TRASHFUTURE - Grime, the Thatcherite Ideal ft. Dan Hancox

Episode Date: May 29, 2018

This week, Riley (@raaleh) and Milo (@milo_edwards) host journalist and music enthusiast Dan Hancox (@danhancox) to discuss his new book ‘Inner City Pressure: the Story of Grime.’ After a loving review of Elon Musk’s one-for-the-history-books Meltdown May, the team converses on the history (and rebirth) of grime, pirate radio, gentrification, ASBOs, Form 696, Matt Hancock, and the classic Tory oscillation between criminalising youth culture and profiting massively from it. Hussein (@HKesvani) couldn’t make it, as he’s on deadline for a piece about Conservative-voting men who are tattooing images of ham on their faces to own the libs. It will be forthcoming soon, and he will of course return. You can (and should) purchase Dan’s book here, preferably from a high street bookstore and not from The Steroid Book Man himself: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Dan-Hancox/Inner-City-Pressure--The-Story-of-Grime/21136553 Riley finally remembered to read the shout-outs. Remember, you can always commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from Lil’ Comrade. In fact, you’d better: http://www.lilcomrade.com/ Nate (@inthesedeserts) produced this episode with Adobe Audition and a particularly American kind of patriotic fervour that comes only from wearing flag-themed Rick and Morty t-shirts.

I blame that's the FSB. They think, well, because it's I a lot of people think we're funded by Russia, but actually Russia as a man as as what is now a sort of reactionary power in the world finds our particular brand of sort of gentle ribbing of liberal figures to be very threatening. Yeah, I mean they would intervene in that. I personally can't wait for them to find a cadre of native Russian speakers that happen to be living in our podcast and then invade our RSS feed in order to protect them. I think I saw some out your flat actually just just some native Russian speakers just being being native native Russian speakers under threat of course. Yeah, and desperate for the for this to become a Russian podcast. So

welcome to the FSB cast. How is your Russian non existent and welcome again once again to me fucking up the intro again, which I do every time to this the podcast trash future the podcast, but how the future if we do not implement fully automated luxury gay space communism is and we'll be trash fucking nailed it. Yeah. Wow. Nice one, Riley. I can't believe I was present for this like row yet. Finally, it's like this three times I've ever gotten it right. Yeah, I was just watching you just he's gonna trip. He's gonna trip. You didn't trip. I fucking reload bars. Just do it again. Do it again. Run that shit back. Come on. Didn't even trip not even one fuck. Yes, there's vomit on my

sweater though. Well, I mean, you know, there's a pros and cons to this. Like, I'm not about to commit the cardinal sin of confusing grime with with rap because that is just completely wrong. But well, I have everyone's attention and you've all been thoroughly welcomed back in a way that had very few errors. I'm going to present this week's lineup. We have in the ball. Yeah, it's me. Unfortunately, I have like a really some kind of really horrendous problem with my nose right now. Like, it's horribly chapped. I don't know what to do with that. My mom wants me to go to a doctor, but obviously I can't do that because I'm in Russia. So, you know, if anyone has any advice for like a horrendously chapped undernosed area,

do hit me up with advice at Milo underscore Edwards. Oh, man. Moisturizer, man. Just moisturizer. No, man, that's made it worse. It made it crust. That is a detail we did not need to hear. Yeah. Well, now it's happened. Deal with it. Hi, I'm Dan Hancox. I'm guessing this week. I'm slightly hungover. I went to a publishing dinner last night where I met Kathy Newman from Channel 4 News and Naomi Alderman, the novelist, and the Ravenmaster of the Tower of London who wore his outfit and slightly unsettled us all by doing so. It's a sex thing. That really sounds like a World of Warcraft character. It really, yeah. No, right. And he was boasting, so he's written a book about being the Ravenmaster

of the Tower of London. And he was boasting about how he has all of these Ravens under his command. You know, he communes with them, right? And, you know, his posse, essentially. And then he revealed the number. He was like, yeah, you know, we need to have six Ravens in the Tower of London or London will fall as the legend goes. But, you know, we have seven just in case one of them gets ill. And I was looking around at people like, what, you have seven Ravens? I have more Ravens than that. That's not an impressive number of Ravens. Whereas you're like squad of a thousand. You'd want them to be able to like swoop down. And you actually have more Ravens than that. It seems like quite a lot of Ravens for the average man. Are you fact-checking me?

Yeah, this is trash future, not lie future. I just love that this guy. I'm actually just Elon Musk and I care a lot about the truth. Well, we'll get into that. But I just, my favorite thing about the Ravenmaster is that he's like a sort of Victorian Elizabethan version of the Brendan Lee superhero, the crow. But, but like wearing the Victorian Elizabethan version of the crows, like all black get up, which looks fucking hilarious, kind of steampunk actually. Oh, yeah. Get the Ravenmaster in the Avengers. It like gets towards the end and is like, well, now truly the Avengers are defeated. I've killed all six of your Ravens. Six Ravens, you say.

I've killed all six of your Ravens, but there's one more and that rogue renegade Raven will come back and save the day, redeem everything and like holy shit. We just, we just pitched the lamest superhero film, like the lamest, fattest superhero film. I go see it. It's not Lamer than the actual Avengers Infinity War, which is one of the worst films I've ever seen. That's true. Oh, fuck. The Holy Infinity War thing. It's like, now they have to be like, it's going to be like trading insults in the playground and like year three where it's like, yeah, well, I have infinity plus one war. It's such a fucking at Avengers Infinity War. This time it's Afghanistan never ends. I know, I know that like it's so tired to be like,

I don't like the Marvel movies and like a zillion think piece has got written about that because everyone wants to like to be honest. Everyone wants to be able to fuck off of writing clever articles about how their socialist who doesn't like pop culture, but as a socialist who doesn't like pop culture, honestly, like they're those movies. Those movies are just fucking show asinine. I'm aware also we're doing a really late review, but fuck it. It counts for solo as well, but it's like all of these, all of these extended universe films. It's so fucking boring because all they've done is they've replaced the eventfulness of storytelling with just a litany of facts for you to memorize. Yeah, and it's like wikipedia page basically of like because it's like why do

you do you listen to a story that I feel something or be edified or to somehow engage with something not to learn how Hawkeye found his fucking bow. You shouldn't be listening. Like any lesson of story teaches you presumably should be implicit, not just a fact someone made up for you to obsess over. It's like it's like I can't remember who who wrote this, but remember there was an ethicist who writes about like who is sort of saying look you can't like one of the main problems of sort of a purely consequentialist ethical philosophy is that you could get everyone addicted to heroin and then fulfill all their desires for heroin. Like you have to have merit goods and just these films are just the most distant thing from a merit good at all. Like at

least heroin is allegedly nice. These are just sort of visually dull redeeming qualities of heroin. So my favorite part of the film was still like all the people with like insane godlike powers battling it out who can like move the earth with the power of their mind and there's one guy just shooting at them with an M4 like yeah, you're helping. No, it's yeah. I only have an interest in those movies in as much as they help me write socialist pop culture, anti pop culture, think pieces whereby and then able to be like, huh? Raise my eyebrows in this audio only medium. At least they're generative. They're productive in that respect on they all like three hours long as well. Is that if they cursed by that

problem of modern Hollywood of like length is, you know, depth? I'll say this. I'm excited for when there's one movie a year that's seven days long and it features every character that's owned by the entertainment mega conglomerate. And so eventually you'll have you'll find out like what happens when Superman punches Homer Simpson in the gut? Does Hank Hill come and help him? What's Sonic doing during all of this? Inspector Morse joins the Batman universe. I mean, I mean, that's the infinity component, right? Like you have every possibility played out and you must continue watching until it's over. It's what really it's why like it is. It is finance capitalism because we have created a financial instrument that has a predictable

yield and that never ends up going stale like this. It's the finance capitalism version of film. Yeah, I mean stale. Oh my God. I've just realized that the Louis slash endeavor spin Ostrom Inspector Morse are just like Avengers, Infinity War, but for your parents, Avengers, Infinity Morse. I mean, that will cross over that crossover. But okay, we've we totally got distracted at a non timely thing, which absolutely isn't our kind of thing to do because it's not like we're planning on reviewing a movie from about 2004 anytime soon. We are anyway. We also before we're dance here because he's written a book called inner city pressure here. To say it's about grime and urban regeneration, grime music, not grime the physical

phenomenon. Oh, Elon Musk's girlfriend. Oh, man, we are doing so much for him actually started in Roddy's apartment. So what we are, we are talking about this book and it's about the both and the way they interrelate and sort of I think the relationship between grime and culture and high culture and low culture and youth culture and the ways in which these things sort of produce one another and their relationship with the broader economy as it's experienced by most people. It's a very good book. I suggest you buy it early and often I buy men and we'll be putting a link to somewhere to buy it in the episode description hive probably woke one. Yeah, let's do that one on Amazon. No, I don't want a link to submit me medical advice about my nose.

Oh yeah, I was going to say Milo, if you go for no surgery in Russia, you'll just wake up with just huge juicy boobs on my nose. I just have a go fund me for Milo's nose in the show description as well, please. Okay, so before we get into the good grime good grime content, I did want to touch on my favorite meltdown, which is the whole Elon Musk thing is just phenomenal. Just so great. So great. I mean, speaking of grimes, smooth. Well, it's like because it all really started at the Met Ball. This whole thing started because this is this is that's year zero for the meltdown. This year zero for Elon Musk's meltdown, which is just it is. It's a category three. It's continuing. It's going to enter like main phase sequence as he begins to go nuclear. It's incredible.

So what we're looking at is Elon Musk steps out with grimes, the recording artist and now reactionary, the reactionary pop artist. Didn't take long, did it? I mean, look, every rich person is going to be a reactionary at some point. There is no rich person who's not also a reactionary. Yeah, that's that's a cast iron rule. I'm trying to think of exceptions. I'm struggling. Tony Ben libel rich people as a concept rich. They've got the means to sue certainly, but I'm not. I'm not sure if they don't have the means to sue. That's libelous. I'll sue you rich. All rich people have tiny decks. That's why they get that's why they get that surgery where you can then pump one up with a Reebok pump and one of your balls. Anyway, so then we digress. So then people basically

yell at yell at sort of grimes and Elon Musk together being like this guy's a monster who doesn't let his staff unionize, which is true. Like they don't have a union and his justifications for are basically like no union would create an oppositional culture in our workplace. I prefer a culture of no opposition. Yeah, I mean, he was also threatening wasn't he sort of indirectly to like withdraw benefits and stuff or like implying that he might withdraw. Yeah, it's like it's like they they all have health care. And if they had a loon union, they'd lose their stock options. So because that's a law of nature, right? Yeah. And also we're cracked down on all the madcap workplace fun like the sort of Laurel and Hardy piano falling on your accidents.

We'd like ragtime music playing in the background. So yeah, the one major is like if the Tesla factory unionized, then Elon Musk's favorite hobby of painting black, like black hallways onto bare walls and watching his employees just run right into them would be would be definitely not on. And the only reason we don't know these stories in more detail actually is that he took them on. He took journalists on a press tour around it around his factory, I think around the Tesla factory and like made them all sign non-disclosure agreements, which is like that's the shittest press trip ever. I've been on some bad ones. We're all jealous you found a golden ticket in a Tesla. It's basically that.

But like the problem is like when you find the golden ticket to go to the Tesla factory, all of that horrible shit that happens to the Willy Wonka kids all still happens to you. You can't write about it. One of them ate a Model 3 and became 50 times his size. One of them tried to drink from a river of molten steel. It was a whole problem. And it became slightly unwell. It became one of the inspector Morse adventures. He was like, look, if we had a union, we wouldn't have this beautiful molten steel waterfall. That's pretty dope. I would work in a place that had a molten steel waterfall. So basically like, yeah, so you Elon Musk is like, you know, total reactionary dumbass,

but then basically a lot of the journalists keep pointing this out at him. So what's incredible? So his reaction. Here's the thing. Every meltdown before it goes from like phase two to phase three is what makes it phase three is am I going to take real world action as a result of this meltdown? Yeah, that's when it kicks into a new year all together. That's like that's like, no, that's limit break right there. That is like that is the Sephiroth limit break of meltdown. Jesus Christ, Milo. So Elon Elon Musk writes, going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article and track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor and publication thinking of calling it

Pravda. Oh yes, Pravda, famously true newspaper. I mean, I think he's engaging in some irony because he's a 2012 era Imgur image board guy. Like boy, he's posting old format memes like the advice dog. It's like he like he's everything. Yeah, he loves science, but like his degree is in the I fucking love science Facebook page. Like that's all he is. Oh God. So yeah, so basically, and this is right. This is the this is the thing. Remember like I can't remember if it was last week, last year in the last couple of months, because like time just doesn't pass for me anymore. It makes no sense. It was. Remember when Donald Trump got really angry at the news and held an award show for how bad the news was? And what a success that was. So you big dick as fuck.

So Elon Musk, all he's done is the Silicon Valley version of that where instead of having like a soiree where he's inviting all of his favorite like news friends, he's just making a startup about how much he hates the news with like loads of data instead. Not a workable system. I don't think somehow and also because because the problem is it's based on this like fallacy, this like weird like this numeracy, this numerate fallacy where we think that things involving numbers are inherently sort of less biased and more trustworthy than things involving words, which are famously because context is meaningless and all words all words are basically just ways to dissemble with your mouth as opposed to numbers,

which are a way to do facts with a calculator pure truth incarnate. And so this is that's the thing. It's like, oh yes, the credibility score will add will add a unbiased objectivity to news and will let us judge the news. But really it's just Elon Musk is doing the burn book from Mean Girls. It's Elon Musk and Edgar come back from the future to save us from fake news. What I will say is that Peter Dow is proposing to team up with him and bring him on board with Barrett. So it's like, it's like Elon Musk and Edgar and fucking Peter Dow as Sarah Connor. He's like, come with me if you want protection from misleading news about union disputes. Well, it's the that's just the thing, right? It's like he's a what I love about Peter Dow's reaction.

Boy, about to Dow it, you know about to Dow it to him is that like he's not offering to turn over Barrett to Elon Musk. He's not offering to go into a partnership with Elon Musk. In fact, Peter Dow's tweet is kind of almost threatening because it's like I came up with this idea first. So why don't you just fund Barrett? Get on board or speak to my lawyer. I really want Peter Dow to sue Elon Musk. That would be such a cool case because Peter Dow is just enough of like a rodent like psychopath that he would like that he would just fucking go at it and he would just nibble away at Elon Musk sanity by filing increasingly unrealistic lawsuits to lib dipshit suing each other over a failed business idea would be the most 2018 thing ever. That would be so good.

This is my festering crock of shit. I'm the one who invented it. What I like and this is where you can tell how science. Elon is is he does a Twitter poll create a media credibility rating site that also flags propaganda botnets option one and this this is this is scientific polling. Yes, this would be good option to know the media are awesome. And he got really excited because the the number for the like media or something kept dropping after the media were right covering it. I think but dude that doesn't prove anything like option three. I get all my news from podcasts. And then just to just to I mean he okay a he did already file the paperwork to establish

this company a while ago but I still love that he got so not mad that he started a company about how not mad he was effort the levels of effort are just completely normal. Yeah. And and finally he gets invited by Kara Swisher to do an interview about this. Kara Swisher journalist I think with the LA something said with someone right and I don't know if he proofreads his tweets but he says sorry I can't right now I'm cranking really hard at the office. The scenes behind yeah this is why this is why all these people need to do more cocaine because then instead of doing this him and Peter Dow would just be opening like a really ill advised fusion restaurant together.

No it would be it would be called Tesla for her and have the hill the hillary campaign sign. Hell yeah it's it's Italian Japanese fusion cooking it's deep fried pizza and the Scottish are like we will fucking sue you. I personally can't wait to try this still with her nyaki. I think I saw someone on a dating site the other day who said that they'd come up with an idea for an something called Italian Italian which was a like Italian Thai fusion restaurant and involved like summer rolls with like pizza in and stuff like that but yeah that isn't I tie like an old time racist term for Italians anyway so I'm just I'm just so happy

to be able to watch all of this happening. What do you think the next phase is man like where does he go from here well implosion of the venture obviously okay before it's actually launched or not okay here's okay look here's this trajectory we should be able to project this using science right like yeah of course it's on the graph let's think of this um that's us Neil deGrasse Tyson numbers actually are things you count Neil deGrasse Tyson I'm not actually to call this a main phase sequence meltdown is incorrect because that refers to stars and stars is only is only a metaphor for referring to famous people they're not actually stars guys Neil deGrasse Tyson I get all my science information from that guy from the muppet

beaker no not beaker beaker's boss beaker and the other one there's like there's like a system isn't it so does that make beaker grimes no peter dow yeah yeah peter dow and beaker cooking up some truth in that lab if we want to be scientific about it then we can think of we can think of two comparator cases we can of sort of having a meltdown at the news and how that goes yeah one is trumps fake news party and the other is verit yeah in both cases there was a meltdown there was the nor normal levels of just having a regular day online just having a normal is having a normal day and cranking it hard in your office because journalists keep exposing your unfair labor practices and you're just and you want to take humanity to the moon or more specifically

you want to take ten billionaires to the moon where they can like harvest your organs forever so there's that there's stage one yeah then stage two is when you start when you start tweeting angrily angrily sub tweeting entire industries stage three is when you turn that into a real life venture so the fake news awards verit or pravda then stage four is when you humiliatingly walk back your venture because it was a boneheaded idea from the start that was never going to work that you did out of resentment i'm so hyped for stage four it's going to be great and we've got the bank holiday weekend to enjoy it as well age four is when you launch your fact-checking venture to mars

you know we're in a fact check mars is mars true we are going to find out can i can i ask can i fact check what what kind of name is elon this is something i've it's a african day one is it is it a regular south african name is it like a sci-fi name that he's no he's from warhammer okay he's a games workshop guy i'm glad he just he wants to be he wants to be the emperor okay but um what just verit shut down humiliatingly because it was dunked on in public constantly and then the very fake news awards instead of being an award we're just a blog post so i can't wait i can't wait for pravda to well it's two things number one someone actually has registered the pravda dot news domain

name before elon could and now that just links to articles about tesla's factories terrible safety records excellent work and then i think it's just going to be a soundcloud rap oh wow yeah it's time for that or like or maybe tumblr rap which is sort of worse and weirder and imagine him delivering that though over some sort of like spaced out beats you know oh yeah i for one can't wait for elon musk to turn his resentment into soundcloud rap for him to call hell yes for him to like get a bunch of face tattoos and collaborate with six nine on a song like the media got doo doo ass and he's got grimes of course to like to join him on the hook or something oh she okay self man like perfect i think that is actually a good transition

into segment two segment the dose the slightly more slightly more serious segment fluid so in addition to having a bunch of really hard opinions on on meltdown sequence elon musk initiate meltdown sequence dan is also standing at 45 degrees dan is also here to talk to us about his book inner city pressure the story of grime but like i said it's the story of actually quite a bit more it is it's the london around it it's new labor it's tower blocks as bows all this kind of stuff oh yeah and we're going to fucking we're going to fucking get into it yeah serious asbo territory so real asbo hours it winders he remembers those stay tuned so we've talked about grime before with ash sarkar so if you want a more general introduction to like

the concept of grime and its relationship with politics more generally and sort of and that i would suggest you go listen to our episode what do you call it with ash that we recorded a couple of months ago because we're going to be talking quite a bit more about sort of the relationship but to that sort of the way in which these concern the grime and its concerns and styles were kind of molded by history and the way in which it's interacted with the british establishment both in generally and as a metaphor for the like black working class urban experience in london nailed it that's exactly what we're going to do it's almost as though we've done the first planned show of this shows entire history do not get your hopes up it is a very loose plan

yeah um so i really expended all his energy on getting the intro right so um for just for a brief reminder um to listeners who may have heard the other episode but want a reminder anyway can you quickly just tell us what is grime and how is it not rap it's not rap that's absolutely right because rap is rap and there is such a thing as uk rap and this isn't it it involves beats and rhymes and so that's you know it has that in common with rap but it comes out of a completely different tradition so the kind of reggae history that of the black diaspora in the uk that evolved in its own way in the uk very different from jamaican music um uh jamaican reggae rather so fast chat reggae in the 1980s um was its own like uk creation um jungle and uk garage are uniquely

british sound really uniquely london for the most part as well just like grime and grime emerges out of that tradition it's don't it's club music i'm sure hip hop rap is club music as well but it's faster it's 140 beats per minute which i'm we're not going to count them all out now but that's fast like it's not as fast as the bass but it is much faster than regular rap music it's even much faster than like house music yeah yeah exactly it is very driving intense music it's not necessarily i mean i'm not saying it's not music you can't relax to but it is music that's meant for the rave it's meant for dancing 100 i mean i've had i mean i'm smash mouth absolutely there have been some cracking collaborations over the years with uh with

smash mouth oh my god that is that is something i would fucking listen to right there and also so what and is you and you've been kind of on the grime beat for quite a while yeah well that's i like that metaphor like i've been on the grime beat i mean i haven't been writing to the beat that would be a bit a bit weird but yes i've been you're a cop of the grime scene i've been on the journalistic beat following grind that's certainly true i mean i grew up in london um i you know heard this music around me and the stuff that fed into it a sort of garage and drum and bass and jungle growing up in south london um and you know i played basketball with neutrino from so solid crew at school he was in the year below me he was i've been i've been

listening to bound for the reload show so many times since i've read this book amazing he was recently tried to explain so solid crew to russian and it took me like 35 minutes and by the end they were like what the fuck is this they waited till you'd finished though i like that they waited a whole 21 seconds yeah you should have done it in 21 seconds really they're impatient people the russians but you don't need me to tell you that um sorry fsb if you're listening i've been covering grime as a as a blogger initially unpaid and out of pure joy like joyous enthusiasm for the music and then and then gradually like as my 20s progressed i mentioned now in 36 the same people that i'd been writing about when they were sort of underground grassroots

like mcs performing on pirate radio were increasingly getting covered by the mainstream press partly because people like me and not many other people to be honest a couple of other music journalists i know we're trying to push this on generally white middle-class middle-aged music editors for clarity i'm white middle-class myself but i'm not middle-aged at least so i've got that going for me in terms of credibility trust me it's at least as good as smash mouth give it a try why don't we have you making the case my love i'm just featuring you like the guy from back to the future like hey hey it's me your cousin um marvin skeptor you know that new sound you've been looking for well check out this i'm not i'm not about stop people can everyone stop getting shot um so

then that's that's kind of that i guess something i i sort of want to jump on really is this is a and so you know like grime artists like wiley and then skeptin jammy and all these guys a lot of them have their roots in um and both the garage scene and then also the pirate radio scene because they weren't allowed in the garage clubs that's right yeah so it's like there's like a generational thing that goes on at the start of the two thousands where garage effectively kind of splits into and the guys that go on to create and grime this at the time completely unnamed um sort of weird renegades like ferociously fast hybrid genre have been shut out of the raves because they're they you know they can't afford the champagne like they're you know it's

it's a shirt and shoes thing like dress codes in in london clubs uh uk clubs generally are not like not a consistent presence but but in the garage i never attends clubs i never take off my track pants it's true yeah so they'd be like you know you'd be you'd be able to get into a grime club but not at but not a uk garage one uh in the early two thousands because they would it would be no hats no hoods you know no no i don't know if they specified no tracksuit bottoms but but that would be implicit probably like shoes shirt um it was aspirational i imagine wearing shoes and a shirt and tracksuit bottoms that would be such a look getting your technique out on it yeah exactly yeah and yeah that that would actually work i think you'd be you'd be fine you'd look

fucking weird but um so it's this it's they're making kind of similar style of music but it grows out of its own thing because they're shut out of this other scene effectively so yeah that's it and that's you know what everyone from lethal bizzle to to wiley have said like you know the slightly they were like 19 20 years old people like dizzy like 16 someone like tinchy strider now i'm like like four yeah he was he was like yeah four years old and and still spitting some absolute fire bars in the club but yeah he wasn't allowed i mean he would be underage and like have to get smuggled in to even to the grime raves because he the bouncers just would be like who is this child no no he's not coming in the raves in the basement of a pizza restaurant

with a soft play area oh lovely so so yeah so we have this so then we get this outgrowth to pirate radio and this is where i think i also want to bring in the relationship to space because a lot of these guys know each other from living in the same tower blocks in east london which at this time is a where they're setting up their pirate radio stations but b is rapidly changing in a way that's not necessarily good for them that's right i mean you know east london as anyone who's ever set foot in it will know changes incredibly fast has done over the last decade but even in the early 2000s when grime is emerging you've got this this sense that like some of the old like 1970s mostly 60s 70s 80s tower blocks are crumbling because they've been you know they've been completely underfunded

and they've been left to rot part of the upside of this culturally is that it's quite easy to sort of break into to them you know whether you're living there or not to climb up to the rooftop and set up pirate radio antennae now you know pirate has got a long history in in london and indeed on actual boats that's why it's because they're called pirates going back to the 60s when they were out in the north sea and they've always been like a crucible of like outside a culture and they've always eventually influenced the actual mainstream in the 60s it was ships at sea playing rock music the bbc didn't want you to hear and then all of those people who grew up on the pirate radio from the rock music the bbc didn't want you to hear then became the bbc absolutely

it's degenerate rock music it's making the women go in heat there was no radio one radio one was literally set up you know back and bear in mind like it's not the case so much anymore but it was actually pretty important as a like you know the as the kind of hub for like youth culture and music in this country for a long time until the internet ruined everything for them but they yeah like radio one was set up specifically because of stations like radio caroline which was on a boat in the north sea that way i mean those were exciting times they were actually like fire bombed by rival rival boats and like the navy had to come in and stuff so yeah always involves like deeds of daring do and like adventure and stuff and and same story with grime and its pirate radio

era in the early 2000s when you'd have people like slimsy and genius who set up rinse fm climbing up in like in disguise as well they would wear like they would they would dress up like they'd carry a mop and dress up in overalls in order to sort of not look suspicious which is what i do when i want to not look suspicious as well so i i remember these pirate radio stations from my childhood because i grew up in s6 which if you're not familiar with it is a is a terrible place but one thing it does have is a lot of like wannabe roadman culture and i remember my sister having a boyfriend who in his car would always have on this radio station called sub jam which is one of those really stereotypical pirate radio stations and that there was no delineation

between the songs or between when the dj was talking they would just be like continuously some kind of jungle or garage playing and he would just shout something over the top of it yeah now why use the fader just just shout just shout i mean it's much something you might want to consider for the podcast like incredibly loud ferocious dance music playing in the background while we're talking also man elon there is the one thing i think one thing i think is important in your book as a concept is the concept of pressure which is that both geographically and legally sort of these the the sort of the grime artists who are setting up the pirate radio stations to kind of try and broadcast the music they've been shut out of this sort of

standard cultural outlet for the garage clubs doing it themselves but then we're also we're losing we're sort of we're very quickly finding it sort of intensely and harshly criminalized in a lot of different ways and we'll sort of get to this but also there's an anecdote about Broadway market which is a street very near and dear to my heart and location i could see it almost from here which is is emblematic of east london's transformation and it's not and i don't say transformation in terms of it was bad and it transformed into something good it's that it was something where people could live and it's transformed into something that basically just caters to the winds of young professionals yeah and really really quite wealthy young

professionals as well like it's not uh but you know i'm not here to like slag off Broadway market but it is emblematic and this this anecdote is from a james meek piece uh after the London riots also a critical part of like grimes history you know it wasn't they weren't grime riots but like these were the people who explained the frustrations the anger um and the sort of you know uh both structural and actual like oppression they were they were receiving from the police and the state um and it shortly after the riots james meek is having like an expensive lunch or whatever with a journalist friend of his uh and like out of nowhere these kind of kids suddenly emerged there are two groups a shot is fired it's like a sunny afternoon and and uh and it kind of it

they then disappeared again and nobody at the posh kind of cafes even really looked up and noticed that they were there and it's this idea that actually china mayville kind of embodies in in the city in the city is novel as well that the idea that you have these two kind of cities living in amongst themselves that it's not like the north i make i make this point that like some cities around the world are divided in terms of their inequalities between north and south uptown and downtown things like that in london you really have the most finely like meshed kind of together inequalities of rich and poor and they rarely interact and it's a really fucking weird thing about the city and and as the city is increasingly through policy your policy

starting with thatcher and going through new labor and continuing to the present day those pockets where sort of working class or poorer people can live are being squeezed smaller and smaller and criminalized more and more um so um there is you get i mean look there so many ways we go from this we i think there's this combination of i think especially the respect agenda the little dickest piece of policy ever contrived and which is basically which is basically like legal it's like you know all that shit where like white people have just been calling the police on black people for like existing in public it's basically a series of a set of legislation that's that yeah it's ways let us let us save you the trouble of calling

basically like you know we'll just do it for you um and that that involved yeah like the policing of people's behavior down to i mean because that's what antisocial behavior order as bo's actually are like so asbo was a a a sort of a a criminal justice out guy sort of an interaction with the police criminal justice outcome yeah you could get from engaging in certain and almost like subjectively defined behaviors yeah listeners are americans they won't know what that is yeah yeah that's well that's actually how like dominant a fucking cultural phenomenon the asbo was for so long and then they got rid of them and everyone forgot about it but that was like that was like it even became part of the vernacular like oh yeah getting an asbo absolutely or asbo

kids i mean you know i was talking to someone about uh owing jones chav's book yesterday and and one thing we forget from that like the first decade of the 2000s in this country is that you have alongside the kind of demonization of of working class young people usually as chav's you also had like this slightly more like racialized version in of hoodies and asbo kids probably fairly sorry racially neutral like that that it doesn't matter as long as you're working class you couldn't be written off as an asbo kid as a feral feral youth was another phrase that was very like commonly used in the media but this criminalize activities like hanging out on a corner or wearing the wrong clothes or and and they can impose random penalties on you for it

so i recall there was one instance in your book where i can't remember who gets this asbo but then they're forbidden from as a result of the asbo they're say okay well you're forbidden from going above the third floor of a tower block now this was this is the legendary grime dj and the founder of one of the founders of the floor where it gets nasty yeah yeah yeah i mean you start to get a nosebleed if you go out that high right this poor guy you sell for pirate radio station to fact check regular radio station this was actually fm it's totally lock in lock in um yeah it's this guy slimsy who's like a legendary figure in grime the kind of you know one of the founding fathers essentially of this genre um but he was the guy

who was like dressing up as a you know as a as a kind of cleaner or whatever to break into the tower blocks and set up pirate stations and you know i say legendary like this genre wouldn't exist without these kind of people who made these sacrifices and yeah he got an asbo prohibiting him from going from going above it and you know he's i think his grand lived on like the fifth floor of a tower block so he basically had so he was at risk of you know you could be sent to jail if you breached your asbo as well some of them some of the asbos that were doled out in during this new labor period are just absurd there was a guy there was a shepherd who was in this is not london but a shepherd in wales yeah i was gonna say there hasn't been a shepherd in london for a while

a shepherd in wales sorry you can't shepherd on the fifth floor of this tower block stop your shepherding god damn it yeah he was prohibited from uh herding his flock in a threatening manner you know you got to make the punishment fit the crime and in this case i don't know what the fuck the crime was but it was really weird although it's that the crime is threatened by sheep for five days straight the the crime is being challenging to kind of count the crime is the crime is being challenging to culture the crime is existing outside the structures of capital that's basically the crime and they can't criminalize it so they just criminalize they allow a broad interpretation that they can just criminalize whatever they feel like

i mean it's so dodgy let's create a whole world of really flexible because like the law is always best when it's super flexible like at the whims of a judge right i mean or a police officer you know exactly so they they would they reminded people penalize people for like the most specific things and it would usually be like young young working class people in cities were the ones who i think got this shit the most and they also there was a series of like public space related legislation that was part of this as well so dispersal orders and curfews even like it seems obscene and absurd but like there were curfews that are something that like without oversight by like local elected officials could be imposed by a local magistrate with corporation from the

local police force so it's no surprise that that that crime is seen as a sort of intimidatingly angry style of music because these people had a lot to be angry about it's being persecuted relentlessly effectively yeah i mean even like down to i mentioned hoodies before people as a sort of a name for like the kids who've got their sweatshirt hoods up but um but they they were very specifically targeted as well they were banned these hooded sweatshirts there's a lot of policing of clothing going on during this period right you know politely with your tracksuit bottoms and you're not allowed to wear your hoodie either literal fashion police yeah exactly no you you will i i you will never take my supreme hoodie from me i suffer and die for that thing but i

recently saw that i won't let you in the club in your hooded sweatshirt they won't let you herd your sheep through the streets and i'm really i'm really so one of the it's it's obvious why this style of music is so angry because they have a lot to be angry about because every element of their behavior is criminalized because and it's it's sort of notionally notionally fair minded because it's like well if you put it in a suit and go to a job in the city you won't be breaking any laws it's like well it's it's this weird thing where so much like reactionary allegedly liberal legislation um is is sort of just either enacted sort of either maliciously or ignorantly sort of assuming that history never happened and power doesn't exist yeah absolutely with it with

no understanding or analysis but that's liberals for you right i mean you know there's there's no history was just building railways guys and we just arrived sort of at the present with with no bumps in the road it's like the entire to find a bunch of indians scratching their heads going we just don't know how to put these railways together and we were like don't worry but yeah it's like it's like this kind of legislation has it assumes that the entire culture has memento disease where everyone is just sort of gopping moron that sort of is just thrown into their circumstances by sort of you know on the on the basis of just you know hustle and then there you go that's that's it so everybody's to just get a job at a bank and we

all go to the same bank we'll all leave the same bank and all go back to our house that's in the same area yeah especially there will there will be no diversity that could ever be even be classed as descent it's just this is it's completely shut off and so i think it's important and this is something that sort of came up on our last episode because when we were talking to ash this was a lot of like grime for corbin was kind of really it wasn't just kicking off but it was really being talked about a lot yeah um and everyone's like oh my god how is grime so grime suddenly got political it's like no it didn't yeah it has been this political literally the whole time because it is it's formed out of a politically you know deeply political kind of context as

everything is sure but like but you know that that anger comes from a certain place and it comes from growing up in like some of the the poverty and the boroughs of east london that actually significantly went on to become the olympic boroughs when london had got the olympics in 2012 are side by side with canary wharf which is just you know the perfect example of you know neoliberal capitalism i think oh and hathily quotes it's private too yeah completely private space so like you know i've interviewed all of these grime mcs who grew up in bow and poplar in east london literally like a five minute walk away from canary wharf which is privately owned sudo public space pops as it's sometimes known and they're like yeah that felt

like the tinshey stride it literally said to me that felt like somewhere we weren't supposed to be and they made us they made us know that there's also like just in terms of because i love a bit of urban design like it's almost impossible to traverse from like the the very short distance to live around there actually right so you've you've seen like there are there's like an a massive a road possibly two a roads actually there's an elevated sightings and like there's an elevated there is the elevated a road then there is not horse ferry road but then there is and i think it is horse ferry road actually yeah it is and it's sort of there is a whole slice of london that you cannot approach like for example if you want to ride your bike from what i used to live

on cable street to where my my gym was just by at the sort of northern end of canary wharf you had to ride briefly on the pavement there was no way to ride your bike there without a brief illegal pavement detour yeah it's like this is how much they wanted to just create like a fucking safe wall yeah that's exactly what it is and it's you know and that's a nice little metaphor for like you know the yeah walling off in cities is something that we've seen coming back a lot more with gated communities less so in london though there are gated like significantly like gated communities including in east london actually it's a lot of the gating roads as well a lot of the gating is implied right like yeah through through one-way systems lacks of crossings large a roads

like we've been talking about ballards yeah or even just the fact is like canary wharf like you can walk on to canary wharf you know basically like wearing whatever you want but if you're wearing the wrong thing you may be sort of followed by canary wharf private security who look very similar to police but actually aren't yeah and they can ask and they can ask anyone they want to leave without you having committed any offense or even looking like you're going to commit an offense just because they don't like the look of you they're allowed to do that that's what private space is basically and there's more and more of these across london as as there are in a lot of like western cities so like there's somewhere called more london just on the south

bank near near tower bridge which is this really unpleasant and creepy kind of it all looks like bishops yeah yeah yeah absolutely and it's outside the gla building in fact as well as an aside like i went i went to a kind of attempt to reclaim this private space some years ago where the london assembly member elected politician explained that for the first 10 years that the gla building was there they weren't allowed to do interviews with the media outside the building because they had banned like private photography and you know if itv or the bbc come down that's private photography and make and you know and it's yeah so they had to walk like 10 minutes down the road so you get this really intense geographic pressure and intense legal pressure

because the other the other the other thing i sort of want to mention about geographic pressure is this sort of is the other hat because this is the the more sinister face of gentrification then there is the happy asinine face of gentrification which is like like i was at pop bricks in yesterday which is like just the most the most asinine place i've ever even heard of yeah shipping containers of a bull pit fuck you milo and it's and that's just the thing this is this this was presumably somewhere where people either used to be able to live or congregate or just live their lives and now it has been turned into a place that basically is is just exists to sort of do the experience economy for you know board young professionals who think that you know

going to you know get a taco in the rain is why they spend so much money to live in london because you can't shipping container literally from a shipping because you can't do that and grant them yeah yeah come on mate you've got a pregame in furnace clap them somewhere but that like pop bricks and as an example like it's somewhere that was created as a destination to make bricks in a destination like an ephemeral place for a night out to help draw the kind of middle-class young professionals that the you know local kind of planners and local council want to draw into a place like brigston which you know has this history is like a really like rich like working class multicultural community or the black community particularly

of like defined its sort of atmosphere for and and and you know and struggled against exactly the kind of institutional and direct kind of racism from the police and others for a long time but have forged a strong community and now being forced out i mean gentrification ultimately is about displacement it's about it's about moving poorer people out so that so that the opportunities for middle-class and upper-class people increase yeah it's they're being they're being they're being like you know for but not in some cases forcibly because you know they'll their tower blocks be torn down and then yeah allegedly they're yeah oh yes of course you have the right of return to this tower block but actually we're going to rehouse you in

a new castle for three years yeah so i hope you didn't have any family here yeah and then they and then people don't come back you know and yeah the job is done oh what a what a shame looks like we don't have to build any affordable housing and so i think moving moving but then that's the happy face of gentrification and then it's just fun it's just mindless fun this is why i hate mindless fun yeah i mean mindful fun is is not much better meditating in a bull pit so going back so i think specifically to grime a little bit i think we can sort of in terms of the grimes relation grimes cultural relationship with sort of mainstream british culture if you like i almost want to sort of we can start as that we

have the underground phase which all pirate radio then in 2003 dizzy gets the mercury for boy in the corner yeah and then we think oh is it about to be successful and there is a little bit of a of a thing where maybe it's going to bubble up maybe it's going to bubble up rush like a cold trickle it's so hard to get radio play for such idiosyncratic frustrated music yeah it's not meant for radio plays not meant for consumption it's not easily marketable yeah and so despite wiley's sort of best efforts of getting people studio time of trying to promote lots of other artists there is this sort of moment that kind of doesn't go anywhere and then everyone's trying to declare grime dead yeah but one of the main reasons i think a lot of grime isn't going anywhere is

that this is music for the club and then there's the invention of a little something called form six nine six i'll explain what that is that's a so this is a piece of police bureaucracy that it sounds like tedious and innocuous and like because it should because this is supposed to bore you in submission exactly it's suffocating it's like and it's uh you know there's there's no better way to smother a sort of a spontaneous and grassroots kind of cultural moment than with with fucking paperwork basically which is exactly what they do so they they they force um they force like club owners and promoters to fill in extraordinarily like detailed bits of like information about every single performer they ask explicitly racially profiling questions like what um you know what's

the main ethnic group that's going to be attending your party and they crucially they only issue these like lengthy bits of paperwork to to like black music nights they're quite clear about that grime like reggae r&b hip hop because the the the the imagination is that because grime often contains some violent lyrics that it creates violence yeah i mean it's like tipper gore traveled from the late nineteen eighties and like agent smithed into the body of um horrifying of that police commissioner all those video games we hear about in the media and so it's you get this this idea that oh well it's violent so we have to police it and then you just like like you say you suffocate it with paperwork it's non-linear warfare as i think one of the one of the terms i've seen i've

seen use things joe kennedy that's right that sounds right and then this basically snuffs out grime as a club music which has lethal bizzle said to me like really quite sad with a great deal of sadness in 2011 um you know and this is like after the student protests when grime has erupted into like parliament square they're playing pow his like ferocious like as they try and storm the treasury these kids have like like got metal battering rams and basically trying to storm the treasury uh while people play pow and like rave in the background it was a fucking great night i must say anyway uh the opposite of the respect agenda it is exactly this is a no fucking respect agenda fucking extremely large dick incident trash future officially supports the no respect

agenda and anyways i sit i sit down with lethal bizzle a week or so later you know show him the videos from that night of like all these kids but and he's like man this is this is what like grime was about like this this energy i'm like he was like hairs standing up on the back of my neck i feel so proud but you know what this used to be fucking club music we used to party like this together and it just became something that you listen to in your house on your ipod and your headphones alone and that's that's not what grime is about it's like being together in the club and fucking partying and we were stopped from doing that and it changed the the way the music sounded as well it made it more like hip hop a bit slower a bit more like the head reliant on

samples and and kind of uh and just you know lost that kind of dynam dynamism real grime was actually the friends we made along the way that's exactly right the um one so before the student protest another interesting thing to point out is that one of the things that sort of keeps grime moving along in an almost zombie state for a while is guy is like dizzy doing bonkers and wily doing wearing my rolex and sort of almost taking this because grime could kind of it sort of stayed alive in two ways by transforming into hip hop you listen to by yourself or by transforming into just 128 beats per music beats per minute rapy help house music more or less i'd be three music i think of like it's got kind of electro synths and stuff like that and it's the lyrics are

not sort of a hundred miles an hour anymore it's just like yeah i mean girls the party whatever where i'm i roll pool something where i'm i roll likes bangs i'm so sorry where i'm i roll likes bangs a lot of these a lot of these are kind of really cool pop tunes i'm you know i'm very pro pop um it's just like they were forced to make it because that was the only way they were going to be able to make a living out of their years and years of like tireless innovation and creativity was like oh do you know what fuck it we have to we got to do a pool party tune i'm humming where i'm a rolex right now dj when he's thinking about playing your song faces a dilemma he could play your new grind track but he could also be playing nadley and brulee as classic track torn and you've

got to justify that decision um so i think what what's interesting about form 696 is that it kills what grime is supposed to be for a while yeah and then interesting what a figure of a figure who's now no longer it was now basically podcast lore um that hand cock friend of the law plays an interesting role in sort of no look i it's very difficult to say what made grime return because sort of around sort of 2010 all these cuts were were expanding beyond just the very poorest and we're starting to hurt more people who felt that pressure who felt that anger and who were had that energy that like actually react well to like a song like pow and then you get riots of course as well he makes you oh we'll get to that yeah and then at the same time um you

also have um a kind of a loosening of the restrictions that are um that are afforded to it myle stop chewing um we get it's really loud embracing the no respect agenda well now nade has to keep that in oh yeah uh embrace the chew so we lose but it's so matt hand cock actually plays a role in the return of grind sort of a kind of fairly important one and i you know i resent that a fair amount but but i know i'm also i'm also i'm glad he did almost unlikely saviour yeah retirement one last job i mean he's you know he's young he's here matt hand cock he's the he's the tory everybody loves he's the he's the king of social media he um inch flying into those hot bitches dms on the app matt hand cock mb yo i'm a pretty big deal on this

app um he's like the zuckerberg of that app he's friends with everyone oh boy he um my space tom i can see him in the white t-shirt yeah oh god matt hand cock matt hand cock i can caceticly slide over his left shoulder what did what did matt hand cock mp do um to actually facilitate the return of grind as a cultural force uh he i mean the short version of the that story is that he scrapped form six nine six or so like he had an uh a special advisor called jonathan batial who now works for universal music and was just like an unusually cool guy to be working for a tory mp and was like this is an egregious like and racist instrument that is being used against black british music um uh we should do something about it you know boss your

culture minister why don't you know and it makes sense that like a young conservative would want to show like hey look i'm kind of cool and liberal like i i i'm down with the kids i'm down with this this was this was the david cameron friendly tory party as well i mean i think it's on that side of it yeah like so he you know he he made he um teresa may wants to make all british culture just more astancing yeah i can't see her leading the charge against against form six nine six so like so matt hand cock uh you know pulls in a bunch of people to provide evidence actually i helped compile some of this and i've never met the the man himself but like i helped compile some of this evidence from club promoters that they were being persecuted unfairly that their nights were

being shut down ahead of time with like no explanation they were losing loads of money and the the thing that cut through with the tories kel fucking surprise was the um you know this is a commercially viable form of music it's something that the british economy and the cultural economy in particular which is you know which is sort of our economy now like is you know it's about about these kind of we don't make things anymore we uh you know we produce bars we spit bars instead and like you know this is something that could actually help the british economy so so like it wasn't really it wasn't scrapped on the basis of its obvious immorality immorality instead it was scrapped because like grime is now commercially viable this is because we have

storm z now as well yeah exactly storm z and sceptre are like stars beyond the uk even and they're generous only generating like they're doing what for the economy here and so the interesting thing i think about matt hancock is that i have a theory about concert just one i have a theory about tory dcms ministers in general i know that dcms relative in new department but let's say tory culture ministers in general i think it is a front bench position that is given as a punishment to someone that the prime minister wants to ritually humiliate all the time yes because matt hancock well having to explain to who was this again who was he talking to the when he was at the mercury music right he he was i think was a daily mirror journalist

approached him well this this is when he i think he was talking to an mc it wasn't just what's your favorite grime tune but why do you like grime he was he was asked that whether like what his favorite grime tune was and was unable to come up by smash man and he gave the milo answer yeah he had to turn to his advisor and say what um you know what's our favorite sceptre tune he was all he was all specific he was talking about how much he loved sceptre he's what the world's biggest sceptre fan always there in the front row screaming out sceptre's bars and what's your favorite sceptre tune um i don't know uh but yeah uh slightly embarrassed him i know he's trying so hard he's trying so hard what is he like as like as a nerd he can't win in this scenario because he

can't say oh you know i don't listen to grime but it's my job to support it as a genre because i'm the culture minister he has to pretend he knows about it but then of course he's just fucked yeah absolutely i'm actually i'm gonna find the particular passage because i i just fucking love it hancock went on to spin grime's resurgence as a triumph of thatcherite values oh god yes shoot it into my veins cranking it really out of the factory today he tells a story of his background but the thing that excites me is that he can break through i don't like to wallow in poverty i think wherever you come from you can make it grime represents modern britain the entrepreneurial go getting nature it speaks that wherever you come from you can make it i mean

matt hancock went to has a degrees from oxford and cambridge and went to a 13 000 pound a year public school so it's good that he doesn't want to wallow in poverty like really inspiring thank god he didn't yeah but also like just on the basis of grime itself like well why is that why is it just the opposite of what the case is i mean i suppose the the short answer to that is like grime is a collective endeavor it's not it's not a triumph of thatcherite values it's a triumph of working class kids having incredible creativity resilience and and understanding that collaboration produces great fucking art and that's exactly you know this this wasn't made by kids who like were you know in a shed in a fucking field miles from anyone like lone creative genius

auteurs they were they were fucking crammed into incredibly like tight tower blocks where like you know there's you know six people in in in a flat that's designed for sort of two or three and so they're hanging out outside together and they're spitting bars together and learning from one another how to make this music and developing it together so the idea that it's a triumph of thatcherism is is is bullshit like that's right values are in fucking canary wolf looming over them taunting them like you know well it's like this is thatcher was just playing the long game right that destroyed council housing so then all these guys knew the only way they'd ever be able to afford a flat in london is if they became a successful grime mc thatcher wanted to motivate

it was a dedication to grassroot british music that really made her stand out for me as a prime minister we needed like a gritty urban atmosphere so that's the thing is like this is this what i love that was that matt hankock it's like it's like trying to make a point like trying to pick up a penny but the penny is nailed to the ground and he just splits his pants wide open and everyone sees his ass it's hilarious it's the verbal version of that absolutely so but that speaks to i think the british establishments like schizophrenic relationship not just with grime but with outsider culture as well yeah absolutely it's i mean it's always from going back to like pop music in the 1960s and radio caroline we were talking about earlier like you

know that there's always been this complete alienation among among you know our incredibly class-ridden society um this complete alienation from grassroots and working class culture and youth culture in general there's been a hostility to it since youth culture was fucking invented you know since it makes youth culture youth culture exactly you know since it was like you know the victorian era and youth culture was like having one of those circular bits of wood and a stick that you kind of run along the ground well that's just the thing is like any anyone anyone who thinks for that now any young person who thinks that youth culture is bad is basically like you know a young tory who thinks he's getting get top from wearing an ascot

you know it just doesn't make any it it is so obviously bootlicking yeah to have any other point of view and that's why it's great that you you know that like one of the biggest pop stars in the uk right now would win a brit award i'm talking about stormzy and would use that platform to like produce some new lyrics and really like visually stark kind of performance in which he berated therese may for like doing fuck all about grenfell you know what were his bars like something like you thought we forgot about grenfell like yeah you should go to fuck you should go to you should do some jail time i think he said yeah absolutely fucking incredible you know that's that's the relationship that the establishment has with british youth culture

youth culture fucking hates it well because the establishment relationship with british youth culture is i think the reason it schizophrenic is that someone like matt handcock will come along and celebrate it when it's commercially viable yeah but then at the same time in fact i think at the same time i think in the same summer yeah you have all these grime mcs being blamed for the london riots because they say oh you're glorifying violence with your music is the same the same justification that they used to you know give someone a to give a genius an asbo that doesn't let him go over the fourth floor of a building it's the same concept that's being used to say no you're responsible for the antisocial behavior among young people and definitely not us basically

mortgaging their futures from them yeah i mean it was it was inevitable really that following the riots someone would try and find a way to blame some kind of youth culture for it and grime and rap was like i guess first on the chopping block for that like it wasn't violent video games it wasn't like it wasn't horror movies it was like here's this music that that is like sort of sonically obnoxious and ferocious that's why i fucking love it but it's also like describing a lot of the poverty the the narrow horizons and in some cases they're not like as much as drill rap music now like describing street violence and like drug dealing and stuff as well so you had i mean i remember that summer 2011 i was writing i was there when the riots kicked off

and you know all this reporting is in the book as well like i saw a double decker bus set on fire on tottem high street that and that was a pretty weird saturday night out i must say it doesn't happen that often anymore but uh yeah like uh the week that followed involved a hell of a lot of writing for me and also like beef with you know avatars of british multiculturalism david good heart and and twats like that who are like yeah you know this this music is is rotten to the core and it was around that time that david starkey you know gave that like completely like fascist basically performance on news night stunning poor and jones into silent almost into silence like i think nobody was expecting this sort of eminent tv historian to appear and say in the aftermath of

the riots something i think it was like the whites have become black there and there's something basically corrosive in black culture he says like it's part of this it's part of this overall idea that um that that that economic forces don't matter and that everything is cultural and everything is more or less a choice that you make net of everything else in your life because you are a homo economicus as part of a regression analysis yeah that's what you are your everything is net of everything else and that's why um someone can look at one of the three things that cultural conservatives trot out to try and explain social decay because they are extraordinarily literally minded people yeah who don't understand that violent lyrics in a grime tune can be a metaphor

or can be expressing something that isn't somehow literal or even can be telling a story of something in heaven it's like a cry for help ultimately of just like this is the shit that i'm seeing every day it fucking sucks my best mate was stabbed to death do you know what i mean and then it's like oh the song said stab to death it's going to make people stab other people to death because they like about that's because they they don't and they don't have i think they're they are so literal minded and uncomplex or they're so cynical about everyone who doesn't also have ppe degrees yeah they think they're sort of so easily influenced as to just do what they're told more or less but it speaks the enormous the enormous sense that british youth culture is basically a reaction

against being patronized yeah i mean and also it seems like a really weirdly late out of like pearl clutching given that you've had like american hip hop music with violent lyrics since like the 80s and like if anything by comparison grime is like relatively sort of like quaint and like it has that kind of like mundane day to day but i mean i don't know that kind of funny the ground of this too has a lot of like i like talking about watering your plants or whatever like these weird like touches of like mundaneness to it which is like way less of that like aggro gangster shit that you get more of in like american hip hop music as far as i can tell what's that song that has the chorus new beamer mama's house uh chandeliers and council flats oh man i don't know

oh man i'm gonna look that up but it's i mean it's it's also true that like grimes like aggier or like as as the slang has it like greasy lyrics i the violent ones that's greasy with a zed if anyone's transcribing this um oh it's a forefather okay right the the cano tune but they were those kind of lyrics are often like quite funny as well like you know someone like j me will talk about uh he's got a line where like i'll box you up like you a david blaine and shit which i think which is just great like you know this this stuff is like inherently comical it's shadow boxing it's like it's playful it's like it's play fighting essentially and and it's pretty pretty funny hell yeah um and i think uh i think that actually gets us where we want to go

amazing um so like i said before everyone go buy dan's book inner city pressure follow him on twitter at dan hancox correct and um yeah just listen listen to grime and if you see a rave maybe go to it share share this episode link on the matt hancock fb app before i go before i go before i go i also want to do a t-shirt shout outs um hold on sorry i remembered our special boy finally to everybody who has ordered t-shirts from edie uh little comrade we have such excellent texts these are the highlights we have gammon is a slur gammon is haram just the phrase custom text here i love that one that's the one i that's the one i keep meaning to get war replaced with free everything and escape rooms are killing youth culture and finally my favorite one which

our producer's wife has ordered we'll have nate edit that out so commodify your descent with a shirt buy a shirt buy a shirt and also thank you to jin sang for our theme tune and again dan thank you for coming on man thanks for having me i've enjoyed it all right yeah it was great later everybody bye ladies bye