Dizzee Rascal

Photos of the Dizzee Rascal concert I attended on March 30th
I left halfway through, but he did put on a good show.
With RSS feed.

A Little Like Spelling Bees, But Louder

Sasha Frere-Jones: “In the past three years, grime producers (who make the beats that m.c.s rhyme over) have developed a fierce, antic sound by distilling the polyrhythms of drum and bass or garage—the music of choice at many raves—to a minimal style sometimes consisting of nothing more than a queasy bass line and a single, clipped video-game squawk. Today, the music’s choppy, off-center rhythms are blanketing London. Some tracks are beginning to show the influence of American hip-hop genres like crunk, but the m.c.s’ cadences are unmistakably black and British, indebted to Jamaican dance-hall music and West Indian patois. ¶ Grime exists largely in an informal economy. Some artists make their débuts on homemade DVDs, which feature shaky footage of competitions between m.c.s—a little like spelling bees, but louder.”

Chantelle Fiddy's World of Grime which features short commentary about up-and-coming grime artists (with occasional photography) and the people she links to in her sidebar, Livin' in the Grime with black-and-white photography of the competitions Frere-Jones talks about, and a PubSub feed of 'Dizzee Rascal' (just to watch the bloggers who compare up-and-coming grime artists to the most famous one) are good resources to keep track of the grime scene.

Dizzee Rascal live on Homegrown Sessions
There are a couple of moments where he doesn't take himself seriously, like the time he says it's corny to say it's good to be back in the UK and when he admits to reading the setlist on the floor.
Video for Dizzee Rascal's "Off To Work"
For a grime MC, he sure has some polished videos.
Dizzee Rascal to perform in Vancouver on March 30th.
Which sucks, because I will be in Ottawa then.

Dizzee Rascal's Showtime

Purchased Dizzee Rascal's Showtime CD.

The beats are a lot more polished than Boy In Da Corner though there's still nobody in American hip-hop doing what Dizzee is doing, but Dizzee as lyricist is still the most exciting rapper stylistically. Marga Man's raps on "Girls" are strangely thrilling, and the beat on "Everything" are definitely a Neptunes rip, though one of the best there is.

I downloaded MP3s of the album before deciding to purchase it.

Video for Dizzee Rascal's "Dream"
He's the jack in the box, then hangs out with his marionette homeys.

Like Buzzers Rasping Inside an Oil Barrel

Sasha Frere-Jones on Dizzee Rascal (aka Dylan Mills): “Wearing a Yankees cap, Mills was calm and businesslike. He is small of stature but moves with equilibrium and carefully parcelled-out effort, as if he’d known since kindergarten that people are watching him. He raps over music that he produces himself; the consensus term for this genre is “grime,” though the sounds are paradoxically clean in the way that only digital media are clean. Some grime tracks sound like buzzers rasping inside an oil barrel; others seem to have been made from cell-phone ring tones. The music is synthetic and hits hard, almost to the point of punishment.”

Frere-Jones also writes about The Streets (aka Mike Skinner), who less raps than talks in his songs. His style of "rapping" is a turn-off for those who prefer straight rapping—I don't exactly identify with a lot of rap lyrics, so I listen to them for the added element of rhythm and for style rather than content—as his songs are more stories over a dance track than songs. Frere-Jones gets that right while getting minor details wrong (in the song "Could Well Be In" The Streets reports that he saw on TV, not read in a magazine, that a woman twirling her hair while she talks to him means "she's probably keen").

He's Too Strange

cnwb: The Scotsman and Quebecois radio station CJAD both churn out different assemblages of an Associated Press story on Dizzee, which includes the incident, and consequent media reportage, of when he was stabbed in Cyprus”. The number of times Dizzee Rascal is reported to have been stabbed has stabilized at 5, although I swear it used to fluctuate between 3 and 5.

Rashaun Hall: “For Dizzee, radio doesn't know where to place him. He's too strange for R&B radio, he's not pop and he's not rock.” So it's true: heads really ain't ready.

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