24/11/2020
TOP 5 LOCKDOWN PURCHASES.. 5 records in 5 days
🔴 【ＤＡＹ ＴＨＲＥＥ】– Jon E Cash – War (VIP) 🔴
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ghY6sZt84
TLDR: this is a bit of a longer one! I’ve wanted to do a long read on early grime for ages, I might do a bit more research and put a blog up or something. Let me know your thoughts, I know the timeline stuff can get a little contentious 😬
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I’ve been eyeing up this record for yonks, and finally decided to take the plunge and fork out for it over lockdown. I first heard it in THAT T.Williams Boiler Room/RBMA mix (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJst_unJlVQ), and it blew me away. For this series I thought I’d explain a bit about the history of this really early grime stuff, where it came from, who was making it, and who is Jon E Cash.
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- In the early 2000s, during the height of UK garage, there was a feeling amongst many in the underground that house and garage had become too uplifting and cheesy, and particularly from hip hop heads, people wanted a darker sound that spoke more to them, which MCs could spit over.
- So, two splinter genres broke away - 2-step, and then this early grime stuff, which I’m going to call proto-grime (to me Jon E Cash and the rest of Black Ops are the earliest records that you can listen back to and clearly identify as grime).
- 2-step (El-B, Zed Bias etc.) was the first to evolve out of garage, and definitely had a darker sound, pushing it in a new direction with boomy, subby basslines and sparse arrangements. But it was also still clearly recognisable as a relative of garage, keeping the characteristic skippy, swung drum patterns that differentiated garage from house.
- Proto-grime, on the other hand, had almost entirely lost the swing to the beats, the drum patterns more closely resembling hip hop beats than garage (albeit it MUCH faster). It was first picked up in a major way by DJ Slimzee, who began playing artists like Jon E Cash on his Rinse FM show.
- Jon E Cash started the DJ collective and record label BLACK OPS along with DJ Charmzy & DJ Dread D (now known as T.Williams), and together they pioneered early grime music. They named it Black Ops because to them it meant ‘above the law’.
- Jon E Cash started out in the early 90s as a graffiti artist, and started visiting New York regularly, which introduced him to hip hop, as well as Kiss FM, which was then still a pirate radio station.
- The tune itself is completely raucous - wailing leads, tense string stabs, and a jittery, relentless beat. I’m not sure there will be many occasions where it’s appropriate to drop this one, but when the moment is right.. PHWOAR.
