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| Photo by Alex Sturrock | |
THE DARKEST WHITE BOY
Skream Raises Hell
Despite our constant support and coverage of grime we still get criticised for focusing on the more aggressive (interesting) aspects of the scene, while ignoring its cousin, dubstep (which is kind of like dark, spaced-out grime with lots of sub bass and no vocals). This may be because up until now, dubstep has been the most boring, techie scene imaginable, made up of of white middle-aged bloggers worshipping a brace of 18 inch drive units and losing their shit every time the bass drops below 30 hertz (human hearing stops at around 20). So, when a 19-year-old white kid from Croydon called Skream produced a tune called “Midnight Request Line” that sounds like Robocop hotwiring R2D2 on a heavy downer of Quaaludes and baby food we took absolutely no notice...that is until it started getting reloads every week on Roll Deep's Rinse FM show, Dizzee started freestyling over it, Skepta cut a vocal version and Wiley started showing up at Plastic People's dubstep night FWD every fortnight just to hear Skream's new dubs. The kid is single-handedly responsible for uniting the two scenes as well as black and white brothers once again. Albeit white brothers with ponytails and dreadlocks, but yeah, we love dubstep.
Vice: What did you used to do for Halloween when you were a kid?
Skream: I just used to go around and terrorise the area, basically. Just, you know, the usual, egging people and egging houses. The usual shit.
When I was six, my mum done me up as the Hellraiser, though. That film was a bit of a headfuck, man. It used to scare the shit out of me when I was younger, but my mum thought it was funny.
Have you ever seen something as horrific as Hellraiser in real life?
Well, when I’ve been doing pills, I’ve seen my mate asleep on the bed and it looked like his head was hollow and all burned out and that. I’ve had loads of little trippy experiences.
Another time, I looked at myself in the mirror once and it looked like I had long ginger hair and a big mole on my face and then I blinked and it was normal again. That scared the shit out of me.
CLARENCE STATELY-HOLMES
“Midnight Request Line” is out on October 10th on Tempa Records.
Please note: All bloggers who get pissed off because we guessed the wrong time
signature or because we dumb down “the scene”—WE DON’T CARE!!
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