Released: 2003
Not everyone, it was fair to say, immediately got grime. Writing in 2004 for the American then-magazine Spin to mark the Stateside release of Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner, Will Hermes confusedly put “19-year-old British rapper Dizzee Rascal’s best rhymes scan like Lewis Carroll translated into backward Korean (“Chung intelligent yaps in hospie flats”)” before declaring it “the hottest and strangest hip-hop import to bubble up since The Streets changed British rap from a punch line to a genre.”
Generations of kids on this side of the Atlantic had grown up being told that American rappers could never be usurped, but as UK garage fragmented at the end of the 90’s small groups of teenage Londoners were creating their own brand of lo-tech hip hop, one that respected nothing and no-one. Dizzee himself claimed to have minted the first song of this nascent sound as early as 2000, but with exposure initially restricted to the capital’s niche pirate radio stations, it would be another three years before his debut album created a national buzz.
Fix Up, Look Sharp was as inventive as it was brash, an irreverent approach to the game that allowed it to sample a distinctly Freddie Mercury-esque Billy Squier, the pounding kick drums sounding like they were being dropped off the roofs of tower blocks in Bow. On hearing it British hack Simon Reynolds had a parochially different view to his US cousins, suggesting “Dizzee Rascal is as good as any MC currently active on Earth.” As the mutually exclusive confusion mounted, it seemed we were still two countries were very much divided by this new common language.
The Voice Of Unreason 