Roots Manuva is a figure you’ll be more than familiar with, one of the first to really show that the UK could do hip hop and, more importantly, do it with as much style and swagger as their US counterparts whilst still being true to their roots. He made THAT song that has become embedded in the history of UK music, I don’t think I’ve heard any other song dropped in such a variety of places and go off every single time, Mala even dropped it on dubplate at The Roundhouse the other week. Me and Sduk were lucky enough to be invited to spend the day at Red Bull Music Academy and an interview / lecture with him and whilst you could just watch the video, here’s what it meant to me.

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The session opens with Juggle Tings Proper, the heavy dub bassline comes in, then the drums and instantly the whole room falls into the hip-hop head bop. It’s clear that here is a man held in the utmost in a room full of people from all across the world. Not bad for a man from Stockwell in a climate that, particularly when he started out, was so dominated by heads from the US. It starts off naturally with his influences, his beginnings, heading down to the local youth club and just making some noise.

The interviewer keeps touching on the UK / US hip-hop thing. Manuva doesn’t particularly see it as an issue, the UK stuff was always what he liked, even if he didn’t necessarily know why and was the butt of jokes at school as a result. Manuva’s sound though has always been of the UK, maybe even quintessentially Brixton. The first slang he falls back on is Jamaican patois, he does and has done always what he knows in keeping with his lineage.

It’s interesting to see where Roots Manuva comes from lyrically. I’ve always seen his lyrics as occupying that space I want my MCs to play in; spiritually deep, full of metaphor yet not overly in your face and using everday dialect. Before anything Roots is about style over content, at the very least you can tell this by the way he holds himself on the couch. When it comes to recording and performing he writes lyrics down but then never delivers as they are on paper, always style over technique. The interviewer plays Awfully Deep and launches into some lyrically meaning of Roots making fun of other people, him being the deep rapper. Roots dismisses it, it was simply done for effect, it was supposed to be the sonic embodiment of an intense episode of paranoia, about things getting on top. He uses language for it’s onomatopoeic essence rather than necessarily the meaning of the words themselves. It’s a deep point, I guess to paraphrase McLuhan, if the medium is the message then Roots Manuva’s delivery of his words and his sonic expression is what primarily defines what he is saying. This is easy to see in Awfully Deep which is most definitely paranoid and frantic.

Not that Roots Manuva is lyrically shallow, far from it. Just look at the lyrics to Cinematic Orchestra’s All Things To All Men where he guests. It makes sense aswell when he talks about his beginnings as the son of a preacher. Growing up the church was his social community, he’d go to church more like 3 times on a Sunday, then all the groups during the week, it was more encompassing of his whole life. And every time he’d see his dad preach which must have had a big impact. He joked earlier about falling into rapping by accident, it was all he could do, maybe this is why. It’s also an interesting parallel that he draws between rapping and preaching. Roots says that both are about conveying and messing around with conceptual nuances, spinning a yarn if you will. I don’t think Roots Manuva necessarily aligns himself with any particular form of spirituality in his lyrics but they are definitely spiritual, it’s definitely most clear in his recent album on It’s Me Oh Lord and Well Alright. The parallel between preacher and rapper is poignant. The church is less and less the centre of the community but people will happily gather around a soundsystem. Roots Manuva is as much the preacher his dad was, just telling the story of growing up in Brixton, the story of “drunks and bums.”

The theme that keeps coming up throughout the interview is one of noise, “that noisy stuff”. From his beginnings of being attracted to sound systems just because of the noise that they brought and just making noise in a studio to the continuous fight to keep that noise alive. Roots says that when he started out UK hip-hop was just noise, it was something that wasn’t supposed to be recorded. And in the late 90s there was very little success for any British hip hop artist, now of course you have people like N-Dubz, Tinchy and Tinie Tempah dominating the charts. “The journey has arrived from a start point of noise,” palettes are more open and the application of hip-hop audio science is now just as refined as jazz. He also talks about how he continuously strives to stay ahead, rather than follow any trends, which can only get harder the longer you are in the game. He pulls it off though seemingly through hard work, Awfully Deep was a big concerted effort to return to the grit. He mentions working both the monster and the ghost and wanting the mashed up contina and the mashed up Reebok. Roots says later his biggest fear is not knowing what the new thing is, he’s more inspired by new things, the noise.

Another thing that strikes me about Roots Manuva is his both his openness and even modesty whilst sat on the couch. A couple of times he flips the questions back on the audience. The most discussed of which is about being dicovered as a new artist, where does all this new technology leave the process of being discovered? You don’t cut tracks to dubplate or have a tape you hand out to DJs. The answer that seemed to emerge the most was getting exposure on blogs. Nice seeing that this is a blog but something I’m not completely happy about or I think is entirely true. I know from looking at our blog stats we’ve put up tunes by some amazing new artists but has got relatively few downloads. I still hear most new music on radio and in dances which have an element of physicality to them, even if you do send a DJ an mp3. I’m still waiting for the happy medium that embraces what used to be both the exclusivity and physicality of the object that made new artists all that more special and fits that with the merits of new technology and networks. No definitive answer gets reached anyway.

My notes end on him laughing about paying taxes through rapping. He mentioned it earlier too; music was his two fingers up to mainstream society yet mainstream culture has ended up courting him. On Brand New Second Hand Rodney was thinking no further than Brixton, it was his baby, yet it grew. He jokes about not understanding why mainstream press was at all interested in music that was written for weed and piss heads. But from his beginnings in a Brixton youth club at 15 pushing James Brown’s A Mans World round on the turntable to get it in time with the drums and keys maybe the very first words he utters on his first LP Brand New Second Hand couldn’t have been more prophetic; “I bring you tents and girth for this home grown range|”.

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Check out all the lectures that happened at Red Bull Music Academy here (gutted to miss the Moodymann one on Friday).

One Response / Awfully Deep / Roots Manuva.

1. ARayment says:

   March 9, 2010 at 22:51

   An awesome report and wicked insight to the session. Loving the Manuva love. My big love for them is their gritty-ness, but not gritty for ‘gritty’s’ sake (i.e Giggs) but its actually because it does encapsulate alot of 80′s and 90′s south (of the Met Line) London vibe.

   Very enjoyable read. Keep it up!