blissblog

"The thing that IS offensive is the condescension to the hardcore Grime fans. They might mangle the Queen's grammar and use patois and sling slang and misspell words (deliberately, though, often), but surely it's OBVIOUS that the level of literacy in the better grime (or hip hop, or dancehall) lyrics is staggering? And therefore by implication and by definition the fans have extreme verbal skills. They're probably not bookworms (although that's just an assumption--for all I know D Double E's got library cards and overdue books all across East London) but they don't need to be--this is a post-literate literati, a voracious oral culture sucking in and chewing up stuff from across the mediascape. With a lot of these lyrics, the sheer comprehension skills needed to follow the twists, spot the allusions, and unravel the compressions, is staggering. You need skill to actually even ENJOY this stuff, the sheer linguistic sport of it. And that suggests to me that the people who are into it, the kids for whom it's their life, must be really sophisticated. When you read interviews with Dizzee and Wiley, they come across as very perceptive and insightful. What the Americans call EQ or emotional IQ, these guys score pretty high. I'd also venture that without having to read the Guardian or New Statesman or political blogs, the grime kids are probably pretty sussed in their grasp on what's fucked about the world. In that sense 'street knowledge' is as good (or better) an education as reading Fredric Jameson or some Routledge primer on late capitalism, postcolonialism etc etc. So yeah, as Matt concludes, tweak some of the words, translate a bit between jargons and idiolects, and you'll find that the bloggaz and the grimesters are speaking the same language. Gutterlectuals unite, down with middlebrow!"