how important is the question of whether Dizzee is hip hop or not?

it's a very important question but one that should be on ILM

sorry. I'm half asleep here. Please delete.

Dizzee is Dizzee. the whole point is that he like so many before him has soaked up and rinsed out influences from a broad enough range of genres and styles to fuse a hybridized sound that seems fresh right now. a lot of artists don't like being lumped into one genre for this reason, it negates the fact they're probably into one thing as much as the other. hip-hop however is more attractive as something to align with because of it's cultural density and gravitas - therefore preferable to saying 'I'm UK garage' because hip hop is seemingly the biggest selling genre in the westerly world. So calling yourself 'UK hip hop' seems the safest and in this case most accurate bet anyway (hip hop being initially a hybrid movement itself).

like so many before him has soaked up and rinsed out influences from a broad enough range of genres and styles to fuse a hybridized sound that seems fresh right now

Grime is different though. the focus in grime is on the mc and dizzee and his peers have recognisable personality - that really distinguishes this music! I don't know as much about this as others but to me both sides of this arguement have been pretty flimsy and I wanna see what people think on ILM.

i just can't bring myself to call it grime. and i personally tend to see the focus being on the MC as a bad thing...even in hip hop sometimes!

With the growth of non-US styles that draw so much from US hip hop (not just grime, but also recent kwaito and contemporary dancehall) I think we're now getting to the stage where "hip hop" is becoming almost as flexible as "dance music", and thus almost as meaningless in pinning down how a sub-genre of it works (eg. knowing that jungle is dance music doesn't in and of itself allow for much in the way of insights apart from the obvious one - that you dance to it).

I think Dizzee is hip hop but that doesn't *mean* anything about the music other than that it has beats and rhymes, and it's prettymuch as wrongheaded to infer that his music therefore operates by the same rules as Jay-Z's music as it would be to do the same of DJ Hype and Juan Atkins.

Of course, the same is almost as true wrt to Lil' Jon and Jay-Z, but it's all a question of degree. Ultimately genres don't conform to a statehood-model with definable borders, but are rather overlapping zones of paradigmatic sets. Dizzee is at the outer edges of hip hop's zone and is also unsurprisingly caught up in a number of different zones. He's hip hop + garage + dancehall + x + y, and yet none of these incredibly strongly.

thanks for providing such a thoughtful answer to such a stupid question.- not really sure what I was thinking. it seemed to me that people saying that Dizzee wasn't hip hop feel that he is losing something through that definition. And yeah your right when you say that as a descriptive term hip hop is kinda meaningless. the thing that interested me was that Dizzee is saying he is hip hop. I think he is referring to it in a more cultural and social context rather than musical. Ummmm my thoughts aren't really that developed on this I was kinda hoping other people would have some insightful stuff to say (weird how it got some kinda discussion going here and nothing on ILM).