Organic Intelligence XIV: The Golden Age of South London Hip Hop

In our latest subscriber-only newsletter, Angus Batey takes us south of the river for a guide to the essential cuts of one of UK hip hop's finest scenes.

The existence of a Golden Age of Hip Hop is not just an article of faith among the music's most ardent admirers, but has become something of a foundational concept on which much of the art form's history is built. The release of Run DMC's Raising Hell is the usually agreed beginning, with Dr Dre's The Chronic marking the closing of the chapter. Whether one accepts those as the bookends or not, what's undeniable is that between 1986 and 1992, the primacy of rattly sample loops (often, but by no means always, from the James Brown catalogue) provided a kind of sonic glue that bonded many disparate records together.

Of course, like any piece of postmodern cultural mythology, rap's Golden Age is open to revision and reinterpretation, and will often change shape in its frequent reboots and retellings. The idea that this period of exuberant, often barely restrained creativity – based on the gleeful upending of parents' record collections by upstart teens looking to turn their shared pasts into something musically new – was something that the United States had a monopoly on remains pervasive, but that doesn't mean it's accurate.

There are golden ages wherever you look – doubtless we're living in the midst of several now. But in that exact same period when American rappers were tuning experimentation into hits, there were people across the globe who'd fallen under their spell and were busy forging a hip hop heyday of their own. Many of them went relatively unheralded at the time, and their names may not be top of that may fans' GOAT lists today, but that doesn't mean that the music they made in response and in parallel with America's golden age didn't have its own particular and powerful lustre.

And so we come to south London, just one of the many places where hip hop took root and began to bloom during that most productive and dynamic of periods. There had been a scene before, but it would be Public Enemy's appearances with LL Cool J at the Hammersmith Odeon in late 1987 that provided the inspirational spark to set the abundant fuel in the talent pool alight. It happened elsewhere in London too, of course, but what nobody back then thought to call the Dirty South had its own stars, its own style and its own localised pride, which its finest exponents were never slow to tap in to or to champion in their music. And in those years either side of the start of the final decade of the 20th century, there was no stopping them.