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Words: Melissa Bradshaw
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Photography: Alice Rosenbaum
Everybody knows JME is a badman.
“In primary school I played the recorder. And then at secondary school
– Skepta used to play…I think it was the saxophone – that one that you have
all the bits you put together. But he only played it for like, a year…” (brrring
brrring) “Wait a sec. Jammer? I’m in an interview…oh oops, I hung up. So he
played the saxophone. And I was in the choir, I was lead tenor.”
Now he’s passed his second year at university while being probably the
hottest buttered Eccles cake in grime, dashing from country to country, crashing
motorbikes, raising the profile of Boy Better Know – an umbrella name for the
work of him, Wiley and Skepta (JME’s brother) – hitting the top of the MySpace
charts before Tom MySpace had even taken heard of The Plastician’s ‘Get Grime on MySpace’ campaign and added it to the music categories.
Poomplex, the second of the infamous JME mixtapes is BAAD! It’s great
for magpies, cuz grime beats have stopped sounding so shiny and new since
everyone is trying to sound like someone else, and people have forgotten that
the good grime was the stuff that turned sounds inside out and put the noises
in strange places: “Some people just go back to a track they did before, get the
page open, press ‘Save As’, give it a new name and just change the instruments
or the pattern slightly. I NEVER do that. Poomplex is grime tempo but it’s
anything goes really.” It’s in things like the mad drum pattern that drops
two-thirds of the way through classically grimey ‘RU Dumb’ and the all-out
innovations of ‘Pence’ that Boy Better Know gives the momentum you longed
for. On top of this, there’s the ultra-cool Tropical project, which started when
JME came home and found The Plastician and Skepta at his computer, making
some funky house for a laugh.
Yes, everyone knows JME is a badman. Yet though half the world – from
MTV to his mum, who takes his Boy Better Know T-shirts out of his wardrobe to
wear herself – follows his every move adoringly, he still needs his space, people,
cuz that’s how he writes best. At school he couldn’t MC to crowds even though
he’d been on radio: “At the radio station you can just stand on your own in the
corner…I still need to wee when I get to the stage door at performances! I had
to explode into some fake confidence – and it’s worked!”
Nowadays JME and his brother are the the kings of slangy memes: phrases
like “shuuhut yuh Mouth”, “gornen gornen”, and of course “boy better know”
– that originated in JME and Skepta’s youthful banter – are the staple of rude
(rooo) kids, er, worldwide. “Stereotypical lyrics just go straight past me, I don’t
even wanna listen. If you take your general conversation and start writing lyrics
from that…that’s the best. Like if someone’s said something that’s funny: the
best thing to catch someone onto a lyric is humour. Otherwise you’re forcing
yourself to write a lyric, which is kind of semi-ish fake, because you’re just trying
to be an MC.” Meanwhile, tracks like ‘96 Bars Of Revenge’ and ‘Serious’ have
established JME as a commentator on grime’s atavism, a microcosmic selfreliance that has been described as an ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude in the face
of blatant prejudices but which, without the necessary internal quality control
mechanisms, can (and does) produce repetitiveness and flaccidity.
Did the younger Jamie Adenuga ever envisage his glittering status?
“No! I thought I’d MC for a little while, then go to uni and be a big man
with a car and a job in an office. I thought I’d still somehow work in music. But
everything we do now is musical, even the clothes we wear. I saw someone
in my T-Shirt in Oxford Street the other day, so I shouted “Boy Better Know”
and he shouted back! I think I’ll do this forever.”
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