Dizzee Rascal - Music and Style

Music and Style

Dizzee Rascal once told author Ben Thompson in an interview with the Sunday's Observer magazine that “everything I do is for the music – I want to master it like Bruce Lee mastered martial arts."

His music is a mixture of UK Garage and hip-hop beats with an extremely broad palette of influences, ranging from metal guitars to drill and bass synth lines, eclectic samples and even Japanese court music. Dizzee Rascal also makes extensive use of un-coupled octuplets and double and triple couplets in his machine-gun-paced staccato lyrics. Like most grime artists, he uses "beats born of ringtones, video games and staticky pirate-radio sounds" Dizzee's tracks are traditional grime in that the beats are often asymmetrical and make it difficult to dance to his music. His vocal performance is also distinctive; he uses a fast style of rapping which blends elements from garage MCing, conventional rap, grime and ragga. He raps about the same issues a confused generation of youth tends to; broken family, faithless mentors and a lack of support. Dizzee's videos are similar to many grime and garage artists in the UK. They are frenetic and fast, often matching the speed of the rapping; this is especially visible in the videos to "Fix Up, Look Sharp" and "I Luv U." Although his fast style of rapping and his subject matter are nothing more than ordinary in the UK, Dizzee Rascal's diversity nonetheless separates him from other UK rappers. In his song "Brand New Day," Dizzee Rascal used "flat, punching out riddims into cheap PC software, beats born of ringtones, video games, and staticky pirate-radio sounds." In "Jus' a Rascal," he uses "T.O.K.'s hysterical dancehall harmonies, a synthesised guitar line halfway between death metal and English Beat, stuttering Southern hi-hats and a kick drum retarded to a crawl."

Dizzee Rascal worked closely with his mentor Wiley, who created one of the first grime tracks, called "Eskimo." Grime is today still considered underground, despite Dizzee's large mainstream exposure. Dizzee's DJ, DJ Semtex, says, "the biggest conflict I have is with major labels because they still don’t get it." Andy Bennett and Jon Stratton highlight in the book Britpop and the English Music Tradition (2010) how Rascal alongside Sway and M.I.A. created music that explored new soundscapes with new technologies, with lyrics expressing anger at Britain's "racialized" subordination of minority groups and that the innovation that generates new musical forms like grime and dubstep that are, inevitably, politically engaged. The chart success of grime-influenced artists like Rascal is heralded as a signal in the way that white Britons are adapting to a new multicultural and plural musical mix in contrast to previous bands.