Tom Fraser

Grime’s easy to dismiss. When its first mutoid beats started booming their way out of east London council estates in the early noughties, it sounded like alien music. The lyrics were in a language that most of us didn’t understand. When Dizzee Rascal shouted at you to ‘Fix up, look sharp’, you thought: ‘What’s he fixing? And I hope he’s careful with that sharp thing!’ Grime is something you can listen to and think: Bit shouty. Don’t like it. Not for me. But that would be to miss the point. Grime is, in fact, the greatest music our city has ever, ever produced. Sod punk. Sod jungle. Sod The Kinks and their soppy odes to bridge-based astronomy. There’s one key thing that makes grime more important than any other music from London, and that’s that it’s about much, much more than just music. It’s about community. Before a small-ish crew of Londoners struggling on the fringes of society decided to get together and talk about what their life was like, a huge section of London (and British) life was just glossed over by the mainstream. Now, a previously mute generation of Londoners has a voice. It has role models whose appeal is so global that people in Japan know what ‘wa gwan’ means. Grime has taken root on the streets of our multicultural urban sprawl and told the world its story. It has changed the face of our city, our country and the world. And it’s done it on its own terms. When scene founder Wiley was first invited on Tim Westwood’s Radio 1 show – a make-or-break moment for