctively and intensely local scale of grime music is a cultural production.

Grime’s local scale, which may be seen as a socio-political strategy, must be understood as a response to, and an intervention in, its socio-political context. Grime emerged initially from some of the poorest areas of the UK. Moreover, these East London boroughs and wards with high rates of poverty and deprivation sit side by side with the city’s ‘visible locations of great wealth’ (White, 2020, 250). The skyscrapers of the City of London’s financial district dominate the view to the west, while Canary Wharf, home to the headquarters of numerous multinational corporations, is even closer to the south. The Tower Hamlets estate setting for Roll Deep’s 2005 ‘When I’m ’Ere’ video, for example, is just ten minutes’ walk from the towers of Credit Suisse, HSBC and One Canada Square. Dizzee Rascal wrote most of his debut album ‘Boy in Da Corner’ while still at Langdon Park School in Poplar, which was barely a kilometre from One Canada Square. In a 2010 BBC London radio interview, Dizzee Rascal chose One Canada Square as his favourite building, explaining: ‘I could see it from all angles as a kid. That was the highest building I could see from my bedroom … I remember when we were little, we had a conspiracy—we thought that thing on the top of it was like aliens, and they were about to fly off—loads of little theories like that’ (quoted in Hancox, 2013, 175). This has always been, as White (2020, 250) puts it, ‘the backdrop to grime’: ‘rich and poor communities that exist side by side but barely touching. In these alien spaces, with bounded territories that are border patrolled by private security, young people are living in proximity to these heavily guarded structures of wealth and privilege—in plain sight, but almost always out of reach’ (ibid., 267; see also Charles, 2016, 93). Grime’s practitioners ‘were exposed to (yet excluded from) fast social change, i.e. gentrification, in the areas they lived’ (Charles, 2019, 108). For this reason, researchers have used the language of ‘marginality’ to describe the socio-economic context of the grime scene (e.g. Charles, 2016, 89; White, 2019, 17; Charles, 2019, 124). For Orlando Woods, grime emerged ‘from the spatial margins of inner city London’ and its political aim has been ‘to overcome the socio-spatial marginalization of urban Britain’ (Woods, 2020, 304; 295). Marginalisation may describe the East London grime scene’s relationship to an East London global elite who are able to move more freely, unpoliced, but its connotation of spatial peripheries is less appropriate. Rather, grime’s practitioners may more accurately be said to come from overlooked spaces and contested edges. These spaces are relatively central, densely populated, close to some of London’s most iconic leisure, tourism and global capital sites, and yet not seen, not included in an urban overview, not part of the city’s or the nation’s story, not part of ‘global’ progress, and ‘rendered out of time and out of place’ (White, 2019, 26). The kind of ‘uneven development’ and urban inequality experienced by grime’s listeners and practitioners is exactly the political-economic basis, as Neil Smith (2010) sees it, of the scalar system and spatial functioning of capitalism.

This is where grime’s postcode scale comes in, with scale understood here to mean not just size or spatial extent but ‘the level of resolution’ (Marston, 2000, 220). Indeed, when something is ‘small-scale’ this usually entails finer-grained, high-resolution detail, alongside different selection criteria for the features included or excluded. For grime, greater granularity is a political strategy: its high level of resolution ensures a set of social realities come to the fore that may be absent from other music, even other popular music with an urban focus and scale. Grime’s scale enables closer attention to the city’s unevenness: to the stuff that falls in-between and to the detail that might otherwise be missed. It draws out the grime, or as Charles (2016) puts it, the ‘subterranean ground-in grit engulfing manicured mainstream spaces’. And although the grime scene has collectively mapped London in high-resolution detail, each grime artist’s emphasis and scale is based around what Richard Bramwell (2015, 125) calls ‘a far more restricted political identity: the postcode’. The genre’s ‘postcode particularism’ (ibid., 126) is expressed in part through the repeated references to postcodes in grime lyrics. Southside Allstars shout out basically every South London postcode, with different emcees representing SE1, SE5, SW11, SW18 and so on. Grime musicians in other UK cities such as Liverpool also use postcodes when making spatial references (Cohen, 2012). Skepta raps on ‘Man’ (2016), ‘You know the postcode when you’re talkin’ road, better know that I speak that fluently’. Of course, Skepta also explains on ‘That’s Not Me’ (2016): ‘I don’t really care about your postcode’. The postcode references should not be taken overly literally, as the British right-wing media does when it invokes grime in discussions of so-called ‘postcode wars’ between London gangs. Rather, the postcode symbolises the kind of ‘hyperlocal demarcation’ (White, 2020) that the music is exploring. It is an indication of grime’s level of resolution.

The postcode is an appropriate choice for two main reasons. First, it fits in with grime’s modernist self-styling. In music videos and other promotional imagery, artists such as Skepta and Dizzee Rascal are often framed by 1960s Brutalist tower blocks and council estates that were built around the same time that the UK’s postcode system was introduced. Balfron Tower, for example, which features in Dizzee’s and Wiley’s self-branding, was built between 1965 and 1967 by the Labour-controlled Greater London Council, just as the famous left-wing Labour politician Tony Benn, as Postmaster General, announced the national application of postcodes. The first postcode was tested in Croydon, South London, where a proud grime scene includes Stormzy, Plastician and Nadia Rose. The use of postcodes therefore signals a distinctly, perhaps even coldly modern method of differentiating and organising space, foregoing what essentially differentiates places and instead fitting them into a modernist system. Rather than using the historic names for London’s parishes and former villages, with their historic connotations, grime artists instead use the codes designed for municipal organisation in the second half of the twentieth century. For example, rather than naming ‘Brockley’, the etymology of which refers to ‘a woodland clearing where badgers are seen’, a grime MC can claim to represent ‘SE4’, which places them on an abstract, featureless spatial grid—albeit an off-kilter grid with a scale that does not apply evenly over all space, as the spatial extent of a postcode differs according to the characteristics of the place. This contributes to what Hancox describes as grime’s ‘sonic futurism’: its ‘sheer alien newness’ produced by its video games samples, its ‘off-kilter arrangements … dehumanised synths and cyborg basslines’ (Hancox, 2018, 70). Using postcodes to designate places complements grime’s ‘sonic representation of the alien spaces that its creators occupy’ (White, 2020, 250).

The second reason for this adoption of the postcode-scale is that it signifies granularity and high-resolution detail, at least in urban areas.Footnote 1 The postcode is the lowest level of aggregation used in national statistical gathering and municipal administration. Each of the UK’s 121 postcode areas (such as ‘SE13’) is broken down into smaller units (such as ‘SE13 6JL’) that often cover just a few buildings—usually around 15 properties and no more than 100 ‘deliverable endpoints’ or residences. This means a full postcode can cover an extremely small area of a densely populated city, perhaps even a few square metres. And although the spatial references grime artists use are actually the postcode areas rather than full postcodes—and therefore they are not that local in their spatial references—the postcode system nevertheless implies an organisation of space that is capable of greater geographical specificity, detail and granularity, and simultaneously malleable and variable according to how the space is inhabited. In densely populated areas, the postcode promises a higher level of resolution than the historic place name it replaces.

What makes grime intensely/microscopically/hyper local, however, is not its lyrical references to postcodes per se but more generally the way it renders its postcode scale musically. The intensity of grime tracks can make the local, at the postcode scale, seem claustrophobic and inescapable. A good example is Wiley’s track ‘Bow E3’ from 2006, which presents E3 as of fundamental and undeniable social significance. (Wiley is now a renowned antisemite and conspiracy theorist, and his music and its politics have of course been reassessed, but his influence on the early development of the genre is still worth analysing.) Wiley raps over an instrumental constructed from a high-hat-and-snare beat, grime’s signature squelchy bass, and two repeated and distorted samples: one is a rhythmic vocal line saying ‘Bow E3’, and the other is a synthesised string sound. The glitch-like repetition and cutting of both samples creates a relentless effect (‘B-B-B-B-Bow E3’). The latter sounds like an inescapable wall of sound, with short reverberations implying impact, as if the listener is repeatedly banging into a wall, unable to overcome the repetition. The bass’s distortion—which intensifies in the middle section between 01:35 and 01:45—can be heard as a sonic representation of reaching the limit of available space. At times the bass rhythm speeds up in time with the relentlessly reset ‘Bow E- Bow E- Bow E-’ sample. There are no echoes or long, sustained notes in the music, and nothing to suggest open space. (Remember, grime production has always involved using and manipulating digital software and samples rather than recording live instruments in the ‘real’ space of a studio. Similarly, grime artists have always made music designed to sound good through personal headphones, in people’s bedrooms, and in busy nightclubs, not in grand concert halls, festival venues or stadiums.) Instead, there are lots of short, sharp bursts of sound bouncing into and past each other. The track is an example of grime’s unruly use of compression and distortion, foregoing a ‘balanced’-sounding mix in favour of a more hectic and intense combination of sounds that seem to hint at music’s material limits. It is the kind of musical texture that Dale Chapman describes as somehow simultaneously full and flat: ‘a flat plane of unrelenting sound that denies depth, perspective, relief’ (Chapman, 2008, 165). The different digitally produced, artificial-sounding aspects of the instrumental are heard as somehow unrelated; rather than a harmonious or natural totality of sound there is a sense of different sonic features at different frequencies being forced to share the same condensed space, which creates a hectic effect.

Wiley’s rapping style accentuates this claustrophobic intensity. ‘Bow E3’ is, like many grime tracks, relatively fast at 140 beats per minute (bpm), and although rappers from other genres might choose to hold longer notes and/or leave more space between lines over such a fast beat, here Wiley fills all available space with clipped, fast-paced vocals. This includes syllables that do not flow together, especially the repeated staccato delivery of ‘Bow-E-three’, with each syllable clearly distinguished. (Grime artists often forego smooth flow: AJ Tracey commonly emphasises the change from one syllable to another by using ‘a’ rather than ‘an’ for words that begin with a vowel sound. Jme similarly favours the staccato sounds of ‘did a E’ and ‘ya eyeball’, rather than the more flowing ‘did an E’ and ‘your eyeball’, on his 2011 track ’96 Fuckries’. Jme also fills all the space in that track by rapping continuously for the full 02:25, with no introduction, chorus or outro.) Wiley uses the four syllables of ‘anybody’ when the three syllables of ‘anyone’ would have been a more natural choice in the line. During the first verse, between 0:28 and 0:55 there are 151 syllables (an average of 5.4 syllables per second), and in the most intense section between 0:34 and 0:47 he reaches almost six syllables per second. To put his pace in context: in US rap the average speed is 4.5 syllables per second, with the musical accompaniments averaging between 80 and 110 bpm (Condit-Schultz, 2016, 133–5). The contrast is even starker in relation to the verses of three other popular songs from different genres released in the same year. The R&B song ‘Bleeding Love’ by Leona Lewis has just under two syllables per second. Take That’s epic pop hit ‘Rule the World’ is just under one syllable per second. ‘Chasing Cars’ by the indie band Snow Patrol includes just over 0.6 syllables per second in the verse. Wiley raps ten syllables in the time it takes Snow Patrol to sing one. He draws attention to the limits of the available space by filling it completely.

The sense of spatial limitation is intensified by Wiley’s flow and verse structure. Almost every line ends with a repetition of ‘E3’:Verse

Verse Listen, my name’s Wiley, I come from Oh-seven-nine-six-one-eight-nine-seven-oh-three-three, I’m so E3 The whole of E3’s got so much talent, I hope you see I know E3 so well, if you ask me Wiley speaks for the whole of E3 You can’t say that, Scorcher won’t make anybody bow to his foot, I ain’t Wolf Pack Boy Better Know E3, won’t accept another doughnut MC disrespect E3 I’m always tryna rep ends but certain friends on ends they don’t know E3 ‘Cos when it’s reppin’ time I show E3 We made the genre everybody’s on but it’s all come from Bow E3 It’s Wiley AKA Eski-Boy I’m from Bow E3

The effect of repeatedly returning to ‘E3’ despite rapping so many words, to keep coming back to the same point, is to produce a pronounced lack of momentum. Or, rather, the internal variation within rhythmic repetition becomes the motivating, driving force of the track, and Wiley’s rapped ‘Bow E3’s syncopate in interesting combinations with the ‘Bow E3’s of the glitch sample. The track does not build to a climax; rather, the same point is made again and again with varying intensity. In the first verse quoted above, Wiley begins by saying he is from E3, and he ends by saying he is from E3. This emphasis on intensity through repetition is characteristic of the grime genre more generally. This may be a function of what Anders Reuter refers to as the ‘loop-paradigm’ of the FruityLoops music production software often used by grime artists, in which the creative musical process is ‘less about inscriptional value of musical material’ than ‘an ongoing adjustment, [or] manipulation’ of material (Reuter, 2022a, 118). This entails, for the grime producer, a focus on timbral variation and complexity—‘shaping sounds’ (Reuter, 2022b, 60)—rather than melodic development. It entails manipulation of the micro-details of different sonic elements that must work in relation. Early grime MCs such as Wiley also grew their audiences through performing live at raves, where their aim was often to generate a highpoint of intensity (ideally enough to achieve a ‘reload’ from the DJ) rather than some kind of linear development. Grime is one of several influential twenty-first-century genres that is ‘modular rather than teleological’ in style, and ‘treats rhythm and timbre (and not pitch, as is traditionally the case) as the primary organizational and expressive elements of a song’ (R. James, 2015, 1; 11). We should understand Wiley’s repetition of ‘E3’—his using of that postcode reference as the structure and rhythmic driver of the track—as part of his method of expressing his ‘level of resolution’ or intense commitment to the local.

Despite Wiley’s recent disgrace, his contributions to the early development of grime are widely acknowledged. He pioneered many of the genre’s characteristic features. ‘Bow E3’ represents the genre well, as do his other, more collaborative yet still E3-focused tracks such as ‘E3 Talent’ (feat. Maverick) and ‘E3 Link Up’ (feat. All in One, Black Rain and Mega). Both these use a flattened, reverb-less, distinctly ‘digital’ or platform-game-style sound in the bass and drums that also creates a sense of spatial enclosure. But there are plenty of other grime artists who produce a similar effect with similar musical features. Stormzy’s 2019 track ‘Wiley Flow’, for example, emphasises many of the elements of Wiley’s style that became definitive of the grime genre. More Fire Crew’s ‘Oi’ (2001)—which has been called the first grime song (Charles, 2016)—is built out of the same tinny high-hat rhythm and ‘glitchy’ sample repetition. The attack, pace and staccato style of rapping can be heard on Ghetts’ ‘Artillery’, in which he rarely stops to take a breath, and most famously on the intensely clipped verses of Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Jus’ a Rascal’. Dizzee ends each line of the first verse abruptly in time with the beat, with absolutely no sustained notes or echo, which exemplifies grime’s tendency to create a sense of filling sonic space right up to its strict limits. In the third and final verse (‘I’m streetwise with the phat guys, so spectize, make the whole crew capsize, slap guys …’), Dizzee reaches a crescendo of frustrated intensity, with the frequency of rhymes increasing, just as Wiley created a similar effect by increasing the number of mentions of ‘E3’ in a line. This is grime’s famously ‘relentless’ vocal style (Charles, 2019, 107). Wiley’s repetition of line-endings is also common in the genre more generally, such as in Roll Deep’s ‘When I’m ’Ere’. Every verse line of that track ends ‘when I’m ’ere’, with the same sense of relentless intensity created, especially in Manga’s rapidly staccato verse (‘critical with every syllable when I’m ’ere’) and when Roachee increases the repetition frequency in the final verse:Verse

Verse When I boom when I’m ’ere, when I jag when I’m ’ere Duck when I’m ’ere, tuck-tuck when I’m ’ere When I’m ’ere bring heat, I’m a G when I’m ’ere

This feature of grime—to intensify a track with increased rhyme frequency and repetition, rather than to use structural or melodic development such as key changes to ‘break through’ or reach a higher level or sense of closure/conclusion—exemplifies the genre’s commitment to the postcode scale, its intensely local level of resolution.

But to fully understand the scalar significance of the genre’s ‘local’-ness, it is necessary to understand how grime is heard and used by its listeners and fans. Although I disagree with Woods (2020, 298) that grime ‘remains largely unresearched’, I agree with his suggestion that more research is needed into ‘how the audiences that consume grime music engage with the spaces of grime’ (Woods, 2020, 309). This kind of attention to how grime is heard is necessary for fully appreciating ‘the new forms of power associated with grime’ including ‘the influences of grime on society and space, and how it may influence the ways in which its fans navigate the city, the spaces they occupy, and their overarching sense of place’ (ibid.). Here I pursue this line of research by examining how a particular track in the grime tradition has been used as a place-specific protest song, focusing on the political purposes it has been put to. By focusing on moments when ostensibly apolitical songs become explicitly and directly involved in political campaigns—when political organisations adopt them as their anthems, or when street demonstrators sing and perform them in pursuit of political outcomes—it is possible to appreciate the power of grime’s postcode scale.

The use of grime music in political protest has been widely noted and in some cases lamented (see Thompson & Biddle, 2013), but it pays to focus on a specific example: the role of Nadia Rose’s 2016 track ‘Skwod’ in antifascist protest in Croydon on the southern edge of London. Rose was born in 1993 in Croydon. Her viral music videos have all been set in and around Croydon, and while her style has more in common with commercial R&B, Jamaican Dancehall and US hip-hop than earlier generations of grime artists, Rose’s music nevertheless stands in the grime tradition of representing the neighbourhoods she grew up in, featuring heavy use of London slang and humour in her rapping, plus electronic samples and familiar squelchy bass. Lyrically, she develops grime’s tendency to directly address perceived critics and to elevate apparently petty squabbles to the level of a poetic battle. For example, her 2016 breakthrough ‘Station’ is a sparsely produced track based around a skittish, stop-start beat and a dextrous, fast-paced rap exploring travel-related disputes.

‘Station’ is an example of how Rose’s music explores the nature of places that are characterised by their relationships with and (dis)connections to the nearby metropolis. In the video, Rose raps on the rail tracks and platform at Chipstead, a suburban commuter station in the ‘Stockbroker Belt’, six train stops south from Croydon. Croydon itself is sometimes called an ‘edge city’, as it functions as a kind of border between inner city and rural, between urban and extra-urban; a ‘post-suburban gateway’ with a highly contested identity (Phelps et al., 2006, 185). It is a key junction on the route carrying commuters from central London to England’s leafy Home Counties, although it is an administrative Borough of London and a large and populous town in its own right, with its own non-London postcode (CR0) and a town centre surrounded by ‘sub-suburbs’. Croydon is a contested space representing the ‘edge’ of London in a more figurative and political sense too. It is not a conventional suburb or marginalised neighbourhood—it has not much in common with The Beatles’ suburban pastoral, nor with the ‘Status Symbol Land’ skewered by the Monkees, nor with the mundane landscapes of middle-class malaise mocked by Radiohead and Everything But The Girl, and nor is it the ghettoised neighbourhood of resistance valorised by N.W.A.—but it has nevertheless been implicated in national debates about what a suburb should be. Croydon is home to the British Home Office’s Visas and Immigration headquarters, where migrants seeking the legal right to live in the UK are obliged to attend and at which they are sometimes detained by Border Force officers. It is the kind of highly politicised ‘immigrant gateway community’ that has become a key site of pro- and anti-immigrant activism (Carpio et al., 2011, 189). It is therefore a local site of national significance, functioning both as an administrative border and as a symbol of the British state’s immigration policy. Croydon has also been the scene of high-profile racist attacks (see Gilroy, 2012; Back, 2015). For right-wing nationalist politicians and campaign groups, Croydon is a key battleground, a site for defining the parameters of London and even the borders of the nation. It is in this context that fans have heard the political potential of the postcode-scale of Rose’s grime.

Rose’s biggest track is ‘Skwod’ (2016), which was accompanied by a viral YouTube video produced by Reece Proctor. But its political potential was not immediately and universally realised. Rose performs a version of it, albeit with the swearwords and drug references censored, in a commercial video for a multinational cosmetics brand featuring choreographed dancers in front of a generic central London cityscape. The ‘Skwod’ video itself looks almost like an advertisement for Adidas clothing, as Rose and her backing dancers are wearing coordinated Adidas tracksuits and shoes. Rose has also been the face and voice of a marketing campaign for a credit card in a commercial video that features her own generically uplifting track ‘Make it Happen’. Moreover, ‘Skwod’ has a broadly feminist message celebrating a group or ‘skwod’ of women, but with its lyrical focus on small-scale criminality and partying it is not obviously or explicitly radically political in content. Even if they lack an explicitly political message, some songs have radical semantic import through a kind of ‘diagnostic’ power to highlight the causes of problems (see Murphy, 2019), but Rose’s lyrics seem to lack even this. Nor does ‘Skwod’ have the angry, riotous, punk or otherwise strongly emotional energy of other grime tracks that have been used in political protest (Fisher, 2012; see also Brown, 2016; Halberstam, 2019). It does not particularly sound like the frustrated expression of the oppressed. Many of its stylistic features are common in commercial, radio-friendly pop music and as such it probably fits into the category of the ‘sonically normative’ (Halberstam, 2019, 248). Rose’s music seems to be ‘entirely complicit with its status as a market commodity’ (Thompson & Biddle, 2013, 4) and any political content is expressed through the unassuming ‘currency of pop’ (Anohni quoted in Murphy, 2019, 219)—although of course many of the most effective protest songs have historically followed the conventions of popular or folk genres that have emerged organically from working-class communities (Martinez, 1997; Roscigno et al., 2002; Bierman, 2013; Turner, 2013). Simply put, Rose does not present herself according to the Woody Guthrie or Billy Bragg model of the protest singer, and ‘Skwod’ is not obviously a protest song. The song has, however, been put to radical political ends by the intersectional feminist activist group Sisters Uncut, who use it as the soundtrack to campaign videos and have commonly played and sung along to it at their political events and protests.

Sisters Uncut is an influential direct action group that has been widely discussed by scholars interested in innovative and intersectional approaches to feminist political organising (see Evans, 2016; Freedman, 2018; Ishkanian & Peña Saavedra, 2019). Sara Ahmed, for example, notes the value of their intersectional approach to issues of domestic violence that crucially takes account of ‘racism, including state racism, immigration, detention, poverty, unemployment, the erosion of the welfare state, all those structures that distribute vulnerability and fragility unevenly to populations’ (Ahmed, 2017, 211). Sisters Uncut organise around a ‘shared otherness’ and, as Lucy Freedman (2018, 238) explains, ‘Their activism serves as a thread to hold together the oppressions and demands of a huge range of people, united in their experience of oppression as women.’ The chant of ‘sisters united will never be defeated’ is commonly heard at their events. Their direct action approach often involves highly visible or disruptive interventions in public space, and this often involves the use of music and song. In November 2021, Sisters Uncut occupied London’s Royal Courts of Justice to protest police violence against women. They chanted ‘Freedom! Freedom! All these racist, sexist cops, we don’t need ‘em, need ‘em!’ When, in September 2016, the group occupied Hackney Town Hall in East London to protest against the local council’s housing policy, Sisters Uncut sang along to a modified version of Rihanna’s ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’. The chorus became ‘You better keep your promise! Fill those empty council homes!’ They also blocked London’s Waterloo Bridge in November 2016 to protest cuts to domestic violence services, and then it was Rose’s ‘Skwod’ that was heard prominently, and with its original lyrics.Footnote 2

‘Skwod’ has long been the unofficial anthem of the South East London branch of Sisters Uncut and it has soundtracked several of their campaign videos. Rose herself endorsed the group’s use of her song when Sisters Uncut used it to, in their words, ‘fight the fash’ in Croydon.Footnote 3 This was in the context of the May 2017 protest in Croydon organised by the far-right anti-immigration organisation the South East Alliance, who were campaigning outside an administrative office of the British Home Office that symbolised the British state’s immigration policies. This was an example of a wider trend of reactionary, nativist activism projects that see themselves ‘at the frontlines of a rescaled national boundary’ and are focused on rescaling political power and claiming authority over immigration policy and practice at a local (rather than national or supranational) level (Varsanyi, 2011, 295). Sisters Uncut joined other antifascist groups endorsing a ‘no borders’ immigration policy to organise a counter-protest that was well attended and widely publicised under the hashtag #DefendCroydon. The effect of this contentious protest in Croydon was of a high-profile battle over ‘who has the right to determine who can and cannot live in the suburb and under what conditions’ (Carpio et al., 2011, 189). It was, in essence, a battle to be heard, to be seen and to disrupt in this symbolic suburban or edge city location of national significance, and a contest over different models or practices of inclusion and exclusion. Fellow South London grime artist Stormzy’s track ‘Big For Your Boots’ (2017)—which generates a characteristically grime intensity against those who ‘wanna come round here like a badboy’—was also heard at the same protest. It obviously has what Jeffrey Boakye (2018) describes as grime’s agitprop-esque confrontational sound. But ‘Skwod’, which lacks that, featured most prominently and generated the strongest reaction from the protestors.

Why ‘Skwod’? Most straightforwardly, Sisters Uncut may have heard the intersectional-feminist political potential in some of the song’s key lyrics:Verse

Verse I’m rollin’ ten girl up in that skwod Fuckin’ with my skwod? I think not Me and my bitches we roll deep And we always got green So we pretty much peas in a pod […] Some girl are braided, some girl are in cornrows But still gon’ dread if we have to The heart is built like a statue […] Cause if my bitches need me there, well I’m comin’ And if I ain’t gotta wish it, I’m runnin’ I do it for ’em, it ain’t nothin’, skwoddy

In these passages Rose plays on the ‘roll deep’ phrase, already adopted by the Roll Deep grime crew discussed above, to describe a squad or crew of women who look out for each other and are not to be fucked with. She references the different hairstyles of black women—braids, cornrows, dreadlocks—in a way that may chime with the intersectional and anti-racist concerns of Sisters Uncut. She also mentions South London locations and her accent and slang provide an appropriate place specificity. The track’s production, too—especially the way the introductory and closing synth lines pan percussively between left and right in stereo as if bouncing between tall buildings—evokes a sense of space that reinforces the urban scenes depicted in the music video. (This panned synth line also features under the ‘that what? That skwod’ refrain, creating a subtle sense of spatial enclosure around the chorus.) And in the video for ‘Skwod’, Rose leads a group of women as they dance down a densely built Croydon high street. The video—which has had over 13 million views on YouTube—is a prominent example of the tradition of grime videos showing the artists appropriating or taking up space in the city (Woods, 2020), especially in sites of significance to a particular postcode-locality, often alongside diverse groups, crews or ‘skwods’ representing oppressed gender identities and/or races. Sisters Uncut’s repurposing of ‘Skwod’ as an intersectional feminist anthem about the collective reclaiming of urban space and public rights for marginalised groups could be seen as a musical practice of reclaiming the ‘right to the city’ (following Lefebvre, 1996; Mitchell, 2003; Carpio et al., 2011; Johnson, 2013). It certainly supported their praxis of taking up or intervening in a politicised public sphere, and of reasserting the political agency of racialised, migrantised or otherwise oppressed people over (sub)urban space.

Even it does not deliver direct political messages, like Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’ and Bragg’s ‘Power in a Union’, ‘Skwod’ nevertheless has some of the traditional elements of a protest song. Lyrically it has several chant-friendly call-and-response or question-and-answer elements (‘That what? That skwod’; ‘Fuckin’ with my Skwod? I think not’) that might be considered as part of a ‘local repertoire’ of musical repetition used in political struggle (Gilbert, 2007, 426). There is a similar call-and-response effect to the coupled phrases in the bass and synth verse accompaniment, and rhythmically it is suited to marching or dancing (see Manabe, 2019). All of these make it amenable to use in contemporary public protests. Its musical features give it feminist import too. The production allows Rose to take on a heroic, powerful persona while nonetheless presenting herself as the embodiment, or rather the uniting figure, of a community of women. There is minimal content in the upper end of the production that might mask the vocal line. This is a sparer production than most grime. It has a staccato synth line and of course grime’s squelchy bass, but it resembles the relatively minimal and space-filled, start-stop production of hip-hop pioneers Timbaland and Missy Elliot (see Chapman, 2008). This means she can rap in a relaxed manner and adopt the unbothered-by-authority attitude she communicates in the lyrics (which is especially suited to the context of a counter-protest against angry, shouting men). With the exception of a few sections of increased intensity (such as when the verse builds towards the chorus), she is not obliged to battle with or stand out over other high-frequency sounds. The laid-back persona that Rose adopts is partly a result of the fact that she does not fill all the available sonic space. Moreover, the few moments when her syllables-per-second ratio increases (‘I do it for them, it ain’t nothin’, Skwoddy!’) seem to signal the intensity of her commitment to the skwod. Rose is, as she puts it, ‘with my team’. Sisters Uncut heard this political, feminist potential in the track.

One might interpret this as a case of what José Esteban Muñoz (1999) calls ‘disidentification’ (whereby minoritised groups appropriate aspects of mainstream culture for specific cultural-political ends), or of ‘queer use’ in Ahmed’s (2019) terms. Queer use in a basic sense refers to ‘how things can be used in ways other than for which they were intended or by those other than for whom they were intended’ (Ahmed, 2019, 199). Moreover, it entails ‘releasing a potentiality that already resides in things given how they have taken shape. Queer use could be what we are doing when we release that potential’ (ibid., 200). Specifically, queer use is ‘to linger on the material qualities of that which you are supposed to pass over; it is to recover a potential from materials that have been left behind’ (ibid., 207–8; italics in original). Ahmed’s emphasis on the potential that is activated by users who linger on the specific qualities of something that is otherwise overlooked fits well with the relationship between ‘Skwod’ and Sisters Uncut. Indeed, Ahmed (2019) uses Sisters Uncut’s policies of disruptive public protest and squatting or occupying as examples of queer use via the disruption of usage. So, contrary to the interpretations of advertising executives and others who might hear apolitical mainstream popular music and use it for their purposes, Sisters Uncut seemed to find that Nadia Rose’s music was perfectly suited to contemporary political projects relating to the defence and valorisation of politically contested (sub)urban space from an intersectional feminist perspective. They lingered on its material qualities and heard its high-resolution detail, thereby realising its potential.

In addition to the aforementioned aspects of ‘Skwod’ that function well as a protest song, there is a scale-related element of its specific appeal to Sisters Uncut that requires further elaboration. Specifically, ‘Skwod’ features various musical techniques of inclusion and exclusion that mean the song suits both the intersectional premise of South East London Sisters Uncut and the specific context of the #DefendCroydon antifascist protest. Firstly, ‘Skwod’ does have an obviously communal, inclusive element. It demonstrates what Bill Rolston (2001, 51) calls ‘pop’s ability to speak for and to a community’, especially a community based around resistance to a dominating or reactionary power. There are the aforementioned lyrical details that celebrate the collective, plus the call-and-response features that invite audience participation. There are also the backing dancers in the video: more and more join as the performance goes on. Moreover, for a track by a solo artist, it is notable that ‘Skwod’ has the feel and sound of a collective, community-building anthem (see Gupta-Carlson, 2010). This is achieved in part through the subtle layering of vocals in the chorus and even the glitch-like doubling or rhythmic repetition of certain words in the verse, especially at the endings and beginnings of lines (e.g. ‘she’s shit and she’s wack (wack) / (they-they) they talk all that chat …’). This creates the collective effect that backing singers or hype women or men might otherwise provide. It is important to note, though, that the song is not inclusive to all, and the context of its performance cannot be construed in the simple terms of resistance versus dominance. The #DefendCroydon protest was a clash between at least three opposing groups: the fascist protestors, the antifascist protestors, and the police. Sisters Uncut, who campaign against both anti-immigrant fascist movements and police and state violence, sat in a specific position in that context. As Judith Butler (2014) has pointed out, different bodies are policed in public space in different ways, such that different groups experience public demonstrations differently. Sisters Uncut see themselves as opposing diverse forms of state and non-state domination, so their choice of protest song needs to reflect that position.

Grime artists are experts at positioning themselves in relation to diverse external threats or groups. Lyrics addressing perceived disses or opponents are common in rap-based genres and especially prominent in grime. Many grime tracks establish the MC’s identity against hostile interpretations of them: some people say X about me—well, it’s not true, and let me tell you why! This is the premise of Stormzy’s breakthrough hit ‘Shut Up’, and of course Wiley’s ‘Bow E3’ begins with an expression of incredulity that ‘certain man tryna say like I don’t rep for E3 … it’s amazing that you can say that!’ It is notable that ‘the cops’ feature as antagonists in Rose’s ‘Skwod’, as well as other unidentified enemies who apparently talk shit about her. She uses this technique to address and produce a specific audience, and to incite or even perform an audience response or mobilise a specific public (see Gupta-Carlson, 2010). Take, for example, the track’s opening lines:Verse

Verse Guess who’s back? ‘But you never left!’ Yes I did, I rose from the dead And now I’m here to kill them with flows And some punchlines that’ll go over your head Huh, turn back, I’m a caution ahead I’m your worst nightmare stood over your bed So dem girl trya call me But I smell defeat like a hole in your creps Wow, she’s sick and she’s bad She sings and she raps She’s shit and she’s wack They talk all that chat But when they see me don’t speak none of that

She begins by questioning the listener directly (‘guess who’s back?’) and ventriloquising their answer (‘but you never left!’) in a higher-pitched voice. Rose seems to be hostile to ‘you’ and to ‘them’ or what ‘they’ say, while identifying strongly with ‘dem’ (i.e. the skwod). Indeed, grime artists such as Wiley, Stormzy and Nadia Rose tend to address and produce a specific, by-no-means-all-inclusive audience: the music is open only to those who identify with it, and it excludes those who do not. This surely resonates with Sisters Uncut’s intersectional inclusivity, as Ishkanian and Peña Saavedra (2019) describe it. The group’s ‘boundary making’—their exclusion of those who identify as men—is crucial in their efforts ‘to bring to the fore previously marginalised voices’ (ibid., 993) and even to campaign for a ‘no borders’ geopolitical settlement. Likewise, the police and fascist protestors should not ‘get’ or feel included in their musical performance. As Turner (2013) and Roscigno et al. (2002) have shown, this selectiveness in terms of who gets to ‘get’ the song and who gets included in the ‘we’ or ‘us’ has long been important for performers of protest songs.

Another technique of inclusion and exclusion that Rose uses to great effect is humour. The opening lines contain several jokes. ‘Rose from the dead’ is a straightforward pun referencing her own first name, but other comic lines will not be understood by all. ‘I smell defeat like a hole in your creps’ relies on the audience knowing that ‘creps’ is slang for ‘shoes’. Some of the jokes will ‘go over your head’, and only those familiar with drug slang (‘green’, ‘blunts’, ‘Mary Jane’, ‘Molly’, ‘zoot’) will appreciate all of the song’s comic qualities. Just as (sometimes abusive) humour and irreverence often function in protest songs that need to both ‘caustically accuse the oppressors [and] enthusiastically uplift the oppressed’ (Shonekan, 2009, 136), so Rose’s music fits into this tradition of songs that are both ‘inwardly uplifting and outwardly accusatory’ through ridicule, sarcasm and a collective voice constructed around feminist jokes-and-punchlines (ibid., 137; see also Woldu, 2019). ‘Skwod’ plays with jokes addressed at key targets; jokes that only some are intended to get.

This selective inclusion and exclusion is also heard in the structure of the song. The verses, which in lyrical terms are for the most part addressed to a hostile other, seem to intensify through louder vocals, more dense instrumentation, and especially the compression and filter sweeps common in hip-hop and electronic dance music. At the end of the verse, these timbral features build energy and momentum, but instead of a soaring chorus at a higher pitch (as in most conventional pop songs), there is a ‘drop’ or breakdown. In the drop, a common feature of contemporary EDM-inspired music production, a rapid ‘deintensification of register feels and functions as an intensification of sonic energy’, akin to the power of sudden deceleration rather than acceleration (R. James, 2015, 36). So as the track shifts down to bass frequencies and the stereo synth line surrounds the repeated refrain of ‘that what? That skwod’, there is a chorus whose power comes through a drop in intensity. This may be disorientating or alienating for many casual listeners, but it signals, for those included, the turn inwards to celebrate and strengthen the collective. This relates to the kind of dancing and chanting seen in the tweeted video of ‘Skwod’ playing at the protest. If we follow Pat Noxolo (2018, 807) in paying greater attention to the dance, ‘choreography’ and ‘diverse movement repertoires’ of ‘cultural signification’ in urban street protests, we see in this case that not everyone in shot or even in the antifascist protest group is actually dancing. Plenty remain still or looking at their phones. Of course, the police officers stand unmoved and watchful. This is not some kind of material-affective sonic force that moves bodies spontaneously and equally. Rather, there is one group dancing together, and their bodies are turned inwards, towards each other, while they gesture aggressively outward, towards the diverse groups to which they are opposed. This dancing group sings the chorus communally, together, with each other, but also past the line of police towards the far-right demonstrators. Their musical performance signals both solidarity among a collective and hostility to diverse external enemies, just as ‘Skwod’ incorporates a complex mix of inclusive and exclusive elements, and just as the grime genre has always played musically and politically with the borders and limits of inclusion and belonging.

So, to sum up: if grime is a ‘local’ genre, it is a local defined by permeable boundaries and an uneven, modernist, postcode scale. Grime artists are concerned with intense renderings of the local, but this local is not purely defensive or nostalgic. It resembles, in this respect, the ‘global sense of place’ or ‘global sense of the local’ that Doreen Massey (1993a, b) describes: it goes beyond any local-global counterposition and instead defines ‘local’ places by the nature of their external relations—to whom or what they are (dis)connected. Grime, in this interpretation, is involved in producing a different kind of ‘local’. In a context in which people’s legitimacy of belonging is questioned at multiple scales, grime intervenes in a battle between different kinds of belonging and different ideals of the local, the urban and the national. And while Sisters Uncut have used grime and heard its potential in this specific context of a South London political protest, they have done so in a way that targets the global system of state bordering and therefore has global implications for the scalar category of ‘the national’. In this sense, the use of ‘Skwod’ discussed here is an example of how the solidaristic use of music may contribute to the production of ‘unbordered homelands’ (Bhowmik & Rogaly, 2023). Indeed, Croydon is not simply a suburban or local case: it functions symbolically and practically as a national boundary and as the contested border of the ‘inner city’ and its associated connotations for anti-immigrant campaigners. In Croydon, grime has taken part in the battle over ‘who has the right to determine who can and cannot live in the suburb’—or in a place defined at any scale—‘and under what conditions’ (Carpio et al., 2011, 189). It comes from ‘the spatial margins’ (Woods, 2020, 304) and it acts at the boundary where (the nature of) place is made.

Grime has this spatial-political function because of its postcode scale. This scale is not necessarily, as Bramwell (2015, 125) has it, more ‘restricted’ than others, but it is selective in a different way, emphasising different features, and it does concern complex procedures of inclusion and exclusion. As this chapter has shown, Rose uses several musical techniques to exclude hostile external groups and simultaneously to address an explicitly included audience. She demonstrates how grime functions as something that is open to some and potentially not to others—or at least not in the same way. While some listeners are not intended to ‘get’ it, her music is open for certain kinds of use and interpretation by audiences who linger over its material details. It was not meant to be universally accessible nor to express generally applicable truths, which is perhaps why it does not seem ‘global’. It is selectively available as a political resource. It shows a sensitivity to what Ahmed (2017, 211) describes as ‘all those structures that distribute vulnerability and fragility unevenly to populations’. It is a creative engagement with what White (2020, 250) calls the ‘bounded territories that are border patrolled by private security’ and the ‘heavily guarded structures of wealth and privilege’. ‘Skwod’ enables alliance-building between those with a shared experience of such structures. Grime artists produce music that is distinctly ‘local’ yet heard as meaningful to the marginalised: ‘to kids all across the country living in similar circumstances’ (DJ Target, 2018, 114), and to people in ‘the urban margins across the world’ or ‘ghetto wherever’ (Hancox, 2018, 162). Global listeners relate to and unite around grime’s level of resolution: the squelchy bass, the timbral complexity and intensification within a loop logic, and the other techniques used to signify grime’s commitment to and identification with the local community.

This selectivity is part of grime’s postcode scale. It is common to assume that adopting a ‘local’ scale simply means focusing on an area of a specific size, but more often it is about drawing attention to certain features rather than others, or making some things perceivable and others not. This is already the case with, say, the national scale, in which not everything of or within a nation is included. Likewise, there are processes that occur pretty much evenly across the world that would not be understood as ‘global’ or included in a global overview. So grime also works with a scalar system in which not everywhere or everyone is included. This functions, implicitly, as a critique of the selectivity of the existing systems. It also functions politically because of its level of resolution—it has a granular detail appropriate for the densely populated areas of London, with the postcode symbolising a scale that does not apply evenly over space but instead organises spatial units according to their characteristics. And this selectivity means that experience and understanding of the music varies. The Sisters Uncut protestors were able to hear and express ‘Skwod’s political potential in the context of defending their suburb against far-right organisations and a broader right-wing political discourse. They were positioned to linger over the track’s high-resolution details and had a richer, more specialised understanding of the song than, say, the marketing executives who used it to sell cosmetics. This intensely local listening, too, is a part of grime’s postcode scale, and it supports Lila Ellen Gray’s (2016) observation that it takes sensitivity to local particularity and to small aesthetic details for a song to move to a political context and catalyse protest. To understand grime’s politics and what Woods (2020, 309) calls ‘the new forms of power associated with grime’, it is necessary to look beyond the semantic content of the artists’ statements and lyrics, and to consider in addition the aesthetic details that are heard as political by specific audiences. Crucially, grime artists are not only ‘organic intellectuals’ in Gramscian terms (see Charles, 2018), but also musical ‘specialists of space’, following Lefebvre (1991). Their music is not just defined in relation to space, or referring to specific places, or even sounding like certain kinds of locations; instead, their music intervenes in space and works to produce a new kind of place. Theirs is a cultural practice that involves the construction of new geographies and new spatial relationships at and through the postcode scale. It is crucial to understand this if we are to meet Woods’ (2020, 309) challenge of fully appreciating ‘the influences of grime on society and space’.

The features pioneered by the earlier generation of grime artists, such as Dizzee Rascal, Roll Deep and Wiley, have come to signify the intensity of the postcode scale in a way that Rose and grime fans could use. As this chapter has shown, part of the reason the genre is interpreted as intensely/microscopically/hyper local is that grime tracks make an aesthetic feature of boundaries, by returning to the same point constantly and with increasing intensity, or by emphasising how boundaries are permeable and differentially policed. It is not just the MCs’ rapping speed, with their high syllables-per-second rate relative to other genres, but their frequently clipped, staccato style, with no long sustained notes or space between lines, that creates the hectic, relentless, breathless intensity that defines grime’s ‘level of resolution’. In addition, the glitch-like repetition and cutting of samples, as well as the repetition of rhymes, phrases and line-endings, often accentuates this effect of banging repeatedly against a barrier, of being bound and inescapably restricted, contributing to the sense that grime’s local scale is distinctively intense in comparison with that of, say, The Beatles. Grime’s is a non-nostalgic localism. Grime artists do not create a traditional, calm, bucolic or ‘small’ sense of the local, where something that is ‘local’ is somehow insignificant. Rather, Wiley performs the E3 postcode as a place of hectic energy, and his commitment to it is intense.

All of this is part of grime artists’ political commitment to overlooked and contested spaces—the grimy margins, gaps and edges of urban life that require greater granularity and a higher level of resolution for their rendering—and their cultural exploration of places that are not taken to be nationally significant or globally connected. Nor do grime artists adopt a more restricted scale than other musicians, but they tend to artistically explore demarcation, particularism and spatial restriction rather than generalisation and universalism. Grime offers an aggregated accumulation of postcode-scale truths that speak in an intensely local aesthetic register to ‘urban Britain’ and ‘ghetto wherever’, rather than an attempt to break through beyond local experience or grasp towards universal truths. It is this more mainstream musical jump, from local experience to general claim, that is the focus of the next chapter.