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On Friday, I said that the majority of the rappers on MTV's "Future Great MCs" list did not have the potential to reach Top 10 status. There is still hope for the future of hip hop though, as there are a some talnted rappers that a lot of people haven't heard of yet -- either because they haven't yet released an album or because they just have not received any real mainstream promotion up to this point. Some of these rappers currently under the radar may even one day show enough potential to be ranked in one of those random MTV Top 10 lists. Over the next couple of weeks I'll try to highlight a few of them.
Today's MC: Lady Sovereign
Over the past couple of years, U.K.'s grime music has been making some headway into America. While its unlikely you'll hear any grime tracks on the radio, it became a bit of a fad among internet hip hop fans and hipsters last year. Grime is more or less U.K.'s take on rap, with MCs using a flow that's faster than what Americans are used to (though not quite up to Twista-levels of speed rap) and using beats that are closer to electronica than something from DJ Premier or Dre. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to grime gaining popularity stateside is the British accents and slang that many Americans have trouble understanding. After repeated viewings of the works of Guy Ritchie, BBC's The Office and Layer Cake, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on this strange version of English that they speak over in the U.K., and I've become a fan of grime music.
Over in England, the face of grime music is the Roll Deep Crew's Dizzee Rascal. However, the grime rapper with the greatest chance of finding success over here is Lady Sovereign, out of Wembley, London. A fair amount of people have compared her to Eminem, though I think that's due more to the fact that she's white than anything she's done musically. She still hasn't quite mastered the art of telling a story through her songs, which seperates the great mcs from the rest, and her catalogue of tracks thus far consist almost exclusively of her boasting about herself, but she does have legitimate lyrical skills. Its not saying much, but I would easily rank her at the top of female MCs currently out. I feel even more strongly about that last statement after watching the allegedly "classic" Fight Klub freestyle battle between Remy Ma and Lady Luck last night, which was about as rugged as the ciphers at your high school cafeteria.
After a meeting with Jay-Z, in which she was asked to freestyle on the spot, Lady Sov signed a deal with Def Jam. I'm not entirely convinced that Jay-Z knows what he's doing as president of Def Jam, but at the very least it gives her mainstream credibility by dropping an album under the Def Jam label. Starting at the end of this week, she will be going on tour with The Streets (another U.K. rapper worth checking out) throughout the U.S.
4/24/2006 9:53:33 AM posted by Fresh