Member-only story
A Love Letter to the Golden Age of UK Hip Hop
There was no time like it.
I was first properly introduced to UK hip hop when I was 15. It was 2002 and, through the haze of skunk and tobacco, my friends and I sat boxed in my pokey room, mesmerised by the video playing on the tiny T.V. It was a compilation of freestyles, most of which were performed in the Dark N Cold Clothing store. The grainy recordings of people like Chester P, Reveal, and Skinnyman was so raw, so low-key, so different to what I understood hip hop to be that, unlike my friends, I didn’t quite feel their frenzied enthusiasm for it. For me, it was like immediately drinking strong black coffee before gradually acquiring the taste. After all, I was definitely not a hip-hop aficionado: my meager experience was based mainly on the Marshal Mathers LP, The Chronic 2001, DMX and whatever was playing on MTV base. A partial excuse was that CDs were expensive and any funds I had were usually immediately converted into cannabis. Furthermore, it is important to note that listening to hip hop is actually a learned skill. At first, you struggle to make sense of the often rapid cascade of words and rhyme schemes, but over time this eventually becomes second nature. Despite all this, that Dark N Cold video would plant a seed that would inexorably bury its way deep into my psyche.
