UK Grime Moodboard

When creating my mood-board for UK Grime I gathered a background picture of a run down estate because that’s a stereotypical setting for UK video. On top of the estate I have pictures of well known Grime artists such as Professor Green, Chipmunk, Wiley, N-Dubz, Roll Deep + Tinchy Stryder. Also on my mood-board I put the little ‘Parental Advisory’ sign because a lot of the songs these artists make have inappropriate words in them.

UK Grime is not very commercial within the UK because the lyrics use a lot of slang words that an older generation wouldn’t understand so songs don’t tend to be air-played or make the UK Top 40.

The artists tend to be on the own in videos unless it’s a collaboration and the videos don’t have a lot of narrative, there more performance and on the own singing directly to the camera, with many of the shots mid-shot or closer and focusing on the artist lip-syncing.

Another thing that tends to happen in UK Grime videos is that either in the lyrics or through the video they promote something that is close to them/making them money. For example Tinchy Stryder promotes his own clothing range ‘Star in the Hood’ by wearing the clothes in all of his videos. Another example is in N-Dubz’s song ‘Papa” they talk about their new album coming out a few weeks after the single is released.

Albums don’t really get sold by UK Grime artists because they wont sell much copies, so they tend to go commercial to sell and produce albums like Chipmunk and N-Dubz. So the analysis a album cover for Grime artists would be hard, it usually tends to be just a picture of them and the album name.

The colours in a UK Grime video are very dark and sinister. All these ‘artists’ came from run-down areas and are now making it out of the ‘slums’ so there sticking to the root and letting everybody know where they came from, and the show that in videos by glumness and not very bright poppy colours.

However the negative side of UK Grime is that it is a little bit repetitive in everything that it does. All the artists market themselves in the same way with a ‘bad-boy’ image and all the lyrics are the same such as they talk about drugs, guns and that or growing up in a run-down area and now making it as a star. Also they tend to be in the same locations as each other, either on a run-down estate (background on mood-board) or within a club-scene so there promoting there song that it’ll make a big song for them to play to a lot of people.