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Dizzee Rascal @ NME Awards - 17/02/08
Written by Robert Ferguson | Tuesday, February 19, 2008 |
Plastic Little, a Philadelphia trio dealing in only marginally less salacious party rap than Spank Rock, opened this NME awards gig in fine style. Like their aforementioned American kin, they combined the energy of Detroit house music with hip hop and threw in some playful rhymes for good measure, at one stage treating the crowd to a couple of lines of “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” over a remix of “I’ve Got The Power” by Snap. Diplo style mash-ups like this were a highlight of their set, with a scintillating booty-call rap to a sample of “Close to Me” by the Cure finally breaking the crowd’s unfair indifference to them.
Next up was a former actress from the channel 5 soap Family Affairs, who these days trades under the Ebony Bones moniker. Thankfully she could not be more different live than her previous excruciatingly dull existence; indeed maybe her musically schizophrenic re-incarnation is an attempt to atone for her previous crimes of boredom. The main touching point for EB’s style was cockney urchin garage, albeit of the kind that would appear to come from the mind of an LSD casualty. Lines such as “Can I see your Giro/Can I lick your armpit/No, mind your own business” being a case in point. Musically there were elements of ska, surf guitar and synths thrown into the mix for good measure, but she somehow fashioned a cohesive enough whole from the madness to produce a very entertaining show.
Unfortunately nothing that is true of Ebony Bones can be said of Newham Generals, the third act of the night. Newham Generals are new signings to Dizzee Rascal’s Dirty Stank label, and as such before the gig they looked the evening’s best prospect outside the headliner himself, but this proved not to be the case. They were a very average grime act, their lack of musical variety mean their songs were often lost in a soup of noxious bass. The most positive thing that could be said for them was that their grime-by-numbers heightened the anticipation for someone who could do it properly.
And when he came, he did not disappoint. Dylan “Dizzee Rascal” Mills strode on to the stage to a loud cheer, which raised several more decibels when he launched into first song “I Luv U”, a crowd favourite from the Boy in Da Corner era. Dizzee commanded the stage with ease, especially in the moment when he ordered the crowd, with all the authority of a latter day Chuck D, to “say my fucking name… and don’t you ever forget it”. Like that’s going to happen anytime soon. The truth is although Dizzee Rascal was one of the pioneering figures in grime along with Wiley et al, as the new songs aired tonight showed, he’s still writing material as strong as anything he’s done and still looking to push the boundaries of the style he helped create. While peers like Kano or the Roll Deep crew have made excellent material they have been completely eclipsed in terms of stature by Dizzee Rascal. How many critically adored albums has Wiley had out in the past year?
Yet for all his vision, even Mills would surely not have foreseen his technicolour middle ground between dance and hip hop been given a glossier coat, and brought back to the UK in such style by American acts like Plastic Little…
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