Dizzee Goes to Hollywood

“Baffled.”

That’s how Dizzee Rascal felt when his 2003 debut album, Boy in Da Corner, was nominated for Britain’s prestigious Mercury Music Prize.

After four years spent struggling in the obscurity of London’s underground garage scene, Dizzee, who had just turned 19, was suddenly at the point of being anointed Britain’s coolest musician.

He was raised Dylan Mills, in the closest thing Britain has to the projects — the council estates of East London.

Now here he was getting drunk on free booze at the posh Grosvenor House Hotel. Befuddled by Hennessy and unused to the glitzy surroundings, he wasn’t even sure what was going on. He assumed that everyone nominated tonight — including Coldplay and Radiohead — would be receiving a prize.

And then Ms. Dynamite was onstage announcing the winner, and he felt everything inside him go quiet. Drunkenly, he wondered, “Did she just say my name?”


Tonight, Dylan Mills slumps backstage at the Brooklyn club Volume. He flew in to New York last night; later, at midnight, he’ll play his first U.S. show.

He looks jetlagged. But then, he’s looked that way for years.

“My body clock is effed,” he says. “It has been for about three years. I don’t know when I’m supposed to sleep.”

British and American critics have been hyperventilating for months about, as one put it, “the most original and exciting artist to emerge from the dance-music scene in a decade,” and Dizzee’s acclaim is deserved. Boy in Da Corner is an extraordinary CD, one that makes its own rules. The first time around, its abrasive, offbeat rhythms can come across as an anarchic mess; listen again and the delirious, carefully built shapes of his songs begin to emerge.

Dizzee’s delivery is no less eccentric: One minute somberly introspective, the next hilarious, his voice skitters up and down the octave like a nervous spider. Post–Slick Rick, it has been almost impossible to imagine hip-hop with a British accent. But here’s an MC who rhymes crew with the quintessentially English boast that he’s “flushing MCs down the loo.” The Streets’ Mike Skinner made inroads with Original Pirate Material, but Dizzee is something else.

Guru, from Brooklyn hip-hop stalwarts Gang Starr, has already given a hearty endorsement to Dizzee’s big-beat single “Fix Up Look Sharp.” “That’s like ragga mixed with hip-hop with an incredible, original U.K. style,” he enthused recently. “I honestly believe he can sell mad records in the States. He’s got good energy, man.”

Upon hearing the quotation, Dizzee lights up. “Coming from Guru? The essence of old-school hip hop? The real innovator? He’s a pioneer.”

For his American bow, Dizzee has brought DJ Slimzee — a white DJ from Britain’s Pay As U Go Cartel — to run the turntables.

From the moment Dizzee leaps onstage, the crowd is with him. “We’re bringing London to you,” he calls. “LDN to the NYC!”

Garage may be very British, but it has always looked to America. Dizzee is ecstatic to be here; his skittery rhymes are lighting up the room. He signals for Slimzee to hold the backing and delivers “Brand New Day” a cappella: “Looks like I’m losing mates/There’s a lot of hostility near my gates/We used to fight wid’ kids from other estates/Now eight millimeters settle debates.…”

Dizzee represents a generation of British youth who are experiencing something similar to what happened to the American hip-hop generation 20 years earlier. In the gentler British Isles, the kill rate may not be anywhere near as high, but Dizzee’s generation has witnessed a rapid increase in violence, gang culture, suicide, gun use and imprisonment. Their parents don’t get it. “It’s real out here,” he rhymes on “Do It.” “Like no one understands sometimes/If people could see what’s really going on/People just going mad in front of me.”

“It’s fucked,” Dizzee says of the East London he grew up in. He saw his first dead body, a man killed by his wife, when he was just 10. Since then, he has witnessed gun violence several times — once, a man was killed in front of him at a rave. “There is a lot of shooting. I’ve seen people getting shot, stabbed. All kinds of shit. It’s not a game.”

As a precocious 15-year-old, Dizzee was already a name in the rambunctious garage-music scene. That was the year he made it onto the flagship pirate-radio station Rinse FM alongside local heroes MC Wiley and the Pay As U Go Cartel, Roll Deep Crew and More Fire, but he’d already been broadcasting until the wee hours of the morning on smaller North London stations for months.

His school life, understandably, was taking a beating.

“I’d go to school in the morning, and I was so tired. So I stopped giving a shit about lessons. I used to bunk off and do music.” Dizzee’s voice is half-Cockney, half–rude boy. Where an American rapper would use y’know what I’m sayin’?, Dizzee says innit?

“I tell you, these last three years, I haven’t had a lot of sleep, innit? We was doing raves from when I was 16, 17 — going up and down the country, sometimes doing two or three raves in one night. I was always coming home at 6 o’clock in the morning. I’m sure my mum thought I was selling drugs.”

Born in 1984, Dizzee was raised in London by his mother, who hails from Ghana, in the ancient East End district of Bow. Her state-subsidized apartment was in a massive sprawl of impoverished and sometimes violent housing projects that lie north of the Thames.

His mother worked long hours to support him; his father died before Dylan turned 2. He refuses to discuss specifics.

“I don’t really talk about that,” he says quietly. “I just know that my mother raised me.”

He also politely declines to talk about how he used to mug pizza deliverymen.

You don’t talk about the bad stuff.

“ ’Cause I’m trying to make music. A mistake with a lot of hip-hop is the bombardment of that stuff,” Dizzee says. “I know other stuff as well.”

He doesn’t like being made to fit preconceived notions. He tells you proudly that Nirvana are among his biggest influences. He gives props to a white, middle-aged teacher named Tim Smith, who stood up for him after he had been thrown out of three schools for fighting and truancy. (Smith allowed him to drop everything else and concentrate solely on music.)

What’s the most important thing his mother taught him?

“Independence, man,” he says.


Two days later, Dizzee is in Los Angeles to appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live, his American TV debut. He fills his free time shopping.

As he drives around Hollywood, he keeps the radio tuned to the local hip-hop station Power 106. Dizzee listens as if he’s paying attention to a physics lecture: nodding, his brow slightly furrowed. It’s as if his radar is permanently on.

An old-school Bobby Brown track comes on. “That’s nang, man,” Rascal says. (Nang = bitchin’.)

Earlier this morning, Dizzee was in the lobby of his artfully designed Sunset Boulevard hotel, sitting in a clear plastic “bubble chair” suspended from the ceiling by a chain. He was treating the ’60s design classic like a playground swing, pushing off from the wall with his Nikes. “L.A.,” he announced, “is nang.”

Dizzee; his manager, Nick Denton; and DJ Slimzee go into JMartin Designs on Melrose Avenue. JMartin custom-paints clothing for Method Man, Xzibit, Jennifer Lopez and David Beckham. Dizzee is commissioning a jumpsuit with a spray-painted portrait on the front, plus his personal logo — a dog turd surrounded by buzzing flies. “I want that for the Brit Awards,” he explains, referring to the U.K. equivalent of the Grammys.

He wanders around, gazing solemnly at artists’ aerosol-can works of his heroes Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur. “That Tupac poster,” he announces, “is nang.”

The manager calls from the counter: “Hey, Dizzee — you want the dog shit brown or white?”


Blender’s photographer wants to shoot Dizzee with his shirt off.

Dizzee is reluctant. The stab wound on his chest is in plain view — a hole ringed by a bunch of stitch scars. Some papers here have started calling him the British 50 Cent. He’s not sure he wants the gangsta baggage.

“I admire him,” he says, “but to tell the truth, when I made my album, I would’ve gladly stayed behind the music as a producer. Coming out and being at the front is a lot to live up to.”

Exactly what happened when Dizzee was stabbed is unclear, but the incident says a lot about the simmering tensions of the scene from which he emerged.

Every summer, U.K. garage mavens vacation in Ayia Napa, a resort town on the Mediterannean island of Cyprus. Away from the grim streets of London, anything goes. It’s a release. There’s a lot of drinking and plenty of late nights. Antagonisms between crews from different territories, held in check at home, boil over in the heat.

Last July was Dizzee’s first time there. Maybe he didn’t do himself any favors when he slapped the ass of a pretty girl he saw walking past. The tush turned out to belong to one of the garage scene’s biggest stars, Lisa Maffia, a singer affiliated with the popular British hip-hop clique So Solid Crew.

Some time after the Maffia incident, Dizzee tells Blender, he was rushed by members of the So Solid Crew. A fight between Dizzee and So Solid’s moody but charismatic leader, Megaman, ensued. Dizzee claims he got the better of Mega.

Later still, Dizzee was pulled off his moped by four attackers armed with knives. They stabbed him five times in the back and chest, in what may — or may not — have been payback.

Dizzee was hospitalized. It never crossed his mind that he could have died. He just sat on the hospital gurney muttering vengeance: “Bastards,” over and over. That first night, wracked by coughing, he couldn’t sleep. Only in the morning did he realize it was blood from the wound on his chest that he was coughing up. “I felt I’d been caught up in some madness,” he says.

Angry about violence on their watch, Cypriot police interrogated Dizzee, who denied Mega’s involvement. “I got a problem, I’m not going to the police,” he says.

The police detained Megaman for questioning but released him, clearing him of any connection with the assault.

“I’m not scared,” Dizzee says now. “If anything, I feel stronger.” He’s upset that nobody knows the truth about what happened. “I punched up Megaman; I humiliated that boy,” he says with a flash of anger. “And every real nigga on the island knows what happened.”


The following afternoon is the run-through for Dizzee’s performance on Jimmy Kimmel.

After the rehearsal, the show’s floor manager approaches Dizzee and warns him that he’s flashing three inches of ass crack. That’s going to be too much for American network television.

Five minutes before Dizzee is due to go on live, Kimmel shows a still from the rehearsal: three inches of Dizzee’s ass crack, pixellated to avoid offending more sensitive viewers. Yuks all around.

After a wildly energized performance of “Fix Up Look Sharp,” Dizzee shrugs when reminded of his bare ass being broadcast nationwide. “Everything comes with a price,” he says.

He looks for a drink. “I’ll be honest,” he adds, straight-faced. “I thought my arse was blacker than that.”