In the relentlessly forward-moving world of UK grime, retrospective compilations are rare. Many of grime's primary mediums are transient: pirate radio sets, rave clashes, or street DVD slews. So it's difficult to sum up even the best grime artists on recorded output alone. Roll Deep's Street Anthems compilation comes close to doing so, however. It helps that Roll Deep are heavyweights, the equivalent of the Murderer's Row of baseball's New York Yankees or galacticos of soccer's Real Madrid. Among the stars that have passed through its ranks and repped on this compilation are Wiley-- who formed Roll Deep from the ashes of another great grime collective, Pay As U Go, and helped usher the genre from rap-infused UK garage to what it is today-- the chart-topping Dizzee Rascal, supersub star Tinchy Stryder, yardcore MC Riko, Boy Betta Know's Skepta, dubstep fave Flowdan, and wordsmith Trim. Through their vision, experimentation, and aggression, much of grime's best moves were devised.
In fact, when the crew falls it's when they try to play by other people's rules-- namely the pop industry's. You can understand the motivation behind such chartbait as "Shake a Leg", "Avenue", and "Do Me Wrong"-- commercial gain, the chance to reach a wider audience, and a reverence for U.S. pop-- but those tracks pale in comparison to the output of their transatlantic cousins that inspired them.
Like grime itself, when Roll Deep define their own terms they are strongest-- shockingly innovative and brutally uncompromising. Recent bangers, made before the crew's focus shifted to respective solo projects, hold their own. "When I'm 'Ere" lays fearsome bars from the crew over Danny Weed and Target production trademarks. "Celebrate" is the closest they come to credible pop, its riff hinting at their early Sinogrime productions.
But it's when Street Anthems unearths the relatively lost classics that the importance of the compilation is apparent. Early grime anthems like "Roll Deep Regular" and "Bounce" were critical in the creation of a unique, shockingly original genre, different from the DJ-based, house-inspired UK garage scene it rose out of. Wiley's glacial "eski" synths sounded cold and alien. MCs laced these distant and strange beats them with acutely local bars-- lyrics dripping in East London slang and narratives. Yet early Roll Deep wasn't exclusively explosive and aggressive. "U Were Always", which features Wiley, Dizzee Rascal, and Ruff Sqwad's Tinchy Stryder, shows a gentler side to the sound, exchanging jungle and dancehall for R&B slowjams as an input variable in their mutant new algorhythm.
Yet even amid this embarrassment of riches, Street Anthems has two glittering centrepieces. If there's one track that cemented grime as a unique proposition and propelled Roll Deep to an A-list crew, it's the instrumental of Wiley's "Eskimo". Even after nearly a half-dozen Wiley solo albums-- and twice as many affiliated mixtapes from the crew-- these vocal mixes remained lost until now. The original vocal is completely unheard and the fearsome remix was to be found only on the leaked Creeper Vol 2 mixtape. Their appearance here is long overdue, with Riko and Trim destroying the remix and Dizzee-- his voice young, angry, and raw-- spitting the kind of gunchat you wouldn't catch him dead doing these days. These days Dizzee rules the charts: Roll Deep not only run the roads, they paved them.
