Dizzee Rascal releases 'Boy in da Corner' — defining grime LP

Why it matters

Boy in da Corner came out July 21, 2003, on XL Recordings. Dylan Mills, who recorded as Dizzee Rascal, was 18 years old, from Bow in East London, and had been making records as part of Wiley's Roll Deep crew for the previous two years. Dizzee produced most of the album himself. The album is the debut LP of grime as a named, commercially distributed genre. The album won the Mercury Prize (the UK's most prestigious album award) in September 2003. It is the first hip-hop or grime LP to win the Mercury, and one of the very few albums by an 18-year-old to ever take the prize. The production is jagged, melodically sparse, harsh on the high end, dominated by short stabbing keyboard lines and 140-bpm tempos. The MCing is Dizzee in his teenage Cockney register, doing internal rhymes at a velocity that the older UK garage MCs had not been working at. "I Luv U," "Fix Up, Look Sharp," "Round We Go," "Stop Dat." The album consolidated grime as a discrete sub-genre and set the template for what would become the next twenty years of UK rap. You should hear it. The first ten seconds tell you what the genre is.