Just as we thought the grime/garage/'nuum beat (just kidding Simon, much as I like the resonance of it -- conjures New Beat and numbskull all in the same breath!) conundrum had been beaten into sublow submission, none other than the Tie-Dyed Lady weighs in with the announcement, "A new London club craze is coming to America via college radio and after-hours dance floors - it's called grimy."
Grimy? Blimey.
Are they sure about that? I've gotten so used to reading and writing "grime" in the blogosphere that I was a bit taken aback by the adjectival form, which RS writer (and my friend and flavorpill colleague Matt Diehl) raises to nominal status by calling Dizzee Rascal "grimy's flagship artist." I'd be tempted to say that Diehl had misheard the word, except that Dizzee's quoted as saying, "Crunk's the closest thing to grimy." (Meanwhile, Diehl proves that he's been reading Reynolds, or perhaps my ripoffs of Reynolds, by noting that it's "also known as sublow and gutter garage.")
But I'm still not convinced. Googling "Dizzee + grime" nets 702 hits, while "Dizzee + grimy" gets only 552 -- and the latter references are almost without fail adjectival. Searching RWD, meanwhile, turns up four hits for "grimy," used mainly adjectivally (though the sentence, "DJ Eastwood has been smashing up raves everywhere with grimy anthem ‘U Ain’t Ready’ could go either way - in this case, "grimy anthem" reads indistinguishably from "grime anthem.") Still, headlines like "Sublow: You Can Have a Good Time with Grime" would seem to support "grime" as a category.
Bloggone it, has grime's time arrived, just to unwind? I for one, would lament such a linguistic crime. Grimy's rhymey, but grime is sublime! Grimy just stymies, while grime runs numbers like primes, makes (screw)faces like mimes, sounds more forceful (and versatile - it turns on a dime). I'm sour (like lime) over the loss of our grime. Fantastic, folkloric, it rings with a chime: like parsely, sage, rosemary and thyme.
Posted by philip at February 2, 2004 07:07 PM