Roots Manuva, aka Rodney Smith, is the best British hip-hop act of all time. Admittedly it isn’t a very crowded field. Manuva is one of a handful of artists who have managed to defeat the institutional prejudice that keeps black British music in genre-ghettos. They are ‘grime’ or ‘garage’ while the mainstream is flooded with simpering guitar indie and the insipid, bloodless ‘soul’ peddled by Adele, Duffy, etc.
Unlike in the States, where monster labels like Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella are household names, there is simply no infrastructure to give this kind of music the sort of exposure that will come so easily to the next baker’s dozen of tousled, gobby little neo-Britpop toe-rags to slouch onto the scene.
This frustration is expressed by tonight’s support, Jimmy Screech, a cohort of Manuva’s ‘Banana Klan’ artistic collective. Screech is a prime example of the dilemma facing any young performer trying to make a living from rap-based music on this island. His buoyant reggae-funk is winsome, radio-friendly even, but his lyrics express disbelief at the unrepresentative state of mainstream broadcasting.
Of course, relative obscurity has its benefits. Tonight’s crowd really likes Roots Manuva. The place looks half-empty until, inexplicably, about five minutes before Smith takes to the stage, hordes of hip-hoppers surge to the front in fervent anticipation. A lonely-looking fellow standing in front of me is so good a dancer that it seems to have cost him his friends.
As soon as the reggae lope of ‘Again & Again’ kicks in, he starts skanking so hard it seems that by the end of the gig I’ll only be able to see the top of his baseball cap bobbing furiously like the head of some electrifyingly funky mole.
Manuva is an odd stage presence, sauntering around the stage with an enigmatic, stoned grin, sometimes almost horizontal in his laid-back demeanor, sometimes apparently uncomfortable with his position. His best songs, though, have a gospel-like resilience that more than carries them through with the help of a tirelessly enthusiastic audience. He almost starts a riot when he cuts off his biggest hit, ‘Witness (One Hope)’ after a single squelch of its inimitable space-age beat; when the song begins in earnest, pandemonium ensues.
The sound is an eclectic mix of hip-hop, dub and electronica, operating as a three-pronged assault. The singalong choruses make for the heart, the dense lyrics work their way into the brain, while the weapons-grade bass is aimed directly at the groin. Live, the simultaneous secularism and spirituality of his sound is thrown into sharp relief by the congregation of flailing arms reaching up to the stage in supplication.
Roots is an artist powered by contradiction and ambivalence. The new album, Slime and Reason, explores the conflict between acting according to our conscience and the compulsions of our slimy earthly frames. Manuva’s music has an exultant, gospel quality to it, yet he is also an introspective figure, describing on ‘Again & Again’, one of the new record’s more exuberant cuts, how ‘…the pain that break me is the pain that make me, and the pain that take me is the pain that help me maintain…’
He has a Graham Greene-esque relationship with religion (his father was a preacher), often feeling the need for spiritual comfort, but finding holiness difficult to reconcile with the slimy reality of day-to-day living.
Tonight, he ends with new single, ‘Let the Spirit’, an instant classic that starts with a synth that sounds like the music from some old Nintendo game, building into a euphoric chorus celebrating the transcendent power of shared musical experience. With sermons like this it seems entirely possible that this conflicted preacher could yet obtain the ear of a larger flock.
