Events | 2009.10.31
The second coming of Britpop
It has been a long, rocky road for homegrown urban music in the UK, but this year N-Dubz and a close-knit group of stars have stormed the charts. Ben Thompson hails the new Brit pop scene\'s key players
It\'s just before 3am on a Friday in October. The paparazzi are still hunting for scraps on the street outside the glitzy May Fair hotel, like city foxes going through the bins. Supposedly there was an improbable summit meeting between Jordan and Cheryl Cole going on inside earlier. And Mel B and her husband are also in residence. But the picture they really want – and the one which will be splashed all over the Sun\'s Bizarre column on the Saturday – is of petite but formidable N-Dubz vocalist Tulisa Contostavlos.
As anyone who saw the hysterical crowd response N-Dubz elicited when winning Mobo awards for Best UK Act and Best Album in Glasgow at the end of September will realise, this charismatic Camden trio are currently neck and neck with Dizzee Rascal and X Factor alumni Alexandra Burke, Leona Lewis and JLS in the race to be Britain\'s biggest pop phenomenon. Of every 10 teenagers who have annoyed their elders by broadcasting newly Bluetoothed music selections very loudly via their mobile phones on the back of the bus over the past two years, it seems probable that at least seven have been listening to a track featured on N-Dubz\'s irresistibly infectious debut album Uncle B .
Although still only in their early 20s, N-Dubz are anything but overnight sensations. Having got together in their early teens as Lickle Rinsers Crew, Tulisa, her diminutive but tirelessly ebullient first cousin Dino "Dappy" Contostavlos, and their laid-back childhood friend Richard "Fazer" Rawson, are now in their 10th year of making music together. And in Suite 451 of the May Fair hotel, the second stage in the narrative masterplan which will cement their newfound status in Britain\'s showbiz elite is gradually unfolding
On the left as you walk in is a room packed with 30 people; electricians, make-up artists, set-builders, managers, PRs, record company heads of marketing. Sprawled on a banquette sofa peering intently at a monitor is Dale "Rage" Resteghini – a top-flight American video director who has worked with Souljah Boy and Busta Rhymes, and who justifies his dyspeptic sobriquet with frequent mini-tantrums and despairing cries of "But this is a narrative moment, not a performance moment!". On the right is a sulky-looking model in a bath, an industry minimum of foam preserving a strategic vestige of modesty.
She\'s going to need all the protection she can get, because on the shout of "action", Dappy will be unleashed. N-Dubz\'s hyperactive songwriter/MC is dressed as a Burberry pirate – bare-chested beneath his sumptuous plaid jacket, with three jewelled crosses jangling against the bony xylophone of his ribcage. Best-known (in sartorial terms) for the ludicrous pom-pom headgear that has upped the takings of many a Camden market stallholder in recent months, tonight\'s shoot finds him sporting a huge, flapping three-cornered fur hat whose furry wings brush the shoulders of passers-by like bats whose radar has gone awry. To say that Dappy is all over his scantily clad co-star like a rash the moment the cameras are rolling would be to over-estimate the virulence of the average skin complaint. "That scene was absolutely sexual," he proclaims afterwards, with obvious satisfaction
Perhaps not surprisingly, given that this is their second consecutive all-night shoot (with a full day\'s workload in-between), his two bandmates are less boisterous. Producer/MC Fazer explains the thinking behind the diamond-studded Garfield pendant he wears around his neck – "That cat is like me: all he wants to do is sleep and eat" – while singer Tulisa looks back on the previous night\'s location filming. "Standing in eight-inch heels on a wooden pier in the middle of the Thames at four o\'clock in the morning with no jacket," she recalls, poignantly. "It\'s not fun."
This is the second video N-Dubz have made with Resteghini. The first one – for current single I Need You – cost a hefty £50,000 (with a hired helicopter with the band\'s name on the side thrown in) but looks the proverbial million dollars. In its first four days on YouTube, it had almost 2 million hits. Showcasing chief lyricist Dappy\'s dexterous use of half-rhyme (via a snazzy "Facebook/face back/haystack" rhyme-scheme), as well as Tulisa\'s mastery of pathos ("You left me standing in my LBD [Little Black Dress] /In my bang-bang shoes, I was so confused"), I Need You\'s salty snapshot of 21st-century courtship rituals sets the scene perfectly for the drama that is about to unfold.
The follow-up video, Neva Did It, will find Tulisa sneaking a peak at the text messages of the extravagantly buff male consort she acquired in the first. The contrast in the lyrics between her " CSI behaviour", and the " Alfie behaviour" of her bandmates establishes the perfect equilibrium of yin and yang which is the secret of N-Dubz\'s success. "Male perspective/female perspective: to the extreme – that\'s our thing," Dappy explains.
"There\'s going to be some bad language now," Tulisa warns, as she prepares to shoot the scene in which she confronts the hulking actor – dubbed "Goliath" by Dappy –who plays her errant Adonis. She then puts her two years of experience on Channel 4\'s late-night interactive grime soap Dubplate Drama to good use, her torrent of improvised invective culminating in the most defiantly Anglo-Saxon of all expletive combinations. By putting their own very British twist on the grand tradition of modern US R&B storytelling that links TLC\'s No Scrubs and R Kelly\'s Trapped in the Closet, N-Dubz have created a bespoke brand of urban narrative that British listeners of all social and ethnic backgrounds can relate to.
Beyond even such seductive plot lines, however, lies a bigger story. Over the past year and a half, Dappy, Tulisa and Fazer have headed a group of young, London-based rappers and singers who have climbed through the hole in the music industry glass ceiling blown by Dizzee Rascal\'s three No 1s on his own independent label. In doing so, they have taken British urban music from the basement to the penthouse. N-Dubz, Tinchy and Chipmunk\'s charity-minded collaboration on the current War Child single – a group cover of the Killers\' Tory conference fave All These Things That I\'ve Done – spurred even David Cameron to say "it\'s a great track", his first public declaration of support for the genre (though whether that is a cause for celebration is moot).
Without wishing to give even momentary succour to those who want to dub them "The Brrraap Pack", if you removed the interlocking contributions of the four acts gathered on this month\'s OMM cover from 2009\'s pop pie chart, you would be left with a very meagre pie indeed. There were three weeks at No 1 for N-Dubz and Tinchy Stryder, three weeks for Taio (pronounced Ty-o) Cruz, who also co-wrote Tinchy and Sugababe Amelle Berrabah\'s Never Leave You (one week), and most recently a first week at the top for Chipmunk. And when set in context, the ubiquity of this mutually supportive cadre of MCs, songwriters, producers and vocalists becomes still more remarkable. Since the start of this decade, when the thriving UK garage scene was first marginalised by the disastrous strategy of calling all music made by black people "urban" and everything else "pop", there seems to have been a tacit agreement within the British record business to ensure that only white performers should be allowed to have careers singing black music. You didn\'t have to be a racial conspiracy theorist to trace a direct line from the 2001 Brit awards (when four times-nominated Craig David turned up in his union flag jumper, but walked away empty-handed) to the subsequent triumphs of Joss Stone, Jamie Cullum and Amy Winehouse, and sense that something fishy was afoot.
So how did what Dizzee Rascal\'s manager, Cage, calls "this fresh batch" of sparky, upbeat writer-performers overturn this dubious hierarchy, in the process transforming the "British urban" category from a millstone to a badge of honour? Resourcefulness, an open-minded collaborative aesthetic and many years of hard work ("from Opal Fruits before Starburst", as Tinchy Stryder puts it): these have been the hallmarks of their successful quest to shrug off what Cage tartly terms "the stigma of kids from Guildford with chips on their shoulders, moaning about how they couldn\'t sell any records".
Taio Cruz\'s background is a testament to the social inclusiveness of Britain\'s new urban elite. "I\'m not from the ghetto," confesses the singer born Adetayo Ayowale Onile Ere, blithely – his music\'s highly processed sheen belying an engaging conversational candour – "I went to public school." Cruz\'s first big break was as much about whom he knew as what he knew. The college room-mate of a friend of his was going out with someone who worked for Def Jam. This well-connected boyfriend heard one of Taio\'s home-recorded demos playing in the background during a phone conversation, asked what it was, and the next thing this level-headed 18-year-old knew, he was signed to a US publishing deal, and swapping beats with Timbaland.
Over the next four years, however, Taio earned his spurs, collaborating with super-producers Jazze Pha and Rich Harrison – writing for Usher and Britney Spears among others – and being called "the new Babyface" by another top producer, Dallas Austin. The first time I met him was in the autumn of 2007, when he was preparing to release his solo debut Departure (later to achieve the dubious honour of being one of Simon Cowell\'s favourite albums of 2008). At this point, Cruz was bemoaning the fact that the closest thing you\'d hear to a soul record on daytime Radio 1 at the time was the single by X Factor winner Shayne Ward. A new song with exactly the same kind of production by a black artist (for example, Taio himself) would almost inevitably be consigned to 1Xtra\'s urban enclave.
In turning this situation around, the strategically minded Cruz harnessed a fundamental truth about the British music-buying public. "If you look at the dance music that people love in this country – from disco to Michael Jackson to European house," Cruz explains now, en route to a record signing session at HMV in Milton Keynes, "it\'s nearly always got that four/four beat: the simplicity of the driving kick drum and the snare." Even as Cruz\'s single Come on Girl was blending classic pop song-craft with upfront, rave-tinged, four-to-the-floor production, a performer from a very different musical and social background was coming to a similar conclusion.
While Dizzee Rascal\'s third album, Maths + English , had made a bold bid to expand his musical palette, the jaunty R&B of Flex hadn\'t quite taken him as far as he was ready to go. "When we\'d do festivals and shows where it wasn\'t just Dizzee\'s crowd," Cage remembers, "we could see that a lot more people wanted to buy into him; they just needed the music to enable them to do that."
The idea of Bow\'s MC laureate teaming up with brazen trance cheese-meister Calvin Harris might have horrified the NME , but it went down a storm with the nation\'s teenage girls. And the chart-topping exploits of Dance Wiv Me and the suitably aspirational Wearing My Rolex (by famously cranky "godfather of grime" and Dizzee\'s one-time mentor, Wiley) gave up-and-coming acts something to aim for.
Eighteen-year-old Tottenham rapper Chipmunk (Jahmaal Noel Fyffe to his mum), who recently had his first No 1, the infernally catchy Oopsy Daisy, shortly after receiving his A-level results (B, C and D in drama, sociology, and critical thinking, since you\'re asking) cites "watching Dizzee grow" as his biggest formative influence. A grime scene stalwart since his early teens, Tinchy Stryder (real name Kwasi Danquah) saw Dizzee behind the decks as a drum\'n\'bass DJ in his local youth club before the latter\'s MCing career had even begun. Tinchy is now the biggest selling British male artist of the year, with his own Star in the Hood clothing line, and an MTV EMA nomination as best newcomer.
For Tinchy, the example of what went wrong for Wiley after Wearing My Rolex (he released a major label album he\'d already disowned that reached No 139 in the charts), was also instructive. "After Rolex went to No 1," Tinchy remembers sympathetically, on his way to film a performance for T4, "he didn\'t want to make other songs like that… but then I suppose if he changed his ways he wouldn\'t be Wiley."
Unlike his guilt-ridden forebear, the 22-year-old Tinchy "ain\'t got the time to start worrying about what someone\'s got to say on an internet forum". And forsaking the insularity that was one of the grime scene\'s biggest self-imposed handicaps in favour of a newfound willingness to give people what they want has opened up new vistas of creative and commercial possibility.
With Tinchy Stryder\'s current single borrowing the hook of Olive\'s You\'re Not Alone, and Dizzee\'s Dirtee Cash making hay with a reworked sample from Bedfordshire rave titan Stevie V, Britain\'s grime crossover shock troops are ransacking their cheesy raver heritage with the same gleeful abandon that early US rappers recycled James Brown and George Clinton. "One of the reasons European-sounding tracks work so well with UK rappers on," Taio Cruz explains, "is that it doesn\'t feel like they\'re trying to be American."
The music Taio, N-Dubz and their fellow musical travellers are making belongs to a broader tradition of multicultural British pop whose defining characteristic is that it makes a lot of people happy. This is a pantheon that includes Intuition by Lynx, Just an Illusion by Imagination, Princess\'s Say I\'m Your Number One, Hanging on a String by Loose Ends, Derek B\'s Get Down, Back to Life by Soul II Soul, On a Ragga Tip by SL2, UK Apache & Shy FX\'s Original Nuttah, Craig David\'s 7 Days, So Solid Crew\'s 21 Seconds, and pretty much anything by Five Star. And while many of its most illustrious denizens had subcultural origins, they all paddle quite happily within the mainstream of British pop.
Consider the choice pub quiz nugget that both Dappy and Tulisa from N-Dubz\'s dads – the Contostavlos brothers – played for years in later incarnations of 70s band Mungo Jerry. The sleevenotes to N-Dubz\'s 600,000-selling album Uncle B (named in honour of Dappy\'s dad Byron, the band\'s mentor and manager until his tragic early death from a heart attack on 12 April 2007) resolve any potential contradiction between these wholesome pop antecedents and the band\'s roughneck urban appeal with characteristic dialectical elegance, describing Mungo Jerry as being "known for many hits, including In the Summertime, which was covered by Shaggy".
The poignant tale of how Byron Contostavlos guided N-Dubz through their impecunious early years – only to be found dead on his sofa, waiting for their latest video to get played on Channel U, just as they were starting to make it – is only the most dramatic of the series of heart-warming sagas by means of which Britain\'s new urban pop elite have fought their way into the spotlight. In the absence of major record label support, Malcolm X\'s "by any means necessary" seems to have been their entrepreneurial watchword.
N-Dubz are now managed by Jonathan Shalit, who also shepherded the rise of Charlotte Church and represents Christopher Biggins ("Mr Shalit pulls big strings," says Dappy respectfully. "He can get us on GMTV and The Paul O\'Grady Show" ). Tinchy Stryder\'s managerial connections to Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk, have been well-documented , as has the fact that Dizzee Rascal\'s self-consciously cutting-edge label XL didn\'t "get" Dance Wiv Me, obliging him and Cage to go it alone via their own Dirtee Stank imprint. But the perfect illustration of the new British urban elite\'s can-do attitude is probably the remarkable Will Smith-meets- High-School-Musical promo epic for Chipmunk\'s last but one single Chip Diddy Chip.
Independently produced for an astonishingly reasonable 10 grand, it was probably this spectacular video which finally won Chipmunk the deal with Sony that has just taken his debut album to No 2 in the charts (the same first week placing as Tinchy, and one higher than Dizzee). "The location – Gladesmore school [in Tottenham] – we got for free, because I went there," Chipmunk explains in a car on his way to an engagement at MTV, "and I pulled in lots of favours. N-Dubz came down because I\'d supported them for nothing on tour. [ Britain\'s Got Talent runners-up] Flawless came through for me, because they\'re from my ends as well."
Chipmunk\'s intentions are unapologetically populist. "Why does it always have to say \'urban artist gets to No 1?\'" he demands plaintively. "Everyone else can just be an \'artist\', why do we have to have an \'urban\' in the front?"
An underlying factor in this de-urbanising process is the shadowy influence of Simon Cowell. When the Popjustice website jokingly compared last month\'s Mobos to the old Smash Hits Awards, it was Cowell\'s success in – as new Virgin Records boss Shabs Jobanputra puts it – "taking a sanitised version of urban music to a Daily Mail audience", via Leona, Alexandra, and JLS, that had largely paved the way for the unabashedly mainstream tone of the proceedings.
That the last three acts to have benefited from the patronage of the man who brought the world Robson and Jerome should all have been black is as good a measure as any of the music industry\'s rapidly shifting mindset. TV talent shows have come a long way from the days when Lemar only came fourth in the BBC\'s Fame Academy , and a teenage Taio Cruz was "bewildered" by the failure of the manifestly-better-at-singing-and-dancing-than-Nicola-Roberts Javine Hylton to make the final line-up of Girls Aloud.
This year\'s Mobos saw long-term aspirations to institutional status finally fulfilled in the gleaming eyes of an over-excited Glaswegian crowd. "We never wanted the Mobos to be a niche event," explains the awards\' founder Kanya King, MBE. "Ever since we started 14 years ago, we\'d always got loads of emails asking \'Why does it always have to be in London?\' And the reception we got in Scotland made it a landmark year for us. I think there is a new generation of Britishness coming through, where black, white, and mixed-race people all identify themselves equally as coming from the UK, and the music of people like Chipmunk and N-Dubz is a culture they can share."
Where once major record labels tried to lead the public, now the public – and the artists – are showing the labels how to do things. Shabs Jobanputra (whose previous label, Relentless, brought the world both So Solid Crew and Joss Stone) credits Britain\'s new urban pop elite with "creating a new business model: downloads, live, T-shirts, and then the album is the icing on the cake". Dizzee\'s manager Cage is even more optimistic: "This is the beginning of our industry," he enthuses. "There\'s nothing for us to be embarrassed about any more."
The upcoming third instalment of the N-Dubz video triptych will certainly push back the boundaries in that regard. The hotly anticipated promotional film for the band\'s no-holds-barred safe sex anthem You Should Have Put Something On (sample lyric: "I ain\'t getting rid of shit") will find Tulisa putting her considerable acting skills to the test by simulating the experience of childbirth. "You\'ll see the top half of her in hospital with people holding their hands out and all the veins popping out and everything," says Dappy excitedly.
On the Saturday afternoon of OMM\'s photo shoot, Chipmunk, Tinchy and Taio will head off to Wembley Arena to do two sold-out gigs for the nation\'s Girl Guides. N-Dubz were meant to play these shows too, but instead have to head back up to Yorkshire at the last minute to put the finishing touches to their new album Against All Odds (which features a song co-written with Gary Barlow, as well as guest appearances from Wiley, Mr Hudson, and superstar Greek rapper Nivo). This work had to be suspended the previous week when the supposedly secret location of N-Dubz\'s Castleford studio turned out to be next door to a school, and a mini-riot ensued.
"The Girl Guides can scream later," Dappy maintains, confidently. "And they\'re gonna scream even louder when they find out we\'ve completed 14 new tracks." N-Dubz\'s album is released on 16 November; Chipmunk, Tinchy Stryder and Taio Cruz\'s LPs are out now
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/01/ndubz-dappy-tinchy-taio
Sesen Launches to Advance Life Sciences Globally With Specialized Language Translations views: 1545
Instagram is adding automatic in-app text translation - The Verge views: 1539