Thus when a barber and a collier fight, The barber beats the luckless collier-white; The dusty collier heaves his ponderous sack, And big with vengeance beats the barber-black. In comes the brick-dust man, with grime o'erspread, And beats the collier and the barber-red: Black, red, and white in various clouds are tost, And in the dust they raise the combatants are lost.
Grime, in particular, is not really about pirate radio and local raves on top of pubs anymore. There are things I miss about those times but as an up-and-coming MC, back then, I would have loved to have had SoundCloud and YouTube and all these platforms to promote my music.
Nobody wants to admit their kid is the one with lice. Not only because of the work involved in getting rid of them, but because lice are still associated with dirt, grime, neglect and often poverty.
When I first started acting, I was actually working with the National Youth Theatre in London doing anti-knife crime workshops, so I was listening to a lot of music that was around us all the time, around the guys I was working with, and the kids - lots of young grime artists from London.
In 2009, my father wanted me to join politics. I told him, 'Why should I jump into the dirt and grime of politics when I can have politicians come to me as owner of a media group?' Then my father gave me an ultimatum.
My older sister was into grime, so she got me into it. When I was ten, I begged her to take me to my first house party, where there were decks and a mic. I ended up falling asleep standing up in the corner.
I think when people say 'real hip-hop,' they want it more buried in the streets. They want it more connected to the streets and the grime and the roughness of the streets. They don't want the fluff.
He inhaled her scent, uncaring of the blood and dirt and grime that permeated her hair and clothing. He was holding her. Finally holding her. “You’re real. You’re real.” She pulled away, looked up at him, the same answering emotion shining in her blue eyes. With a groan, he lowered his mouth to hers. He couldn’t hold back. Nothing in the world would have kept him from kissing her in that moment. He was overcome.
There must be a place where hopes and dreams are nurtured, and that place is only within ourselves. A place to clean the grime of life, a place that waits for us to stay and look inside that we might see the truth.
I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.
I hear all the big department stores like Macy's and Bloomingdale's in the U.S. playing hard hip-hop records to the shoppers, like Rick Ross at his gnarliest. That's amazing. It makes me think grime can do a similar thing.
If you grew up in London's East End you'd probably be inclined to be into something like grime music. But if you're removed from it, like in Guernsey, you can have a wider set of influences, and you're not tied down to any genre or any scene. I think that affects my sound, for sure.
With most electronic music I hear now, the things I like will be the things that have soul. It has to have a feeling in it, where it feels warm, or feels epic. I like to play with that in my music as well, there will always be a piano chord or something underneath it to make you feel at home. I always try and make sure even with vocals and layering that you still feel like you know me, no matter whether you're into grime or hip hop.
Grace has to be the loveliest word in the English language. It embodies almost every attractive quality we hope to find in others. Grace is a gift of the humble to the humiliated. Grace acknowledges the ugliness of sin by choosing to see beyond it. Grace accepts a person as someone worthy of kindness despite whatever grime or hard-shell casing keeps him or her separated from the rest of the world. Grace is a gift of tender mercy when it makes the least sense.
I have a cousin called Flirta D who was big in the grime world, which made me really cool at school. 'Flirta D's your cousin?' 'Yeah, buddy.' 'He must be a millionaire!'
I was like, 'If I bang your thing, will you bang my thing? Will you sing on my album?' And he was like, 'Yeah, of course.' So I've got Robbie Williams on my album. Robbie Williams on grime.
The Grime guys have kind of rewritten the blueprint for people as far as creativity, songwriting, ownership, doing your own videos... So they're sending out a real positive message I think to people, that you can do it yourself in a punk way, and you can still potentially be successful and get to people.
My core is grime. But I make all kinds of music. Take Picasso. He could paint whatever way he liked. He could do a little ting with a felt tip if he wanted to - it's still going to be a bad boy Picasso at the end.
It's not just my music. Not everyone just listens to grime now 'cause of Skepta. They like how we speak. They like the slang. They like how we dress. They listen to the music. It's everything.
I don't even think of it as a strategy. It's me in my element; it's my forte. Me being with all the mandem on the ends, spitting to an old school grime riddim, is me in my element; that's when I feel I'm at my best.
Snow isn't just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife mining town but also of a kind of weary familiarity, a taken-for-granted quality to which our eyes are all too susceptible.
Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know.
There are people who take on different objectives and missions in life. When you grow older, there's a a void - and right now, I'm filling a space where a lot of old rock, grime, hip-hop, punk artists left a vacant space.
Me and Stormzy. We're gonna do an album. We're gonna do an album of Nelson Riddle arrangements in grime form. It's gonna be called 'Griddle'.
I suppose when I was growing up, it was all about fitting into a box or fitting into a category. You know, looking like I listened to hip-hop, or looking like I listened to grime. You'd see someone and go, 'Oh, look at that person. He's wearing that or that; he listens to punk rock.'
Initially we were spitting lyrics over garage beats, in that eight-bar gap where there wasn't a vocal. But we were rebellious towards garage because they were rebellious towards us; a lot of their gatekeepers said grime was too violent.
An unfolding technology has increased our economic strength and added to the convenience of our lives. But that same technology-we know now-carries danger with it. From the great smoke stacks of industry and from the exhausts of motors and machines, 130 million tons of soot, carbon and grime settle over the people and shroud the Nation's cities each year. From towns, factories, and stockyards, wastes pollute our rivers and streams, endangering the waters we drink and use.
We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
The first time I went to the Planning Commission was when it was under KC Pant, a long time ago. Since then I have been back there many, many times to the point where the many people who seem to spend their lives sitting outside the various offices and even the patches of grime in the hallways and stairwells began to look familiar.
I'm on the rise and whatnot, but I'm not the man to say, 'All right, world, here's grime.' It's gonna take me, Skepta, JME, Novelist and Lethal Bizzle, to say, 'I'm sick, he's sick, he's sick, he's sick'. Not one man can do it.
Everyone uses grime as a footstool, but imagine Biggie Smalls started doing hip hop, and it started going well, and then he started making RnB: there would be no hip hop!
Lyrics came quite easy early on in my career. But I always wanted to push it further and stand out a bit more. We were coming from the garage era when lyrics were simplified, purposefully, to work in the club environment. They were about hyping up a crowd or bigging up a DJ. Moving into grime, our lyrics became more in-depth.
I never felt like I was in the grime scene. I was the outsider. So when I veered away from it, I didn't feel like I was leaving the circle - I felt like I was never in it.
Growing up in the mid-to-late '90s in London, you start seeing the explosion of drum'n'bass and then the birth of U.K. garage and grime. I decided to focus a lot of my energies as an aspiring MC. It was a very natural way to express yourself as a kid from a certain kind of neighborhood.
What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday... He consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it.
I didn't get played on radio or TV for 3 years. They all told me the same thing: it was too urban. They don't see grime music as commercial music, but all music is commercial; it's how you make it. That's what I'm trying to say.
Me and Skepta, we're kind of from the same world but have totally different-sounding albums. That's why I get funny sometimes when people say I'm a grime artist. Not in a negative way, but I don't feel it's a true representation of the music I'm making.
There is nothing unnatural in this world," he said. "An unnatural thing is a thing that could never happen in nature. I happened. I am natural, and the things I want are natural. The power of your mind, and your beauty, even when you've been drugged in the bottom of a boat for two weeks, covered in grime and your face purple and green - your unnatural beauty is natural. Nature is horrifying.
A gardener is never shut out from his garden, wherever he may be. Its comfort never fails. Though the city may close about him, and the grime and soot descend upon him, he can still wander in his garden, does he but close his eyes.
I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.
Now, [hip-hop/grime artists] Stormzy, Skepta, or the Section Boyz have to be validated by Drake, Rihanna or Beyoncé. They're rolled into this one urban culture bubble; it's not really to do with, "I'm specifically f - ked off about my country and what's going on in my town." We're very much only showing success to artists who impress American artists, and I'm one of them.
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