Review Summary: For Tomorrow: A Guide to Contemporary British Music, 1988-2013 (Part 86)
For a certain group of Americans during the early 00’s, grime was the most exciting strain of rap music on the planet. In contrast to a rap world ruled by the legacies of dead icons, grime had no such constraints. Grime seemed to evolve fearlessly, absorbing every new variant in 2-step and garage that it came across and with masterful debuts by The Streets and Dizzee Rascal still fresh it had breakout stars too.
Run the Road, a compilation released by 679 Recordings for curious Americans, served as that crucial next step in grime's jump to American shores.
Grime doesn’t hit American ears the same way stateside rap music does. For the most part, the beats don’t bang in the straightforward way American rap music tends to. Grime beats tend to contain some kind of destabilizing element - whether sharp, scattered snares or edgy synths or thundering subbass - for the MC to navigate. Since
Run the Road is a collection of different tracks by different artists, it isn’t cohesive enough to function as an introduction to the genre.
Original Pirate Material and
Boy in da Corner are still the best 1-2 for an intro, but
Run the Road is the perfect 3. It’s a clutch grab bag of fantastic songs that came in the wake of those two paradigm shifting classics and
Run the Road kicks off with one of the scene’s most adrenalizing songs.
Over a beat composed primarily of slides being racked back and forth on handguns, “Cock Back” is akin to one of those running mixes that are supposed to keep you motivated, except it’s for throwing elbows into the faces of strangers. In many ways, Terror Danjah’s “Cock Back” the most immediately accessible song on
Run the Road in that it predicts post-Flocka trap in its dread shakin’ aggression. Carrying theme, Riko & Target’s “Chosen One” works booming gunshots and the sounds of shells ricocheting off concrete into it’s backing track. While Roll Deep’s “Let it Out” initially sounds like its following in the urban tension of the opening two tracks but instead blooms into something genuinely motivating and beautiful as synthetic flutes and chimes decorate the beat. Kano makes the first of his five appearances on solo showcase “P’s & Q’s”, displaying a brash confidence and charisma that earned him apt comparisons to Jay-Z back in the day. “Believe I'm on my, P's and Q's, in sneaks or shoes/We're in a Honda, *** it no Jeeps or coupes.”
Aforementioned MVP Dizzee Rascal makes an appearance on the riotous “Give U More”. Dizzee’s prime ability to attack skewed, sideways beats so easily they might as well be click tracks after he’s through with them is in full display on “Give U More”, one of his best ever mic performances. Durrty Goodz’ “Gimmie Dat” takes place at a blinding double time but really impresses in the way Durrty enunciates every word so the individual words rarely get lost in the avalanche. Lady Sovereign’s two appearances still ache with unfulfilled promise (She’d hit her peak a couple months after
Run the Road on the hilarious “Random”) both on her own “Cha Ching [Cheque 1, 2 Remix]” and her verse on “Fit But Don’t You Know It [Remix]” which would have spiced up the original considerably. “I think I'm nice/I know I'm nice/’Cause your eyes look twice/Up down left right/Left right left right”. Ears’ “Happy Dayz” is probably
Run the Road’s best showcase of grime’s ability to create something that scanned as rap but sounded unlike anything but the most attentive of American listeners had heard before. The beat sounds both chippy and seasick, as a massive synth/sub-bass smash into the track’s toy boat like giant waves while Ears tightropes being nostalgic without being bitter.
Over a decade on,
Run the Road now carries a tragic aura. By 2004, most on
Run the Road had either peaked (The Streets), was about to hit huge commercial disappointments (Kano, Lady Sovereign), or slip into obscurity. Grime never crashed through the underground to topple pop music. Tinchy Stryder and Roll Deep, along with their alumni Wiley and Dizzee Rascal, would hit bigger chart peaks by making brash pop moves that sacrificed grime’s roughneck essence for shiny pop. Instead of making pop come to grime, grime went pop. Still, for a minute there the genre was the most fascinating thing happening and
Run the Road is a pitch perfect snapshot of a moment in time. Right at that moment when it felt like grime still might breakthrough on both sides of the Atlantic, forcing American players into a drastic state of catch-up as their more forward thinking UK cousins stole the charts out from under them. That didn’t happen but it’s still a great sounding disappointment.
