Dizzee Rascal's Boy In Da Corner: Album Review

Dizzee Rascal is said to have been expelled from four schools and sent away from every class beside music lessons. But, encouraged by his music teacher, he'd spend his free time mostly on a school computer, testing out production ideas. By 14 he was already an amateur DJ. And by 18 he’d dropped a gem of a debut grime album: Boy In Da Corner (2003).

Grime music developed in early 2000s London. It's a form of jagged, aggressive electronic dance music (EDM) that mixes hip hop, dance hall and jungle (electronic music meets roots reggae meets dancehall). Emceeing or rap is a core element of grime, which originated from UK Garage (UKG), itself a form of dance music that incorporates elements of dance-pop and R&B. This was the format Dizzee was working with. But he elevated the template with a fresh and stubborn DIY attitude on an impressively self-produced first album. His sense of music is unsettlingly beautiful. He’s in his production doing music and more, incorporating atypical, atonal sound materials as much as distorted vocal samples and musical instruments. Anything to him is music.

Here, video game and arcade aesthetics tumble into gunshots and sirens and flat hi-hats and bursts of rock guitar which beat over chopped up electronic pulses and machine bleeps and 2D melodies and techno pounds and clatters of synthesizers and bass frequencies, Rascal's growls and gulps and yelps and yells all the while jabbing the air. He spits his words, his lyrics, at his beat, slapping and smashing them at the spiky sounds and rocky sonic, like dough, like eggs. His voice is vexed, vigorous, venomous. His music is rough, harsh, barely danceable. It's is a big, ugly success of a production.

Dizzee, born Dylan Kwabena Mills, born 1984, is from East London. On this first masterpiece he trains his eyes on his environment like a grasshopper’s on a stalk. This is the attitude he sports on the opener “Sittin’ Here,” an album highlight, a stand out, a strong start. He’s just sitting there, he ain’t saying much, he’s only watching every detail. “It’s the same old story, ninja bikes, gun fights and scary nights.” He’s weighed down by his thoughts. “Plus I think I’m getting weak ‘cause my thoughts are too strong.” He’s thinking of a time past. “It was only yesterday, life was a touch more sweet.” Like that he sits, thinking wagwan. 

Then on he goes throughout the album to fill us in on wagwan: loveless romantic tangles, teenage pregnancy, gun fights, etc., etc. All a revolving cycle of gloom. Even the promise of hope is almost no hope. On “Brand New Day” Rascal raps: “Looks like I’m losing hope, ‘cause I climb this mountain without rope.” Then he quips: “I plan to make my paper, put some away for an off key day (Uh, put it away).” The hope is only strong enough to keep him afloat in the hood. To listen to the album is to ready for an aggressive East London despair-filled excess of youthfulness. This is harsh music about harsh realities. And Rascal's got a big beat, a big mouf, and a big mind. All the things he spends on his small neighbourhood.

Like the fresh, then-futuristic production, the lyrics here have a fresh aura about them. MCs, solo and group acts, were mostly celebrating violence and macho vibes, equating them with success. Rascal himself was then a member of the Wiley-founded grime crew Roll Deep. (He joined in 2001 and left in ‘03.) But he finds holes in his blood-ready brio and slots in vulnerabilities like pocket squares. He depicts violence and dark energy not as a lofty dream but as a matter of fact, a way of life. He brags like a god but he’s human and he’s violent for he has to. On “Cut ‘Em Off” he threatens a blud who thinks he’s tough: “I’ll chop you up and share you out between your friends.” Meanwhile he’s claimed earlier, with an unsaid smirk, “I’m just crazy.” Of course he is. But, in a twist, he raps: “And just remember this, I am you.” That’s being vulnerable. Bruh is human, his violent lyrics punctuated with moments of fragility.

Rascal is like that, scaring off his adversaries but also drawing them close. On tracks like “Stop Dat” and “Jus’ a Rascal” he digs his teeth into letters and words and bites them so deep and so hard, shredding them like old fabrics. His opps will feel their knees quaking listening to his songs. (On “Cut ‘Em Off” he warns: “Stop dreaming, I’m your worst nightmare.”) But they might also be weighed down by the despair that, though they live, they’re now experiencing from a distance, even if a short one. Rascal might scare them, his opps. But he also might catch their hearts off guard, blowing the big, hard things open like rusted padlocks.

All the while his writing stays sharp, harsh, British. Street-heavy English dipped in Jamaican Patois. On “I Luv U” he gives a lecture on synonyms, calling oral sex different names. One girl gives brains, one knowledge, one head, one shines, one BJs. This is clean, dirty MCing. On “Cut ‘Em Off” he spits, “My butterfly leave you looking like a sieve.” Butterfly is short for butterfly knife. This is street language anchored on dark humour. The mix of violence and humour like this textures the album all through. On “Fix U, Look Sharp” he yelps: “...you got a bright future/Don't let my gun affect it.” LOL.

Kwabena has released seven albums since his debut. He’s become an OG. But he’d have easily attained such status with just that first project. It’d have been to him what the Miseducation of Lauryn Hills is to Ms. Lauryn Hills and Mos Def and Kweli Talib Are Black Stars to Black Star. Not to forget that this here is the album that pushed grime music into both mainstream and critical acclaim, topping charts and bagging the Mercury Prize, making Rascal the first to do it best, a primus inter pares. But BIDC, released in 2003 in the UK, 2004 in the US, which makes it at least two decades old anywhere in the world, still sounds like it was released yesterday. It’s an album that catches up on time. A classic.