Dizzee Rascal insists he invented grime.
The ‘Dance Wiv Me’ hitmaker says he’s been subjected to a lot of comments about how he is only going back to the genre because it has had a resurgence in the UK, but is adamant he was doing it long before the likes of Stormzy, Skepta, Wiley and Kano and that his new record ‘Raskit’ isn’t grime.
The 32-year-old Londoner also says ‘Big For Your Boots’ hitmaker Stormzy has told him he’s been a big influence on his music.
Dizzee told NME magazine: "I get people moaning like, ‘Ah, you’re trying to come back to grime, now?’ What are you talking about? I was making grime before anyone else.
"That’s not something that’s even really out there as a fact, but at the same time you’ve got people like Stormzy bigging me up, saying that I’m the one who influenced him. And you can hear it."
And on how he’s gone for a different approach on his follow-up to 2013’s ‘The Fifth’, he said: "Of course I could feel that a lot of people were calling for me to make a rap or grime album – I don’t live on the moon. I didn’t want to make people bounce up and down. I feel like I’ve maxed out on it."
Instead of writing upbeat songs to make people dance this time round, Dizzee – whose real name is Dylan Kwabena Mills – has revisited the "isolation" he felt when he was forced to move out of the council estate home he shared with his mum in Bow in London’s East End because he feared he would be hounded by press after they camped outside of his house in 2003 after his Mercury Prize win for ‘Boy In Da Corner’.
He said: "It was very isolating. It upset people too: I had friends who thought they should be able to follow me everywhere, but I realised early that having a big group of people with me all the time wasn’t going to make my job easier."
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Dizzee Rascal: I invented grime
