Wiley records 'Eskimo' — grime's foundational instrumental

Why it matters

April 2002. Richard Kylea Cowie, who recorded as Wiley, recorded an instrumental called "Eskimo" in a home studio in Bow, east London. The track was stripped, harsh, fast (140 bpm), and built on a thin, almost icy keyboard line. Wiley released it on a white-label 12-inch. The track caught on across the London pirate radio scene over the next several months. What "Eskimo" did is establish the sonic prototype for what would, by 2003, be named grime. The instrumental was the first major statement of the eskibeat sub-genre Wiley spent the next two years working out. His Roll Deep crew (Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder, Kano, and a teenage Skepta) became the central node of the early scene, doing pirate-radio sets across the East End and Tower Hamlets. By the time Dizzee Rascal's Boy in da Corner won the Mercury Prize in 2003, grime as a named genre existed in the public conversation. None of that happens without this one Wiley instrumental from April 2002. You can hear "Eskimo" still in the DNA of every UK rap-and-grime record made since.