Brass Trax

Whither the British MC? It’s the question posed by An England Story: The Culture of the MC in the UK 1984-2008, a new compilation from Soul Jazz Records that charts the lineage running from the overlooked British dancehall and hip-hop scenes of the eighties and nineties to the relatively well-known grime crews operating today.

In fact, the compilation is quick to answer its own question. The opening tune, the title track “England Story,” offers a crash course in British MCing. The artist, YT, drops the name of every major sound system, or DJing crew, production house, and MC from the eighties and nineties. Listen carefully and look at the album’s tracklist; YT mentions half the artists on it.

“England Story” isn’t just a potted history lesson; it’s a fierce track. And it proves the Soul Jazz compilers’ thesis in a very different way. YT voiced the tune over producer Curtis Lynch Jr.’s custom refitting of the 85 rhythm, which had been the chassis for Baby Cham’s “Ghetto Story,” Jamaica’s biggest hit of 2006. The stories of the English MC and the Jamaican dancehall are different chapters of a shared history. Throughout the past three decades, artists in both countries gave and took and enriched each other’s music.

Listen to “England Story” by YT
Listen to “Ghetto Story” by Baby Cham

Jamaica was an English colony for nearly 300 years, and, after Jamaican independence in 1962, the country remained a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. England was a natural immigration destination for destitute Jamaican strivers looking for work. As the Jamaican population in England reached a critical mass, cultural practices from the Caribbean started popping up in yards and on street corners throughout the major cities.

(A similar phenomenon happened in the United States, where a Jamaican immigrant known as Kool Herc started his own Jamaican-style sound system, complete with an MC toasting over records, chatting in a style that came to be known as “hip hop.”)

British reggae had its roots in the waves of immigrants that arrived from Jamaica in the 1950s and 1960s, but it would be the second generation, the children of the immigrants, who would make British reggae music it’s own thing.

The first sign that English reggae had arrived in the dancehall was the emergence of the “fast chat” style with the 1984 release of Papa Levi’s “My God My King.” It’s a minimalist reggae, in which most of the ornamentation has been stripped from the backing track: the better to showcase the double time chats that the deejay spits over the beat.

Papa Levi must have known how sick the fast chat style was because he hesitates before he unleashes it. In fact, the first half of “My God My King” sounds pretty typical: boasts, consciousness, and ganja recounted in an AAAA rhyme scheme. Papa Levi chats with a flat inflection that falls somewhere between Jamaicans Early B and Peter Metro. But once you hit the two minute mark, Papa Levi’s flow comes twice as fast, his lyrics twice as complicated, full of interior rhymes. It made a journeyman work into a masterpiece. “My God My King” was the first British reggae record ever to top the Jamaican charts.

Listen to “My God My King” by Papa Levi

Papa Levi was a member of the “Saxon five,” the group of deejays who were members of the Saxon sound system, one of the four biggest crews in the UK. His success established a market for the lesser works of his crewmates, like Tippa Irie’s “Complain Neighbour,” which was an unlikely hit on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a goofy song about how Cockney British have short patience for Jamaican-style parties. They’ll call the cops if your music is too loud, even if it’s your granny, drunk on vodka, who is doing most of the dancing.

Listen to “Complain Neighbour” by Tippa Irie

For exhibit “B” in the case for British dancehall excellence, look no farther than “Walk and Skank,” a slack and swaggering take on the Answer riddim that can still stir the right crowd into a flurry. The track was cut by Jah Screechy, of the Saxons’ rivals, the Coxsone crew, over a sticky, stripped down version of the riddim cooked up by Blacker Dread. (It’s an earlier version than the one that the label would unveil in the 1990s.) “Walk and Skank” clocks in at an epic five minutes, and part of its appeal is its sketchy overdubs, which allow Jah Screechy to repeat key syllables half a step behind himself. It’s a hardly an original idea, but the lo-fi quality of the overdub make “Walk and Skank” sound like uncut hypeness.

Listen to “Walk and Skank” by Jah Screechy

Reggae was not the only influence shaping British music during this period. Besides the music from other diasporic groups (especially those from the Indian subcontinent), Britain had heard its share of American rap. A perfect marriage between Jamaican dancehall and hip hop was consummated with Tenor Fly’s 1994 hit “Bump and Grind,” which he recorded over a snippet from Jean King’s “Mr. Big Stuff.”

Listen to “Bump and Grind” by Tenor Saw

It could have been as unremarkable as the string of hip-hop crossover records that Jamaican deejays were cutting in US studios in those days. But there’s a tension between the sample, from a song about a dude who’s too big for his britches, and the lyrics, about a dude who refuses to go down on his girlfriend, that even Tenor Fly’s mic skills can never resolve.

It wasn’t long before Britain’s homegrown dance music scenes, the ones that forsook vocals and spawned jungle and drum and bass, would find their way back into the British MC tradition. Some of the most compelling tracks on An England Story come from recent times, when it finally sounds like England has invented something that nobody has ever heard before.

Nonetheless, tradition persists. “Tika Toc,” a floor filling banger from MC Skibadee presses the glass of drum and bass over a sample of Jamaican artist Tenor Saw, and the view from the microscope is mind altering. You can hear in MC Skibadee’s clipped delivery the legacy of Papa Levi, but also the influence of American rap. You could even compare aspects of his phrasing to rappers like Treach, of Naughty By Nature, but you can’t reduce his flow to his influences. There’s something about it that’s pure British.

Listen to “Tika Toc” by Skibadee

By now, thanks to artists like Dizzee Rascal, American music fans know about grime. It’s British hip hop, sure, but if An England Story demonstrates anything, it’s that grime is nothing more than the latest phase in a long developing musical tradition. It’s not a novelty; it didn’t come out of nowhere.

The layering of its history is clear on a cut like Riko’s “Ice Rink Riddim,” one of a number of tracks recorded over the same riddim by his fellow members of the Roll Deep Crew (which included Dizzee Rascal). The very practice of versioning a rhythm is something that grime inherited from reggae, and the section where Riko’s rhymes devolve into threatening nursery verse could have been ripped from the dancehall playbook. He switches from Jamaican patois to lower class English slang effortlessly, and his double time cadence is an obvious, brown-eyed descendant of the fast chat style.

Listen to “Ice Rink Riddim” by Riko

The Soul Jazz compilers buried the sweetest treat of the compilation at the end, like an afterthought. Est’elle and Joni Rewind’s recent reworking of “Uptown Top Ranking” (now with Gucci bags and rapping) should come as a standard accessory to any set of headphones. It’s the sort of nugget that makes you glad that cultures bend and twist. That they are fluid and protean. That borders and ears remain open.

Listen to “Uptown Top Ranking” by Est’elle and Joni Rewind