 As a deeply lonely person, I spend much of my time – when not weeping or playing online poker – perusing internet music forums. If you haven't yet visited one of these forums (although, if you are reading this, I'm guessing you probably have) they essentially serve two main purposes: the first is to represent a kind of virtual soap box for musical geeks everywhere to have their say on the latest dubstep white labels and argue over whether Reason or Cubase produces the finest 'wobble bass'. The other is to provide a kind of cyber crèche for tourettes-ridden 14-year-old Home Counties simpletons, who log on under guises like 'The Grime King', 'BaDdAmAn4813', 'Sinatra' and 'Leicester Click' (these are all real) and vent their spleens on pretty much anything, using mainly winking emoticons and the * symbol.
The one subject which dominates (or has dominated) pretty much every one of the more 'urban' of these music forums is the question of whether or not Grime is dead. Opinion on this topic – in keeping with opinion on most of the other topics that pop up on these sites – is divided. Some – like Birmingham's 'jonfun' - adamantly advertise the genre's rude health, claiming “things are gonna kick off!”, while others – such as UK Urban Music Forum's no-nonsense 'mc_nitro' – confidently offer the less ambiguous diagnosis that “Grime is dead”. Special mention on this particular thread from which I have been pilfering must go to 'Stu' from Newcastle, who claims, “aye... it's going through a bad patch; every genre does”. 'Stu' is quite clearly either a bored Samaritan or the male equivalent of The Sun’s Dear Deidre; either way, what he doing on this forum is beyond me.
However, I digress. The topic in hand is that of Grime's current condition, and with the genre rapidly approaching its seventh (rough estimate) birthday, will it be celebrating in rosy-cheeked, buoyant good health, surrounded by friends and relatives, or will it be wheezing and spluttering over long-extinguished cake-candles in a solitary hospital bed? The metaphor may have gone too far, but the question remains: is Grime dead?
Well, firstly, we should examine how a musical genre can 'die' in the first place. There is evidence to suggest that a scene can fade away with the disappearance of a major figurehead; Kurt Cobain was unquestionably the most famous person within the Grunge scene, and when he died in 1994, the scene died with him. While this example may seem like an isolated incident, (reggae didn't die with Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye did not take Soul with him, and it is unlikely that – if Chris Martin passed away – the lead singer of Keane would immediately be hit by a tram) it does indicate the fragile nature of the smaller genre.
While, thankfully, nothing like what happened to Cobain has happened to anyone in grime, the stark reality is that Grime is a small scene - just as Grunge was - and this small scene's figureheads are disappearing fast. Kano has long since devoted himself to hip hop, and the question he poses via a song title on his latest mixtape - 'Is This Grimey Enough?' - will have fans of his early material responding with an unequivocal “Not really, no”. Wiley may be displaying an almost canine-like loyalty to the genre he helped create, but Dizzee has fallen in with Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys, and Lethal B has fallen out with Clarkson; Grime is shedding icons at an alarming speed.
However, while Grunge couldn't recover from the loss of Nirvana, Grime is currently housing an extremely eager and willing 'new' breed (though most have been around since the genre's birth) who are more than capable of filling Dizzee's Air Force Ones. MCs such as Trim, Ears, Durrty Goodz, Ghetto and Tinchy Stryder all have the style, delivery and lyrical ability to keep the scene alive (in the sense that they can produce high quality songs) but there's no guarantee that this alone will be enough to hold the public's attention. Indeed, after Cobain died, bands like The Melvins continued to produce Grunge music that was arguably (i.e. in my opinion) better than Nirvana's, but they just didn't have that same spark.
So what is the solution? Maybe it is impossible to recapture the excitement and originality of a new genre taking its first clumsy steps; early groups like The Voidoids and The Clash, for example, still remain the best things to come out of punk rock, and today we're left either with bands like Orphan Boy and The Towers of London doing the exact same thing that was being done better 30 years ago, or McFly, who've taken the original format and moulded it, but have raped it senseless in the process.
The solution – in Grime's case – may be the quality of its natural selection. While hip hop is commercially strong enough to cope with the fact that its biggest stars are talentless buffoons, Grime is literally the only genre I can think of in which the most famous and successful artist is also the best. Yes, despite Dizzee's recent forays into pop, he's still Grime's only true household name and yet he's also the person responsible for the best Grime music ever made; justice so rare and so fragile that you wish you could cup it in your hands to keep it warm.
Now, more than ever – with Dizzee, Kano and co. moving further and further away from the genre that broke them – Grime needs its 'Survival of the Fittest' instinct to squeeze MCs like Durrty Goodz, Trim etc up onto the surface and into the limelight. It's only with the installation of new figureheads like these that Grime can be saved.
So, the easy answer to the question at the top of this piece is no, Grime is not dead. Great Grime music is still coming out all the time. However, commercially speaking, the genre is currently comatose, confined to a metaphorical iron lung, or – to quote our kindly Samaritan 'Stu' - “going through a bad patch”. The real question is, can it come through unscathed?
That wasn't a rhetorical question; I really want to know.
Words: Tom Ellen
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WRETCH 32 
Thanks Tom for a funny read...
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