Quicktime Seckle: An Oral History Of The Grime Blog Era
Written by SOURCE on January 9, 2023
THE IMPACT…
Raj Kapone: Any youth culture movement is gonna get eyed up by brands because it gives them direct access to the kids and what they want. The developing nature of the grime scene meant that anyone involved around the beginning was on the inside looking out, so, naturally, we were the ones they came to when they wanted a piece of the action. As a free title that was reliant on advertising, RWD was already working with these brands who were trying to tap into our young audience—from Nike and Adidas to Levi’s—so we were seeing the impact blogs, forums and our print magazine was having close-up, on a commercial level.
Hyperfrank: I had one goal back then: to get a byline in RWD. I was like, “In two years’ time, I want to write for this magazine. It’s something I am going to do.” Three months after starting my blog in 2006, I had written my first piece and then I was like, “Okay, where else can this go?” Because you weren’t really getting bloggers writing for mainstream publications at the time, unless you were experienced in the field of music journalism, like Fiddy—who wrote for style mags like i-D—or Martin, who wrote a grime/dubstep column for Pitchfork. There was such a massive hierarchy, and I remember me and you, JP, being up all hours of the night going through our grime ideas to send to all these big platforms. It felt like you could only get through if you did the whole degree stuff. Anyway, I think, for me, it was just more about sharing my love for this music and culture with the masses. There was one specific incident where I was very drunk at one grime event, and I remember going home and writing a post about homophobia in grime, which was wild and not constructive at all. It was quite immature, to be honest. But when I woke up the next day, I was being sent for—live on airwaves—by one of the MCs I mentioned in the piece. It was crazy, but that’s when I really knew my words held weight.
Elijah: I guess my tipping point was when I joined Rinse FM. They’d seen my blogs and heard my mixes and stuff and, because they were looking for DJs as well, they took a chance on me. Once I took that up, and once I started meeting people regularly, I was more careful about what I was saying on my blog. People that came up to the station would be like, “Oh, it’s you! You’re the guy that writes the things on the internet, innit?” It meant that I couldn’t be as critical as I was in the beginning. First, on forums and posts, I’d just say what I thought of a song, if I thought lyrics were rubbish or something. But now, or just from then… I had a call with an artist one time and they were like, “Who are you, fam? I’ll dun you!” Once they calmed down, they were like, “I’m just trying to feed my family, man.” From that point, I decided I was gonna be a lot less critical. If I didn’t like something, I wouldn’t write about it.
Sian Anderson: I remember someone hit me up from 1Xtra, when DJ Cameo was on the station, and was like, “Oh, yeah, we saw your blog. You should come and do a demo for the Grime News on Cameo’s show.” So I go to the BBC, I get put into some studio, and I see Cameo—who’s live recording—and they’re like, “Yeah, record a demo.” And I’m like, “I don’t know what a demo is. I don’t really know why I’m here, but I’m here—hello!” [Laughs] When stuff like that used to happen, or when I got mentioned in mainstream media spaces like The Guardian and The London Paper—I knew it was because of my blog, and mostly off the back of the grime content. It was a real thing. My mum still has the paper clippings. I think when people started paying me for my opinion on grime, that’s when I realised there was really something in this. There’s a story to tell. We didn’t think it was a story to tell because we were growing up in it and living in it, so it wasn’t that fascinating to us. We were speaking our truth or the truth for the people that were around and our friends and family and our peers. But then it got to a point where I realised there’s a whole world of people that didn’t have a clue what this was, what we were doing and why we were doing it, so it was like: let me help tell it from my perspective, through the mediums of journalism, radio and A&R.
Martin Clark: Once artists started to hit certain milestones—like Dizzee winning a Mercury and going to his first SXSW, Burial getting recognised in certain spaces, Skepta and Jammer touring New York early on—it sounds totally trivial now, but these things weren’t necessarily destined to happen. There’s so many artists that don’t get anywhere. But to see the people we were writing about finally getting the props they deserve, that did it for me. As people, we make our bet; like, “I think this record is cool” or “I think this artist is cool,” and you’ll probably make a bunch of them over time, but only a few of them you get right and then you see it growing and growing and growing. Every time I turn on DJ Target on BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra, it’s like: “Man, you did it!” He probably had many life goals, but if you think about his progression from Roll Deep and running around to now… Sure, I think Target is great and there was Aim High and all that important stuff, but there was no guarantee he was going to get this kind of audience to go that way.
Chantelle Fiddy: Don’t you feel like that about so many others? I remember the first time Tinchy Stryder came to my house with Wiley, he just sat on the stairs. He wouldn’t come in—he was so shy. I spoke to him recently and he’s married with kids now, talking about investments and things like that. I put the phone down and I just thought, “How mad is this world? That kid that sat on my stairs is now…” And it’s not just him; there are so many people who have gone so much further than you ever thought was possible. Look at Skepta! So many people.
Simon Reynolds: When Dizzee came and did his first gig ever in America, Williamsburg, a whole bunch of American music journalists of my acquaintance came out to see him. Americans had this thing—it’s a traditional reflex in American rock critic culture that you wait till you see the artist deliver live. So they were all skeptical about the Boy In Da Corner record. They weren’t sure if British people could rap. This was a whole big thing in America: “The speech patterns are all wrong—it sounds fake.” But then they were like, “Oh, yeah, he’s great!” He commanded the stage very powerfully. I think blogs probably helped to sort of interest or intrigue other media people. A rave review in a proper magazine probably did a lot more, but even then, I think in the end the music breaks through. I mean, for grime to get to the point where someone could play headline in Glastonbury, it took a really long while for that to happen. Grime started to become a critical success. Dizzee won the Mercury in 2003, didn’t he?
Martin Clark: Bit of a lull after that, wasn’t it? In terms of the validation by wider…
Simon Reynolds: —the outside world, yes. So, in terms of pundits or whatever, grime had this status a lot earlier than it actually broke through to become pop music. And I think—to some extent—blogs influenced that, just by alerting people to the existence of this music. As I’ve dedicated my life to being a critic, I’m not sure how much critics really change the fortunes of artists. One mainstream radio spin is worth more than 20 rave reviews in a newspaper, so how many blog posts is one worth?
Chantelle Fiddy: I do wonder how many people were reading and this is the thing we’ll never know. The amount of people I’ve gone on to meet in life—even Jessie Ware, she was like, “I used to read you lot’s blogs,” because she was a journalism student. You just don’t realise how far and wide these things were. I’ve worked with people at marketing agencies in other countries who used to read our blogs, so I think it was wider spread than we realise. I didn’t want to be the face of anything. I didn’t want to be bait. We’re now in the age of the influencer, and I remember the first time somebody asked me for a press shot and I was like, “What? We’re writers.” Okay, you might see a tiny little pic on an article, but that’s not what we were in it for. I’m so grateful to have had that experience because the focus was on the writing, on the words, on the music, not me having to put a picture up there of myself. I’d hate to be a young person navigating a career in the creative industries right now. I really would.
