dizzee rascal in the sunday new yuck times

LONDON

On a recent Saturday night, about a thousand young black Britons crowded into some tunnels near the London Bridge for a rowdy party that's known as "The Eskimo Dance." At first the D.J.'s played American hip-hop and Jamaican "bashment" — the local term for dancehall reggae — while the men drank mixed drinks (or, if they could afford it, champagne) and watched the women dance. But then came something else: the beats got murky and fidgety, and local M.C.'s crowded the stage, barking out fierce, mile-a-minute rhymes. People pushed forward, straining to see who had the microphone.

Dizzee Rascal, a brilliant and wildly original 19-year-old M.C. and producer, was everywhere and nowhere that night. His hits — panicky confections of spluttering electronics and superenunciated yelps — were played during the hip-hop and bashment sets. And M.C.'s borrowed his underground tracks — grim, sparse beats, with hardly any melody at all — for their live sets. Wiley, the veteran M.C. who helped organize the night, began by paying tribute to Dizzee, who was once his close friend, and people cheered at the mention of his name. But Dizzee, who grew up going to parties like the Eskimo Dance, had chosen not to attend.

It turned out to be a wise decision. Around 2:30 in the morning, a rhyme battle onstage spilled out into the audience. Soon, hundreds of clubgoers were stampeding toward the exits — and then, when another fight broke out near the back, stampeding away from the exits. Bottles were flying. People said they heard gunshots. Outside, as police officers and their dogs kept watch, fans headed home early (the party had been scheduled to last until 6), trading tall tales about who had done what.

Dizzee's been keeping his distance from the scene that spawned him but that is beset, he says, by just that kind of "dumbness." In July, two weeks before he released his astonishing debut album, "Boy in da Corner" (XL), he was stabbed five times. (He has hinted that the crime was motivated by jealousy or resentment, but it remains unsolved.) Dizzee recovered, and the album went on to be a success: it has sold more than 200,000 copies so far (enough to be certified gold in Britain), and in September he beat out Radiohead and Coldplay for the Mercury Prize, the country's most prestigious musical award.

Britain has long been full of hip-hop fans, but the country has produced surprisingly few hip-hop heroes of its own. While home-grown rap scenes thrive in France and Germany, Britain's has never really taken off, and the "Radio 1 Rap Show" on BBC plays almost nothing but Americans. Dizzee's manager, Nick Detnon, derides most British hip-hop as a watered-down version of the American stuff, and suggests that Britain's close relationship to America has inhibited innovation. "The only thing that's holding us back is speaking the same language as you," he said.

Maybe that's Dizzee's secret: he doesn't speak the same language as American rappers — or, perhaps, anyone else. Hip-hop music is usually built around rhythms of speech; that's one reason Atlanta hip-hop, for example, usually sounds so different from New York hip-hop. And so Dizzee created his own sound by exaggerating the eccentricities of his own voice: the typewriterly clatter of hard consonants, the flattened or distended vowels (in his rhymes, "right" rhymes with "bat," and the word "boy" might have two or three syllables), the gulped half-sentences and abrupt shifts in momentum. His eerie, stiff-legged beats are as peculiar as his rhymes, full of overlapping keyboard parts, unpredictable rhythmic clusters and, instead of bass lines, jagged shards of low-frequency noise. He may dress like an American rapper, but he loves American hip-hop too much to imitate it.

He has already been embraced by a small group of American hipsters and record geeks — listeners who have never heard of his East London neighborhood, Bow, are nevertheless entranced by his exotic slang and peculiar electronic compositions. But watch the music video for Dizzee's current single, "Jus' a Rascal," and you'll see the audience that means more to him: scowling young men in baseball hats and writhing women in well-ventilated outfits, all gesticulating in time to the beat on a boat floating down the Thames. (Visit www.xlrecordings.com/broadcast/ to watch the video online.)

To fans like these, Dizzee is the opposite of exotic: he's a local hero, a product of the rough-and-tumble U.K. garage scene, weaned on pirate radio stations, vinyl-only record stores and, of course, volatile nightclubs.

In person, Dizzee Rascal is every bit as charming and as mercurial as he is on CD. When he talks about his favorite American rappers, he could be any teenage music fan, gushing about a new Ludacris track or quoting a verse by the relative unknown Peedi Crakk. But his eyes never stop moving, as if he's taking everything in and storing it all away. His cellphone chimes mercilessly, so he's forever mumbling gruff greetings and gruffer goodbyes.

On a recent — and, inevitably, rainy — Monday afternoon, Dizzee could be found slumped in the front seat of a handler's car, an oversized baseball hat pulled low over his face. He was heading a few hours north from London to Birmingham, where he had a three-night gig opening up for Justin Timberlake. In Dizzee's CD player was a disc containing a rough mix of the music for his 30-minute set, and as the car inched forward in heavy M1 traffic, Dizzee was figuring out exactly which words would go where.

Dizzee Rascal was born Dylan Mills in 1984, an only child in some of Bow's dreariest primary schools and council flats. His parents were of mainly Nigerian descent, but he says he's often mistaken for a Jamaican or a Ghanaian, and because he prides himself on being hard to figure out, he can be playfully evasive on the question of ethnicity. "I'm Cockney," he said, half-smiling. "That's about as white as you can get, innit."

He grew up listening to the harshest music he could get his hands on, from Busta Rhymes to Sepultura. But his favorite homegrown music was jungle, a wicked-sounding electronic dance genre built around frenetic syncopated rhythms. Dizzee says that although he heard local hip-hop while he was growing up, it was the tongue-twisting jungle M.C.'s who most inspired him: "They were the only ones who really sounded English," he recalled. By the time he was 13, he was buying records and practicing rhymes, determined to establish himself as a jungle D.J. and M.C.

The British dance-music scene is notoriously restless, and by the late 1990's, the musical momentum had shifted from jungle to U.K. garage (also known as speed garage or 2-step), which had more melody and less clutter. At first, U.K. garage seemed like a sleek British version of R & B, and the scene even produced an international star: the bland crooner Craig David. But kids like Dizzee were attracted to another kind of garage: a self-consciously raw offshoot ruled by toneless bass lines and nervous, skeletal beats. This grimy new sound (variously known as "grime," "gutter garage," "sublow" and "Eski") inspired a new wave of British M.C.'s, including Dizzee, whose eccentric style won him a place in Wiley's well-respected posse, Roll Deep Crew.

In the last few years, the garage scene has produced a handful of breakthrough acts. So Solid Crew earned widespread (if fleeting) success by championing a glamorous version of grime, inspired by the flash and swagger of hip-hop. Ms. Dynamite, who began her career in 2000 with a classic underground garage single called "Booo!," turned to R & B for her debut album, "A Little Deeper," which won the 2002 Mercury Prize. One of her rivals was a white Birmingham native known as the Streets, whose excellent "Original Pirate Material" pays tribute to grime by going the other direction: the rhymes are flat and conversational, and the beats are sweetened with house-music keyboards.

But the garage scene has never produced an album like "Boy in da Corner," an impossibly rich collection of battle rhymes, nuanced narratives and radical beat-making. "I Luv U," the album's biggest hit, tells a sly, savage tale of deceitful women and single-minded men. Dizzee offers sneering sympathy to a cuckolded boyfriend ("It's a real shame you got hacked by the whores /It's a shame that kid probably ain't yours"), and he punctuates his disdain with one of his monstrous, grinding bass lines.

Some tracks on the album stitch together brash lyrics that Dizzee had been reciting for years, but others are slower and stranger. To make "Sittin' Here," the album's gunshot-riddled opening track, he says he composed the woozy beat, then took it home and let it play while he stared at the wall. The result was a remarkably subtle track about, well, staring at the wall:

I'm just sittin' here, I ain't saying much, I just think
And my eyes don't move left or right, they just blink
I think too deep and I think too long
Plus I think I'm getting weak, 'cause my thoughts are too strong

This sense of unease hangs over the whole CD, and hearing it now it's hard not to be reminded of what came next: the stabbing. Dizzee was on the garage-crazed holiday destination Ayia Napa, on Cyprus, when he says he was assaulted by a group of British "boys" he'd never met before. There have been plenty of rumors but few hard facts; The Guardian reported that the police questioned, then released a member of So Solid Crew, with whom Dizzee had been feuding earlier this year.

Recalling the incident today, he said, "I would love to have kept it to myself." But of course he couldn't; the stabbing became a huge tabloid story, and cheating death only heightened Dizzee's appeal and credibility.

By the time he returned to Britain, he had decided to bow out of the Roll Deep Crew, severing ties with his onetime mentor Wiley. Dizzee won't say exactly why, and neither has rapped about the split. All Dizzee will say is that when he was attacked, there was no one there to defend him. "It really, really showed me a lot," he said. "I'm in this on my own."

And so for now, he is taking a break from the U.K. garage scene, turning his attention to a new challenge across the Atlantic, the Jan. 20 American release of "Boy in da Corner." Dizzee already has at least one high-profile American fan: Mr. Timberlake, who stops him backstage in Birmingham. "I just want to congratulate you on all your success, man," he tells Dizzee, who stops and chats for a minute before sauntering off — he has half an hour to check in, wolf down some food, find his D.J. and get onstage in front of about 13,000 teen-pop fans, but he seems more amused than nervous.

Give Dizzee a microphone and he starts moving differently. His shoulders twitch and shift, and his head starts bobbing, carving out sharp little patterns in time to the beat. Mr. Timberlake's fans cheer (or, more accurately, screech) when Dizzee raps over Jay-Z and Missy Elliott tracks, but they applaud loudest for his own hit "Fix Up, Look Sharp," a riotous, off-kilter hip-hop track. And when Dizzee rhymes "Flushing MC.'s down the loo/ If you don't believe me bring your posse, bring your crew," he seems to be taking puckish pleasure in his un-American slang.

Other British grime M.C.'s are hoping to follow Dizzee's path. Wiley's debut album is due out this spring, and Tinchy Stryder, a promising teenager, is sometimes touted (prematurely) as Dizzee's successor. But while it's tempting to claim that Dizzee is blazing a new trail for black British music, it's also possible that he'll turn out to be an anomaly — a solitary virtuoso whose musical revolution starts and ends with his own records.

In America, Dizzee faces long odds: American listeners have never really embraced imported hip-hop, let alone whatever it is that Dizzee does. Then again, over the last year hip-hop radio stations and clubs have seemed more worldly than ever. Panjabi MC scored a bhangra hit (with help from Jay-Z). Lil Jon extended the life of his "Get Low" by releasing a merengue remix. And Jamaican patois seemed to be everywhere, thanks to the newly minted dancehall reggae stars Sean Paul and Elephant Man. If, say, Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes decided to throw his weight behind "Boy in da Corner," who knows what might happen? And if not, well, suffice it to say Dizzee Rascal hasn't got his hopes up too high.