“All the Other Players Want to Look at My Pad”: Grime, Gaming, and Digital Identity

Abstract

A fusion of jungle, garage, hip-hop and Jamaican sound system culture, grime emerged from the housing estates of East London in the early 2000s. The genre has always had strong ties to gaming, from producers who cut their compositional teeth on Mario Paint (Nintendo RD1, 1992) to MCs who incorporate videogame references into their lyrics, album titles and aliases. This article traces grime’s relationship with gaming from the genre’s inception to the present, focusing on two case studies: veteran London MC D Double E’s 2010 track “Street Fighter Riddim” and Senegalese-Kuwaiti musician Fatima Al Qadiri’s 2012 Desert Strike EP, a “soundtrack” to her experiences of the first Gulf War. Showing how players build videogames into their life stories and identities, these case studies affirm that gaming was never the exclusive preserve of “nerdy” white middle-class males while foregrounding the ludic dimensions of digital musicianship and the musical dimensions of digital play.

Keywords

• Grime
• identity
• masculinities
• sampling
• gamer culture