Duppies is a book in three parts which, in the author’s words, pays “deliberate attention to the debased – and misunderstood – aspects of black and white working class grime culture in London; an attempt at a kind of grime prosody, whether imagined though Eski beats, multicultural London English (MLE), cockney rhyming, or sino techno formal experimentation.”
From the Preface:
“Grime is late shift, zero hour, it makes a beeline for bare life, but what it lays bare leaves everyone cold. Grime is the thread that links afro-pessimism to afro-futurism, but its role proceeds without ties or duplicity.
Grime is post-work and post-brexit, its riddims respond to the necessity in which I exist – see these wheels, they may be brand spanking new, but under the bonnet there is fever and anguish. [...]
Grime is payback for n-words and down-lows. It has dominion but no license for each dissolve is charged with an asbo. It makes music from a manor that is not-me, but what it gives has neither use-value nor beauty.
Grime is a medium of the unknown, it refuses everything but possibility: its violence is one without immunity, but its real is dispossession, and is inconsolable without knowing it.”
