This year has seen an explosion of 140BPM instrumentals, creating chaos in a scene that has often relied on the same group of twenty or so classic tracks. This much-discussed new wave of grime has formed around hostile, weaponised deconstructions of familiar sounds. At nights like Londonâs Boxed, you can expect to be totally assaulted by gunfingers and bass, with figures like Logos and Slackk completely obliterating and rebuilding their DJ sets with deranged intensity.But everything has been going on behind the decks, its key figures in grimeâs new wave only revealed by the blue backlight of CDJs. Whatâs been missing is the charisma of fresh-faced MCs who would rob your girl's phone number with little more than a knowing grin. Grime has stopped being flirty.South London crew The Square, led by MC and producer Novelist, set out to change that; bringing chat-up and punch lines back to the genre. The group, who are aged between 15 and 20 and are mostly still at school, made their intentions clear with debut single. âPengalengâ declares: âthat girl is a pengaleng and I might move to her frienaleng,â and continues chirpsing its way through batty-slapping high-hats and thrusting basslines.DeeJillz is one of seven official members of the crew, but thereâs more here today, drifting around Birthdays. âWeâve got bare members,â says Novelist, who adds that he recruits by just asking other teenagers on the streets around south London, âdo you spit?â Centred around Lewisham (by way of Brockley, Deptford, Sydenham and elsewhere in SE postcodes), the core is made up of four MCs, one producer, and two guys who do both. The groupâs debut mixtape, The Formula, is reminiscent of that first Boy Better Know mixtape, when beats and bars take equal presidence - all underscored by last-orders humour and canât-tell-if-youâre-joking threats.17-year-old Novelist is plainly, though unofficially, the ringleader. He made waves earlier this year as an MC with his feature on Mumdanceâs spiky and spacious tune âTake Timeâ on Rinse, as well as the release of his own instrumentals on an EP for Oil Gang. The whole group somehow clicks when he strolls in (heâs just been up the road getting a haircut), forming a circle around him and hushing up when he speaks. Check The Squareâs cyphers from the last couple of years on YouTube, and see how Nov is ever-present and ever-commanding, making good on the promise âyouâll never see a shit video with me in.â
The Squareâs appeal isnât in YouTube commenters dissecting the elaborate mechanics of their flows, but in the generational disjunction thatâs embodied in particular by Lolingo and Novelist: theyâre young MCs who came up on Flex FM, who look up to the likes of Crazy Titch, Kano and Chipmunk, but theyâre not just parroting or paying homage. Theyâre bringing their generational homegrown humour to a scene thatâs morphed into something alien and, in many ways, more chin-scratchy; bringing the sound of where theyâve come from to the sound of where weâre at.What grime needs in 2014 is MCs under 20 - Lewisham High Streetâs golden boys - who grin while they yell âIâll make your mum climaxâ over the crunch and smash of a Sir Spyro set.âYou see like, the Boxed stuff, I personally thought, do you know what, these guys havenât got an MC thatâs working with them,â says Novelist. âAnd theyâre all sick producers. Whatâs going on here? Itâs like, thereâs two sides of grime, the instrumental side and the MCs, and to me itâs like all the MCs were oblivious to what was going on with this side, with Boxed, and Mumdance, those guys. I thought, yeah, letâs make some different sounding stuff, letâs go with that. And Iâm trying to bring my crew down that avenue as well.âLolingo tells me that he feels at home in the Boxed crew because they embody something about the âauthentic sounds of grimeâ as much as The Square do. âEveryone who has been listening to grime during its early stages knows that music production wise the instrumentals were very gritty and mostly dark. But what sets me apart from the Boxed crew is that my productions are bubbly and fun.ââYou know what,â says Elf Kid, âgrime needs a batch of new faces, and thatâs us right now. Weâre not trying to follow anyone, weâre doing our own thing.â The Square are young, and they donât try to hide it (âGCSEs stress me out,â says Streema on the groupâs 2013 cypher). Their rhymes focus around girls, school, image and all the other things that teenage boys think about: but thereâs also tougher realities theyâre able to speak to from their south London upbringing. Violent crime looms large in the crewâs background, and theyâre vocal about it. Just last year, Lewisham was named the most unsafe place to live in the UK, with a homicide rate at twice the national average.Novelistâs voice takes on a frank tone. He speaks with his hands a lot. âWeâre just a product of the area we come from,â he says. âWeâre smarter than the people older than us - weâve seen what theyâve done, and what theyâve done wrong, and done it better. Weâre not getting in jail, weâre not getting arrested.â And yet, he says, they have had to live with violence in their daily lives. âSome of us have been stabbed, some of us have dodged bullets. This is actually happening. Itâs not a myth. You hear about these things on the news and you think oh, sounds controversial. Nah, itâs real man. I lost how many of my friends this year. I lost four or five of my bredrins.âWith scarcely a prompt, the crew are quick to explain how they see the relationship between violence and their music. Itâs something theyâre prepared to defend, as a streak of aggression runs through much of what they do. Novelist declares, âPut it this way yeah: you go into a museum, and you see a picture of a woman naked, painted. You donât look at the artist and say heâs a pervert. You say heâs an artist whoâs depicted something, shown it to the public how he sees it. Thatâs how people go in and view it. The same way as when we make music, weâre not trying to glorify it, weâre trying to show you what we see, how we see it.ââReally and truly, what weâre doing, itâs almost not even like grime,â he adds, on a sudden tangent. And itâs almost as if he could be speaking for any of the warped experimental factions of grime that have sprung up in the last couple of years, as he pinpoints exactly how weird and non-traditional yet cohesive their sound is. âWeâre not trying to be in anyoneâs crew, weâre just trying to release our energy. Some of our tunes are not even 140, but it still has that grime energy to it, that people would think itâs grime, naturally, even though itâs not. The way the beats are patterned, itâs not grime, but thatâs just our thing.âWhat grime is today is beyond beats that are programmed a certain way - instead, the thread that runs through it all is a sense of tension and uprising, a pushing of sound to brittle and bold points that havenât been explored before. The Square are out there on the brink of those sounds: theyâre there with pirate radio ringing in their ears, a wink on their faces and always a different girl on their arm.Follow Aimee on Twitter: @AimeeCliff
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âWe get down with the females!â says 18-year-old MC DeeJillz when I meet the crew on the âPengalengâ video shoot. âWith the grime scene now, weâre just hearing bare rough tunes, but we ainât heard no babe tunes, no girl tunes.âItâs a scorching summer afternoon, but weâre chilling in the basement of Birthdays where the boys are sitting on the bar and cracking each other up. While weâre talking, a slow trickle of girls peek in through the doorway. When one young lady he knows catches DeeJillzâs eye. He flashes a smile and calls to her, âHereâs a pengaleng!â Thereâs way more girls coming down for the video, they assure me.
Musically, Boxed is one of the best club nights you can go to in London, but itâs also a sausage fest, attracting a lot of head-nodding guys who spend most of the night tweeting the DJs âTrack ID?â So, I ask, are these guys out to bring the girls back into the club? The room erupts with yells of âyeah!â
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But Novelist is far from the only reason to get excited about The Sqaure. 17-year-old Streema, who calls himself the âtallest younger,â is a deadpan lothario (check his video for âIâm That Guyâ where he raps about the dimples in his cheeks and hints âno I ainât got a wifey, but I know that a lot of them do like meâ). Elf Kid will take your girl for a Nandos. DeeJillz has the slickest style of the crew in his âSpray Out Freestyleâ video (where heâs also got girls on his mind, obviously), and 20 year old producer Lolingo is as much at home flipping Amerie samples for the Boxed collective as he is moulding new eski templates for The Square to go in on.
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