bun-u

for the arts crowd

This piece I did appears in Arts Professional this month...

Dirty Canvas: a life of grime When the Whitechapel gallery opened in 1901, it did so with the mission ‘To bring great to the impoverished people of East London'. Late last year the awesome but unsung Grime crew Ruff Sqwad from an impoverished estate in Bow brought great art to the Whitechapel. Ruff Sqwad played as part of a night called Dirty Canvas in the Whitechapel's late Friday nights programme. The sound on the night was densely layered, often abrasive, while the eight or so members rapped about their sexual prowess and just how damn talented and tough they were. The show was brilliantly received glowing reviews in i-D magazine, The Wire and Street Soundz. The consensus was that this was one of the best live grime performances. At the time of the Ruff Sqwad show, the gallery was showing Paul McCarthey's Pirates of the Caribbean exhibition. The show, containing themes of sexual violence, consumerist indulgence and porn, was also received extremely well by reviewers and audiences alike.

It is in-keeping with the Whitechapel’s cutting-edge ethos to show something in the vein of the Paul McCarthy’s exhibition, despite its ‘difficult’ content. However, the gallery programming a Grime night is perhaps both more unusual and interesting. Of course, there are plenty of galleries are using music as a tool for audience development, and there is an increasing emphasis on cross-platform programmes, but specifically holding a regular Grime night opens up a whole new range of possibilities.
First, to the uninitiated, a background to Grime, which is both a London underground music scene and possibly a social phenomenon. Emanating from rave, jungle and garage and drawing on US rap and Jamaican dancehall, Grime has become the sound of particular cross-section of inner London’s younger community. It is sometimes dismissed as a variant of US hip hop, and sure some of the sounds/visual clichés are similar, but upon a deeper understanding of its sounds and context reveals that it a peculiarly London-centric thing. Productions draw on the sub bass sounds of jungle and the beats of garage, voices and language pick up on the patois of dancehall, while aesthetics are borrow heavily from the macho-ism/bravado of US rap. Adding to the mix is cockney humour and some grim readings of what it is to live on the wrong side of the tracks in London. The overall sound could challenge anything else describing itself as ‘experimental’.
The scene was founded as a youth-reaction to Garage in the late 90s. At the time, Garage was aspirational music drawing on the then ghetto fabulous look of rap music - expensive clothes, cars, champagne, cocaine and clubs with chic-dress-only policies. With access to more cash and credit lines, the scenesters tended to be older (in their 20s and 30s). Younger wannabes were left out in the cold (often literally - outside clubs in their prohibited tracksuits and trainers) shut-out from taking part in the scene. Grime was born out of this frustration in this. Reacting to the aspiration lyrics of Garage tunes, Grime artists rapped about the more negative, bad stuff happening in their lives. Grime also switched the DJ/MC relationship, which in garage saw the DJ-as-king and MC-as-support. The cost of a microphone being much less than DJing decks, meant the MCs took over.

At the turn of the millennium, the So Solid Crew, who straddled the Garage-to-Grime transition were involved in a number of high profile misdemeanours (some involving gun crime), which effectively shut-down the live circuit for both scenes. Still evident to this day, promoters, police and authorities are reluctant to support/approve anything with either a Garage or Grime label. While this effectively finished off the Garage scene (which relied heavily on the nights out and the litmus test of ‘what worked on the dancefloor’), Grime took up residence on London's extensive network of pirate radio stations. Here Grime became musically more experimental and as a network more insular. Artists became less aware of their audience and what musically or lyrically was working. They also lost the opportunity to hone their performance and presentational techniques. In the five or so years it's been around, Grime has only enjoyed sporadic commercial sales. Dizzee Rascal is perhaps its most well-known cross-over success story due to him winning the Mercury Music Prize in 2004. Kano, Lethal B and Roll Deep have also enjoyed some critical acclaim accompanied by moderate sales. Despite the lukewarm mainstream interest, the underground scene has remained strong (and has become stronger as a result). As a consequence, a huge cross section of young people in London (and increasingly elsewhere in the UK) have aspirations to be either a MC, DJ or producer. However this is a phenomenon, which for a large part continues to be hidden from the mainstream. There are two possible reasons for this. First, consumer patterns suggest that youth culture has become increasingly gentrified by older people. They have greater purchasing power and are still buying heavily into music, clubs, magazines and clothes. The second is that the vast majority of young people are illegally downloading music, which means that Grime’s core audience interest is not registered in sales. The lack of a live circuit compounds matters of economic viability.

The vast part of the Grime scene therefore, is maintained without a drop of support in public funding, corporate sponsorship or mainstream media. It is reliant on a network of illegal pirate radio stations and self-produced and distributed white labels – an infrastructure inherited from the rave, jungle and garage scenes before it. This active involvement in forging what is a DIY arts scene, is despite the fact that many of its protagonists are from what authorities would describe as ‘excluded groups’ – young people, people in social housing, the ‘working class’, people from different ethnic backgrounds, people with criminal records and people without an educations and basic skills.

Ironically, arts organisations are challenged to ‘access’ exactly these types of groups. The onus is on them to put in place ‘audience development plans’ and inclusion policies, to challenge the current situation which sees ‘the arts’ only being accessed by the more affluent, able and ‘white’ parts of society. This challenge and deemed response comes both from arts organisations themselves and the Government who tie their funding streams to affecting this change. Several notions are at work with this. The first is there is possibly the assumption here that ‘excluded’ groups have ‘the arts’ or ‘culture’ missing from their lives and that arts organisations can play a role in filling this gap. The second is that there are a series of barriers preventing certain groups of people from accessing the works of arts organisations. Finally, financial exclusion is a major barrier for excluded groups, and expenditures on the arts/culture comes low on their list of priorities. The existence of scene like Grime – a burgeoning, self-resourced and independent DIY-based arts scene – puts a different spin on some of these notions. It perhaps points to re-examining policies on audience diversification and inclusion and how culture/arts being developed outside of the main infrastructure of arts organisations can play a role.

The Whitechapel’s venture in promoting a Grime night as part of their Friday night programme is both brave and totally appropriate. The night is one of only three regular Grime nights in the Capital and has served as a crucial outlet for the scene, at a time when other live venues are running scared from it. The Dirty Canvas night has provided artists whose music has been dismissed by the mainstream with a reputable and established platform. This has helped to empower both them and their core audience. It has furthermore served to pick up interest from mainstream music organisations and media at a venue considered accessible. For the Whitechapel, it goes much further than just helping to just diversify its audience – it has provided sanctuary to a neglected but cutting edge art form. In a sense, programming a Grime night at the Whitechapel is entirely natural, and in-keeping with the gallery’s aim to 'provide a platform for artists and informing and shaping culture'.

Of course, the experience of the Grime scene is certainly not unique either to music as an art form or within music itself. This DIY/independent approach to forging culture is mirrored in outsider art, fanzine culture, street theatre and in other music scenes like punk, and improv. Galleries and other art organisations are increasingly recognising these movements and reflecting them in their programmes. Indeed the Whitechapel at the time of the next Dirty Canvas show, will be showing an exhibition of outsider art.

posted by David M @ 9:46 pm