The 9 best Grime tracks of all time
Grime
London MC music built on cheap software at 140 BPM, born on pirate radio in the east of the city around 2002. Square-wave basslines, no swing, and a vocal delivery that treats the beat as something to fight.
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Musical Mob / Pulse X
Two notes, a square wave and almost no other content. Usually named as the first grime record, and the reason an entire scene decided that a beat could be this bare and still work.
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Dizzee Rascal / I Luv U
Made at sixteen on a school computer. A row between two teenagers about a pregnancy, over a beat that sounds like the argument, and nothing in British music had sounded that unmediated before.
Lethal Bizzle / Pow! (Forward)
Eight MCs, one relentless beat, and a record banned from so many venues that the ban became part of its reputation. The genre's most efficient demonstration of what a posse cut is for.
XTC / Functions on the Low
A mournful string figure over a beat with nothing in the middle. Ignored for a decade, then rediscovered as the backing for Stormzy's Shut Up, which is a fair verdict on how good it always was.
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Wiley / Wot Do U Call It?
A single whose entire subject is the argument about what to call this music. Wiley refuses garage, refuses urban, and in refusing them names the thing by negation.
Jammer featuring Wiley, Kano, D Double E and Durrty Goodz / Destruction VIP
The clash record. Four of the best MCs in London taking turns over one beat, with D Double E's verse still cited as the high-water mark for the form.
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Skepta & JME / That's Not Me
The comeback, and a public apology for a decade of chasing American pop. Made for eighty pounds, on purpose, and it reset the scene's standards overnight.