Rinse:17 — Elijah & Skilliam
Is this CD the most dense concentration of creative energy in grime 2011?
It’s the culmination of nearly two years work by a duo that began as enthusiastic outsiders and now find themselves catalysing a tight knit community who are redistributing the fundamental power balances within grime. Where the MCs dominated the genre for the last decade, now the producers and DJs are taking the grime back to the raves. Butterz: it’s about to get ugly.
Elijah and Skilliam grew up in east London and became friends at uni in Hertfordshire, primarily because they both liked grime. “We were outcasts,” jokes Elijah of their university friendship groups. “The majority [of people’s tastes] were like ‘Friday night, put-on-a-shit-shirt-and-listen-to-Baywatch-riddim.’ We liked our own kind of music from London.”
They were all set for successful if somewhat conventional careers when a setback changed their lives. Elijah had been offered a steady office job, starting the next Monday. “On Friday [the boss] called me up and said ‘bad news, this music thing. We looked at it on Google and we think it would be a conflict of interest.’” Grime had parred three years of uni. But in a trait that would become one of their calling cards, Elijah switched this setback to his advantage, making it a turning point for his life and soon, for grime itself.
“Why in the hell would you start DJing grime in 2008?” asks Elijah rhetorically. Primarily because your would-be boss just found your pirate radio sets on Google but that’s hardly a long lasting reason, especially when UK funky was then exploding. A better motive would be because you’re fiercely passionate about the scene and when few people had faith in it, you still did. Someone else must have seen the strength of their belief too because around this time Rinse FM offered them a pilot show. Using the connections he’d built as a grime blogger, Elijah then had two days to pull together the most upfront selection they could locate.
Rinse had taken leap of faith on two unknown grime DJs and they weren’t about to let the station down. While the scene’s A-list DJs were off supporting MCs on promo tours, Elijah and Skilliam used their show as a platform to showcase all the latent, unrecognised new production talent within grime. “We treated Thursday 1 till 3am like its the prime EastEnders kind of slot,” asserts Elijah. To them, every show is sacred and should “sound like a CD.”
On the foundation of their Rinse radio show, the duo soon built a label, merchandising, raves, an A&R consultancy but most of all a focused community, aligned to one mission. “Most other Grime DJs only see their job as playing good records,” explains Elijah “But Skilliam and I really go the extra mile to make good tunes happen in the first place. Hooking up producers and MCs with stuff they would sound good on. That is how most of the records have formed on the label, not just because we have picked up whatever has been working. We have built up most tunes from scratch as a team.”
When you step back from a decade’s worth of evolution in grime, what initially made it the hottest sound on the planet (its unique London MC-lead sense of identity) also limited its global spread. How could global newcomers participate if they had to be from east to spit? What’s unique about the redistribution of power that Elijah, Skilliam and the Butterz camp have pioneered is that suddenly where you’re from is no longer a pre-condition to involvement. It’s where you’re at.
Martin Clark
LDN Autumn 2011
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