HERITAGE: Jme, Skepta And More Sit Down With SK Vibemakers To Discuss The Landscape Of UK Music (2005)

HERITAGE: Jme, Skepta And More Sit Down With SK Vibemakers To Discuss The Landscape Of UK Music (2005)


May 15, 2020

Flinging it all the way back to '05, today's clip comes from an early interview with Jme, Skepta, President T, Scorcher and Cookie. To give you an idea of how much of a throwback this is, this was back when SK Vibemakers was a duo that included FX (who now uses the SK Vibemaker name) and Rainman.

The five North London MCs sat down to give their thoughts on the grime scene in 2005 and the wider UK music world. Going in depth, they breakdown how they define grime (a term which was still new back then), the comparisons between grime and UK hip-hop/rap, and the contentious issue of America's influence on our homegrown scene.

There's also some valuable points made about the word 'grime' itself and the parallels between it and Dirty South hip-hop in America, with both being cast as negative off-shoots of another sound — Dirty South as an off-shoot hip-hop and grime as an off-shoot of UK garage. Of course attitudes have changed somewhat since then and grime is now respected as its own separate entity from both garage and hip-hop, but Scorcher's comment that "there's always negative stuff at the start of a big thing" is worth remembering when certain members of society talk about UK drill.



Photography: Jordan Curtis Hughes


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