Grime Notes

For almost a decade now, grime has been a major presence in my life. It started slowly at first, just a guest feature or two by top MCs on tracks in different genres. Then I downloaded Wiley's Treddin' on Thin Ice, Eskiboy next, and from there I knew something big was about to happen. I'd enjoyed hip-hop plenty as a younger adult, but grime was totally new to me. It moved differently, felt different, gave me a new appreciation for the interaction between music and lyrics. I got sucked in deeper and deeper: Tempa T, Jme, Footsie, Dizzee Rascal, Terror Danjah, Durrty Goodz, and countless more besides. Exhilarated by MCs and instrumentals equally, never more so than when the two collided on an unmissable track.

The purpose of this project is to add to the worldwide appreciation of grime. Despite the likes of Dizzee, Skepta, and Stormzy blowing up internationally, grime has always held a tenuous connection to the larger industry infrastructure. It existed on the margins at first, had a brief flirtation with the mainstream in ~2007-09, then returned to obscurity for another half-decade. My interest in the scene began in 2012, when things were mostly under the radar (excluding Wiley's new major-label effort). The old hands were hard at work, of course, and Butterz was ascendant on the club/independent label circuit, yet things were still bubbling with no signs of imminent eruption. So I was surprised as anyone when, a few years later, Skepta's Konnichiwa album started generating serious heat. It was especially surprising that a throwback track like That's Not Me would be the one to touch things off, after so many magazine articles about how grime just didn't make sense to listeners outside the UK. Soon grime found a second life in the charts, and mostly without the last incarnation's pop overtones. It was a heady time even for me as a US-based observer, but the crucial thing to remember is that grime never claimed sole dominance of UK rap. The real kings of that larger movement were Krept and Konan, fellow-travelers who belonged more properly to the 'road rap' genre designation. And then of course came UK drill, current champion and popular scapegoat for the racist press. Ask your average US American what's going on with UK rap, and I would wager they'd be more likely to tell you about Headie One than any of grime's crowning achievements.

(Though one guy here in Baltimore seems to regularly pump out Giggs from his car en route to work...)

Anyhow. The format I'll be using is short, ongoing, and incomplete, which I feel is appropriate for my limited understanding of a musical phenomenon to which I'll never have insider access. I can only relay my impressions and enthusiasms from afar, molded by years of intense stateside admiration. These grime notes will be arrangements of stray thoughts I've accumulated through considering particular MCs, songs, tracks, or labels. The smaller size of my planned posts should help me with semi-regular updates, since more sustained projects tend to wear down my initial motivation. But by the end, I'd like to look back on a database of observations and avenues for continual investigation, a re-organization of what's possible that can guide me through the '20s. If grime was just a passing fancy for me, I would've known it by now. It's absolutely here to stay, and I welcome its permanent place in my life. The effect has already been immense; let's see what a new decade will bring.

Collected links to be compiled here:

Grime Note #1: Wiley, Gangsterz

03/19

Switching to monthly now, as weekly is a bit cumbersome. It should also help centralize things better and require less fishing around for certain links.

Some odds and ends from a film I watched recently called NAZIS IN THE CIA: if you haven't heard of Stefano Delle Chiaie (as I hadn't), take a look at his extensive involvement in global fascism. Chiaie is interviewed directly in the film, and he still speaks proudly of his many "revolutionary" achievements. Perhaps his most widely-known associate is Klaus Barbie, glanced over in the film but present in the Wikipedia summary. Cinephiles will know Barbie from HOTEL TERMINUS, which I haven't yet seen but would like to. I feel it's helpful to independently verify conspiratorial items like NAZIS IN THE CIA, by cross-referencing with credible documents. Maybe an hour-long TV-style documentary can't be trusted, but what about Marcel Ophuls' classic film, which examines Barbie at quadruple length?

Following up on that: we can see both Barbie and Chiaie at work in supporting Luis García Meza through the Cocaine Coup. I won't claim to be an expert on any of this, but as always, these are avenues for further research. Just dipping into all this makes me feel grateful for Evo Morales' leadership, which comes after decades of fascist and conservative interplay. May this vicious cycle be ended for good.

Less dramatic but still significant: the CIA was able to secure a small prison sentence for Junio Valerio Borghese, which freed him to re-enter the world as an unreconstructed fascist. Borghese and Chiaie were close collaborators, and Borghese's fairly short life thereafter was dedicated to the propagation of fascism.

(Chiaie, by the way, is still alive.)

Sarah Jones writing in 2017 about the stubbornness of eugenics.

Adam Kotsko on nostalgia's temptations makes me wish for a book-length treatment along the lines of Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths.

An AI program is being signed to a record label so it can, I don't know, give you chill meditative music to boost your workflow or something.

Ethiopia's at the front of China's Belt and Road investments, but while some have called it a debt trap, the ambassador isn't too worried now that China has agreed to restructure the debt into smaller loads over a longer timeline.

"I'm innocent!" proclaims wealthy financier on the lam.

On the subject of Malaysia, we really want to go see this hotel when we're there. The article writer evidently hates it, but the comparison to North Korean architecture is a positive for me!

Really great conceptualization, by Girish Shambu, of older and newer ways of watching things...or "content," I guess, as audiovisual works are now called. I don't think I can ever adjust to certain parts of the changing world he describes, and I'm not even that old (27!). Some aspects of the uncompromising old cinephilia still feel noble, but increasingly I find so much of it reactionary and restrictive (despite all those legendary filmmakers and critics whose work has had enormous impact). For instance, I definitely recognize that defensiveness in critiquing filmmakers formerly given a pass, and I'm happy to say I had no trouble dropping Woody Allen, a long-time favorite of mine, once I truly faced up to what he'd done. So I'm definite support the new cinephilia's liberations. I don't think I can ever be at its vanguard, but then I don't think I even should be. If I can just contribute to the ferment a little, that would be more than enough for me. It's long past time for the marginalized to take things into their own hands.

As for the older way of watching movies...my big influence/arch-nemesis Nick Pinkerton is at it again, this time defending poor embattled David Lynch on Twitter from widespread hatred and condemnation of his art. Or so it seems anyway. Yet the real surprise for me was that the image Pinkerton uses to illustrate his "gunk of the id" thesis -- Patricia Arquette in LOST HIGHWAY being forced to strip at gunpoint -- is the exact same Lynch image that affirmed to me a lack of true criticality in this auteur's career, a coincidence that begs greater elaboration. That is to say, what Lynch does, and does very well, is channel his own impulses into wildly weird artworks so mesmerizing that to nitpick them would seem embarrassingly small-minded. Pinkerton is pushing back against the safety-rails TV-styled version of cinema, where sharply delineated but thinly imaged character outlines describe their struggles in non-descript locations. I feel some sympathy for his cause, but ultimately cannot bring myself to join it. That is because the problem's being misapprehended as a referendum of Lynch, and not of the artistry of those unknown to the US American critical consensus. The young left is not asking for a sanitized version of cinema, but, rather, asking: whose gunk? Whose id? That this roundabout should hinge on cinephile favorite David Lynch is tedious symptom, not cause. By the time an aging white man's vast portfolio gets evaluated, the fight's already been fought. And there have been many such fights, with many similar conclusions. Cinema, as it exists now, is more like a series of empty frames on a film strip, speckled only by the faintest traces of paint, untouched by the people whose ability to participate would fill in the negative space. What cinema can and should look like is uncontroversial: the deeply-considered styles of many artists -- mainly the oppressed, but with some proportion for white males -- dredging up plenty of psychic experiences, whether they be expressed in popular, alternative, or experimental forms. So the dichotomy articulated by Pinkerton is a false one. He wants a more open cinema, but in trying to broaden its parameters, he inadvertently cordons it off himself.

Week 25

I found this a really compelling account of Jakarta's past struggles and future ambitions. And I'll be curious whether the completed MTR does indeed benefit Jokowi's popularity.

This seems like a huge project that will alter the Pearl River Delta for generations to come (perhaps even the global balance of power altogether), so I plan to keep a close eye on all of it. If I ever get back to Hong Kong, I wonder what the effect will look like on the ground.

A sponsored article, but I do like the idea of arriving on Japan's western shores for a change. As convenient as the shinkansen is, you still lose a lot of hours riding it cross-country. And since I don't often have much time to spend abroad, every little bit helps. Fukuoka could be very useful to me one day.

Marylanders continue to be suckers, and it sounds like the only reason they don't want Hogan running for president is so that they can keep him here. Unfortunately there's not much to do now except wait until 2022...

This essay is a bit misleading. It starts from the premise that proto-humans culled violent males from their population and domesticated themselves, but it slowly lays out a more convincing theory: female proto-human females selected against violent males, thus facilitating an evolutionary feedback loop. I like that a lot, and I would love to hear more in the future.

Why the USA can't build any good infrastructure. Another strike against reformism, in my opinion. This seems so futilely complex that only a total redo could suffice.

UKG, gone but not forgotten. I used to love UKG when I was younger, but grime won me over in adulthood. No insult intended; I still go wild for shuffling hi-hats. Still, I forget sometimes that it was a whole sub-culture, a memory still burning in the minds of many.

A good account of how coercive sex and rape culture are co-constitutive. Or, alternatively, rape culture is a structure, and sexual coercion is what reproduces it in the day-to-day.

Week 24

Abe's tenure as Prime Minister of Japan. Notice that Abe considers Donald Trump an ally, but China and the DPRK threats. I really think international politics is a lot easier to understand if you just cut the Gordian knot and look at things as they are. The USA and Japan are capitalist; the DPRK and China are Communist. One can defend the former and denounce the latter all they please, but there's no objective position from which to do so. Ideology is always present in such distinctions.

An overwhelming majority of Okinawans intend to reject Tokyo's and Washington's plans for a US base in their prefecture. Considering how close the Brexit referendum was and all that resulted from it, I wonder how democratic this outcome will be.

If this situation were to follow the mujahideen example, then the US' weapons will be passed along to the PKK, who will continue their needling of Turkey, which will drive a wedge between Turkey and the US. I'm not predicting that outright; it's just a very familiar pattern. Also interesting that Assad and the YPG seem to be building a coalition based on mutual distrust of the US.

Keeping in mind for future travels: India's first Bollywood museum.

Week 23

I spent time yesterday and today immersing myself in the student debt crisis. And it is an enormous problem. Entire futures are being stripped bare of pleasure and purpose by the US higher education system (or lower ed, as I understand Tressie McMillan Cottom has described it). Previously, I've written on how government inaction on problems like AIDS and poverty are a form of predatory delay, where the powerful have all the time in the world and the powerless have none. Societal responsibility can be deferred altogether for people seen as deserving their fates. This is becoming the case as well for student debt, and, as always, its impact is felt disproportionately by the marginalized.

Yet this is affecting the white and well-off as well. And that's most likely why it's netting some attention lately. The problem is that it's a decentralized problem, so previous efforts to organize (LGBT people against AIDS, the Civil Rights movement against segregated poverty) are not being replicated in a modern context. I think there are two interesting things to consider here. First, the atomized middle class has less sense of social cohesion, so they experience this structural problem as a personal one (with all the attending guilt, shame, and despair). Second, this new and widespread precarity could manifest in unexpected ways. I think back to Bue Rubner's Viewpoint essay on Catalonia all the time, in which he persuasively argues that the 15M movement grew so large because the petulant middle class traversed their usual social strata. It remained a temporary alliance, and one which served Catalonia very little in the end, but it suggests that middle class in anxiety can lead to leftward drift. I believe we are seeing that with the Millennial generation in the US, who are rapidly flanking the Democrats from the left.

The question would then be if this alliance has any more value for the US left than it did for the Catalan/Spanish left. I'm not optimistic. If a pragmatic liberal-leftism is oriented toward gaining what its participants consider "rightfully theirs," then those young white college graduates will wave goodbye to their truly oppressed peers once a middle class lifestyle opens back up to them. It's depressingly easy to imagine this scenario; look how the boomers turned out, after all. The work lies in reframing student debt as something more than an obstacle to the perpetuation of an economic system that's already untenable. A more radical critique would bring down the entire system with it, connecting student debt to financialization, a blight that's afflicted schools and politics and healthcare alike, all to the detriment of life on this slowly collapsing planet. The silver living is that plenty of people, especially the younger generation, have already made and articulated these connections. The dark cloud, however, is a settler-colonial empire whose subjects would largely prefer to sustain an illusion right until they're at the waterfall's edge. For that, I have neither hope nor optimism.

--

Are reparations the only answer for Baltimore? The answer is, unequivocally, yes. On the micro-level, communities of color are being terrorized and traumatized by the everyday violence of this city. But on the macro-level, racism is deeply entrenched and close to intractable without radical change. That's the argument Laurence Brown, one of the smartest scholars on Twitter, makes in this interview. Efforts to redress the historical wrongs suffered by Baltimore have been demonstrably inadequate. Much larger efforts are needed. (Even the Baltimore Sun has been paying attention, and while the paper itself is commonly an embarrassment, it can be a good barometer for how mainstream ideas of racial justice are becoming.) You can look at some very useful maps of the "Black Butterfly" (Brown's coinage) here. Since the conditions are historical, structural, and ongoing, there can be no piece-by-piece amelioration. It must be part of a concerted reconfiguration of how Baltimore is organized along racial boundaries.

Japan will recognize indigenous Ainu people for the first time.

Week 22

I like keeping up with Soderbergh because you can count on him to lay out a State of the US Film Industry address quite regularly.

Week 21

Absolutely fantastic writing from one of my favorite thinkers. There are tons of things going on in her prepared talk, but the musical trend observations alone are worth savoring:

Next, a great post from Isiah Medina on pseudo-intellectualism masquerading as its opposite, and how that plays out aesthetically + politically.

This one's not an endorsement: MarketWatch considers the ailing US economy and its stressful impact on kids and families. They are largely right in their structural orientation, but their enthusiastic assent to the economic status quo under study is just bizarre. I found this article through Malcolm Harris, who wryly noted that it covered the same topic as his own book and decided that, more or less, everything's fine as is.

Some fun reflections from the Sugarhill Gang on hip-hop's 40th birthday.

No one will miss cars when they're gone, and I'm breathlessly awaiting that day. Car culture is a death cult I don't want to be killed by.

Digging into Rivette's film criticism. I need a lot more context than I have right now, but I was intrigued by the characterization of the Cahiers critics as being indifferent/hostile to material-based experimental cinema. I guess this is where more Bazin might help! Still, it's definitely an avenue worth walking down at some point.