A portion taken from The Pirates Dilemma by Matt Mason (Former Editor of RWD). I know you children don't read much, but try and read this.


"But it wasn’t to be. A few MCs from the scene crossed over to mainstream success, but you can count them on one hand—Dizzee was by far the most successful. The media attention was too much, too soon. Grime was pigeonholed as antisocial and violent. The harsh picture of street life painted by MCs quickly painted the entire scene into a corner. It lived fast and died young like punk, but stayed intangible as a commercial entity. Record companies couldn’t work out how to sell it, and commercial radio didn’t want to play it; it was “too urban,” they said. U.S. R&B divas and manufactured bands put together by reality
TV shows were much safer bets. Some artists had reasonable album sales, but reasonable was no longer cutting it at the majors.


By late 2005, interest in grime was dwindling in the mainstream press; even Dizzee was distancing himself as he became a bigger artist, and it became increasingly clear he might outlive the scene that birthed him. “People couldn’t make up their minds anyway, from ‘I Luv U,’ saying, ‘Wass this? Wass dat?’” he said to me in defense that year.
“People are scared of adjusting. That’s why I don’t like to attach myself to one scene no more, ’cos people can’t make up their minds.” The next time I saw him was at a party thrown for him by Nike, celebrating the release of his own limited-edition brand of Dizzee Rascal/Nike sneakers. Dizzee was now a millionaire and a household name. He decided to move on.

The mainstream media was thoroughly bored of grime by 2006, and had moved on, too. On the underground it began to sound past its sell-by date and the scene began to split into even smaller ones. Many fans and pirate DJs migrated to a new strain of the funky house scene that was taking shape, or to the emerging nu-rave scene, or to grime’s more cerebral cousin, a bass heavy nano culture known as dubstep. Grime seemed to rise and fall inside of three years. It was a flash in the pan like punk, but in a world where the media are fragmented into millions of pieces, it’s hard to build consensus and a commercial after- life around a scene the way punk did. Youth culture is now disposable. Hip-hop in the United States is championing a shiny new local interpretation of itself every month, while a hot new rock band arrives every week as last week’s heads for the stage door. What has changed is the amount of choices we have. We have so much music available to us, the sample size is too large—it’s impossible to observe change. Youth culture can no longer rebel against the status quo in music, because there isn’t one.

Despite the backlash, grime survives, though only just. New artists continue to emerge, but remain off the mainstream grid. It is part of music’s more democratic model that exists without the major institutions. Many of the scenes most respected artists have formed loose knit networks of their own within grime, such as the Boy Better Know collective, producing their own albums and merchandise with no relationship to the majors, or the mainstream, at all. The niche market grime relies on is small, but the network at its disposal is global. Its message travels through forums and MP3 files—artists are booked to play all over the world because of Internet portals such as MySpace. It has a worldwide fan base; mainstream hip-hop artists including Jay-Z, LL Cool J, and Lil Jon have all acknowledged it."

The books out in shops now, the rest ain't Grime, but you can put it in a Grime context. Its a heavy read. Big up Matt

Check out more of his stuff on www.thepiratesdilemna.com Download the book (PDF) HERE