roll deep - the avenue (single, from the in at the deep end lp, available for purchase here.)

my inaugural mp3 post is an unusual choice for me since, as w/ just about any current form of dance music, i know absolutely nothing about its genre, grime.

oh, i know the names: dizzee, wiley, kano, lady sovereign, and so forth. the sound, that is, the rapping and the music, is cartoonish, as the names themselves might indicate. what kind of cartoon characters, though? not average people like the simpsons or the griffins, not exactly superheroes either--somewhere in between. hulk hogan's rock n wrestling, maybe.

roll deep--if my sources are correct, a mike skinner discovery--do nothing to ruin my thesis. like late 90s american hip-hop, it's 80's-fixated; being british, though, the sample choice is idiosyncratic: the maisonettes' "heartache avenue." it quite literally sounds like a roller rink--or roller rinks as i remember them from the mid-80s: neon lit, arcade games, hand-holding, &c. the effect roll deep create is analagous to american peers like kanye west and ghostface and all of the old-school superheroes; w/ very little tweaking of the sample source, roll deep seem as if they're merely rapping over whatever's handy. it may make for weak ring entrance music, but it's a hell of a summer single, whichever side of the atlantic one calls home.