Leeds Hip Hop Scene

So I’ve had a lot of time on my hands as watch I Sky Sports News and email my CV to just about every business in West Yorkshire as I look for work, there’s only so much Sky Sports News you can take before you start giving yourself little projects to do such as sorting out your old CD’s and re-categorising your DVD collection, just so you don’t go completely insane.

Anyway I was on a mission of sorting out my CD’s and I found a copy of Rob Life’s Bangers and Mash mixtape featuring Braintax, Rodney P, Jehst etc and I read the inside sleeve that was written by Disorda over at Suspect Packages, to quote him it says….

“UK hip hop has long been stigmatised as being a low key operation with no major backing from corporations, and no love outside the core fan base of artists and groups. In the past, journalists have consistently put it down in numerous articles and reviews and personally this has always pissed me off!

This negative attitude to UK hip hop has ran throughout the music industry. All the way down the chain from major record labels, distributors and retailers to smaller shops and specialist distributors, UK hip hop has never been well supported.

Ever since the early days of crews such as Demon Boyz and London Posse the UK scene has always had a definitive sound and style. These early crews broke down the boundaries of hip-hop in the UK and showed us you could rhyme in your own accent and rap about what you saw in your town and not in the ‘projects’. Many artists have come and gone over the years and many have stuck around and the one true essence of most of the successful ones has been to ‘go for self’ with their own promotion, own funding and own support. This approach has worked for many and is now working for more people than ever before. The Independent UK Hip Hop scene is now better placed than at any time in the past.

So fuck the doubters and mindless ignorant fools who can’t recognise raw talent when it’s their own doorstep smacking them in the face! Now is the time to stop talking all the negative bullshit I keep reading and hearing on a daily basis. We have built up our own UK organisations comprising record labels, shops, studios, radio stations and more. Its now moving to the next level.

This CD you hold in your hands is a retrospective view of our scene over the last 15 years. It includes classic tracks from the 80s & 90s and some fresh tracks from the brightest talents on the scene today. Take a long hard listen. Is this a second grade version of Hip Hop? I don’t think so and I hope you will agree”

I remember buying this CD and feeling inspired by the message from Disorda, I went all out and stuck myself in to the scene, New Bohemia had just started up around that time and I was making music and working with other producers. I worked with the Rough Records label from its inception and was heavily involved in the marketing and promotion of the Leeds By Example project, making friends with many Leeds acts when I decided to create this website, initially we created a Myspace page in early 2005 and within months the website was born. This lead me to make many more friends along the way and help with unifying a fractured local scene. Early 2007 and we decided to create the Diff’rent Strokes nights and bring some lesser known acts to the Leeds live scene (DTTS, The IRS, MINDSpray, No Fakin DJ’s etc), as well as getting involved with the Leeds By Example Live night at the HiFi, at the moment the Diff’rent Strokes & Leeds By Example projects are on hold whilst we contemplate the future for them.

Even though both projects are run on shoe string budgets and are essentially not for profit we really need to wonder whether or not in the current financial climate they can continue right now, can we continue to plough our own money into them with little guarantees of any sort of return on the investments. Sadly too many bars and clubs in Leeds have become “live venues” even though their facilities and clientele really aren’t suitable for that type of entertainment. This has lead to over-saturation of live music to the people of Leeds and in a way devalued the venues and good quality acts that should be thriving from a large audience, and now we are on the verge of a Carling Academy opening in the City Centre with a 2000+ capacity it’s what the city has needed for a long time but with the falling numbers of gig-goers is this venue going to take away the audiences from the smaller good quality music venues, the types of venue that blood new acts.

Also the arts councils budgets have being cut with the government ploughing public cash into sport in preparation for the 2012 Olympics, I’m all for the Olympics as it will and has created jobs, improve access to sports facilities and will ignite a nation’s passion but the big winners in this will be big business, the government could afford to allow the big businesses to offer bigger sponsorship deals rather than cutting money from local government and other public bodies.

All these things are what we need to think about when looking at the future of any projects we get involved in… but going back to the quote from Disorda on the CD packaging has the UK scene moved to the next level?

There are plenty of talented people out there, there are several labels and record shops too, but no-one is really making any money, when you look at the sales figures of units & the live earnings of UK artists compared to their US counterparts you soon realise that the numbers don’t add up. The business model in UK hip hop does not work and I predict that just like the UK economy is going through a time of change so too must the UK Hip Hop Scene, if an artist/label owner is going into the UK scene to make easy money then get out now, or they need at least to be creative, hard working, innovative and prepared to be different from the rest.

UK Hip Hop has been an exciting and interesting place to be, I’ve made many new friends and met some extremely talented people - even people who I consider as personal musical hero’s and from that point it’s been rewarding but in retrospect has the UK scene moved to the next level, honestly I don’t think it has and unless things change drastically they never can… in my working life I look at challenges in three ways REPAIR, IMPROVE & ENGINEER… i.e repair (to go back to the state things were), improve (can we make things better with what we’ve got) and finally engineer (create something brand new, superior).

Far too often people sit and moan about the good old days, the golden age - all these people want to do is return to a time in the past, a time when in all honesty that was probably less successful than where we are now, a few people want to improve on the situation but again they are limited to change by the fact they are using the tools we’ve got in place already and this is the point UK hip hop is at we’re about to reach critical mass, there’s only so often that you can fix something or improve on it till it finally breaks. Which leads us to the only solution - we need to create something new for the UK scene to reach the next level we need to be different, challenge the stereotypes, innovative, creative and better…