OT Crew
When it comes to per capita rap talent, Great Britain ranks somewhere between North Dakota and Yemen. Brit-rap has seemed moribund since the early 90s, when rave culture, as Simon Reynolds put it, “swallowed hip-hop whole.” The MC was largely relegated to a supporting role–his job was to hype the crowd. Recently, however, a new breed of rappers has jostled its way to the mike, adopting the swagger and thuggish vibe of American hip-hop. And their raucous intransigence and privileging of words over beats has set ravers against one another as decisively as punk split rockers in 1976.
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During the past decade, UK club producers and style magazines did their best to refine hip-hop to a single reference point: the break beat. By ’95 the influence of such tastemakers helped birth downtempo, trip-hop’s Milquetoast cousin. All lazy, moon-walking breaks and swirly textures that occasionally hint at actual music, it sounded right at home when it ended up piped into trendy boutiques. Up the pace about 60 beats per minute and you’ve got the blueprint for drum ‘n’ bass, which even shared downtempo’s affinity for Fender Rhodes vamps and tinkling chimes.
After four years of drum ‘n’ bass romper room masculinity, UK garage was a major shift, getting the girls–“the ladies’ massive”–back on the floor. Garage combined a shiny top end, sure to please an increasingly coked-up club clientele, with butt-grinding bottom-end swing. Unlike many dance styles before it, garage not only explicitly connected itself to Jamaican dancehall, but also to U.S. R & B, resulting in plenty of bootleg remixes of artists like Brandy and Whitney Houston.
By the end of 2001, the first wave of garage rap stars–Oxide, So Solid, Ms. Dynamite–had been defanged and absorbed into British pop. As with punk, the industry figured out exactly what it could sell–garage racks in UK chain stores have been halved. As a reaction, underground tracks have grown darker and nastier, leading to what critic Steve Goodman has dubbed “electrobashment.” This new style combines the masculine flavor of dancehall’s “bashments” (dances and club nights) with an unforgiving rigor.
