Sadly our scheduling didn’t allow our editor to make a cheap from-Grimes-to-grime joke…
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Micha Cavaseno: Last year, while older brother Joseph “Skepta” Adenuga was courting overseas hipster attentions via his new benefactor and king of cultural safaris Mr. Aubrey “Traws Me Dadeee” Graham, his younger brother Jamie “JME” Adenuga did what he’s done since ’05: make good music. He didn’t constantly bring out Novelist or Stormzy to shows to pretend he never sold out years ago. He just made a no-frills grime album where he burst with confidence, eccentric beats and his own earnestly moralistic and geeky charm. The album in question, Integrity, is the highest-charting independent album in UK history thus far, and while it didn’t have any cool viral videos reminiscent of 2004 or whatever, the music sure as hell was. On “Man Don’t Care,” Swifta’s martial drums clatter crisply while the neon bright 8-bit synths and wailing soul vocal snips make you think this is another Logan Sama staple from forever ago. And Jamie yelling about suffocating his foes with money is typical Boy Betta Know braggadocio. The key difference here is Giggs, once and always king of Road Rap. Whereas Jamie’s 2015 was marked by remarkable reliability, Nathaniel Thompson proved his eternal adaptability by tossing his old slow-flow and stark menace into the closet and playing with double-time flows and trick punchlines. With his goofy DBZ- and Batman-themed puns, he’s a perfect stone-faced and stiff foil for Jamie, resulting in one of the more tragically undervalued but solid grime singles of 2015.
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Alfred Soto: Impressive flow spent on a lyric of detailed vituperation by this British MC, solid seesaw keyb backing.
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Iain Mew: Not a standout on JME’s excellent album Integrity, because of Giggs’ momentum sink verse and because the hook is too low-key for the space it takes up. The dark Mega Drive-sounding riff is a good base for one of JME’s vivid and precise takedowns, though, and I’m glad to learn of an alternative use for my bank code fob once we all move to app log-ins.
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Patrick St. Michel: Starts with a dude going through his keyring and listing all the ways he’ll destroy you with the things on it, and gets even better from there.
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Brad Shoup: Amnesty hasn’t seen something with this few bits since “Lincoln Continental”. Danny was cruising a cloudship through the technical credits; JME and Giggs are taking all your lives in the dungeon level. There are two dozen quotables, punchlines for weeks, and Jamie going First Strike with his keyring. It’s pretty basic math.
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Thomas Inskeep: My favorite grime records tend to be those that don’t remotely try to sound like hip-hop, but are definitely and defiantly original, and British. This is one of those: a vaguely Warp-ish production that would never pass muster on US radio, and a couple of rappers better than most I’m used to hearing, pushing the beats ahead. Also, when’s the last time you heard the word “tweezers” in a song?
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Edward Okulicz: That mechanical whine and grind grabs the attention from the outset, and JME maintains it wonderfully — his verse reads like a threat and a statement of purpose, but it sounds like a boast, which is a great trick to pull off. Giggs is fine, but he’s a bit overshadowed by gripping noises from his trackmates.
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Will Adams: The keyboard ostinato is hilarious in its relentless effort to make the song sound as unstable as possible: chromatic parallel tritones??? I kinda want to send this to my former voice leading teachers just to troll them.
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Jonathan Bogart: On the day when dumb-clever violent masculine posturing holds no appeal instead of very little for me, I will probably be even more smugly unbearable than I already am, and I’ll miss out on some genuine pleasures.
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Anthony Easton: Gangster posing is always about the anxiety of money, and this slides between legit and illegitimate ways of marking capital. As sinister as Michael Caine and a parking garage.
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Megan Harrington: Increasingly, or, perhaps, rapidly, the world feels in peril. Maybe I’m just sensitive to the headlines, maybe my various timelines are just a vortex of darkness, an assertive pessimism where previously optimism reigned. Anyway, on one of these timelines someone asked what music the royal you that populates this platform listens to in times of chaos. I don’t really like this response to tragedy — like, honestly, who the fuck cares what I’m listening to in the wake of death. Lots of people recommended music to locate the calm in times of wild disarray. I like “Man Don’t Care” because it’s honest. There’s no room to move or breathe, your only option is to stay quiet and listen.
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