Dizzee Rascal – Boy In Da Corner

I heard this when I was still living in Cumbria, just before I moved to Leeds. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before: just the anger and wit, and the way everything sounded super-direct and aggressive but with laugh-out-loud moments too. I saw him perform live when he released his next record, and it’s still the best hip-hop show I’ve ever seen – he was so magnetic and had so much energy. Because I’m getting on a bit, my complaint is always that new grime isn’t as good as Boy In Da Corner, which isn’t really fair – it’s like saying something isn’t as good as Low. This is a classic record and it’s stood the test of time, and still sounds pretty wild when you listen to it now. I don’t think Wiley was involved in actually making it – although he is on one track – but it’s very Wiley-influenced, with that high-end fizziness to it which was so new at the time, thanks to Reason and Logic and that plugin sound. There was a lot I wanted to understand but didn’t about this record until I moved and met people who grew up in Wood Green and Tottenham, who loved it because this was their music – it was what they knew. And that was big for me, that sense of it not being an abstract thing, but more ‘this is really happening.’