DIZZEE RASCAL

Jan 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Aidin Vaziri

Dylan Mills grew up in a grimy east London public-housing estate with his mother. His favorite album was Nirvana's In Utero (Geffen 1993), Kurt Cobain's hopeless peace offering to fame. The only poster on his wall was of Tupac Shakur. “They made America sound like a place where you could get rich, a place with big cars, big money — everything large-scale,” he says. “But they also made it look violent and harsh.”

For most people, the tragic fate of these pop giants would be enough of a deterrent to make them consider a career in banking instead of music. But for the 18-year-old rapper and producer who rechristened himself Dizzee Rascal, they shaped the explosive vision behind his groundbreaking debut, Boy in da Corner (XL, 2003). Although just an industry fledgling, Rascal was not immune to the violence of his heroes: In July, the same week that the album was released to widespread critical acclaim in the UK, Rascal was stabbed five times in the Cyprus resort town of Ayia Napa.

Nevertheless, the album's strange brew of scratchy rhythms, minimalist stuttering beats and high-pitched vocals is potent enough that it has allowed Rascal to transcend his rough beginnings in life, as well as in music. And it has already earned him the prestigious Mercury Music Prize, placing him alongside previous winners Roni Size and Ms. Dynamite. More important, in a field of nominations that also included the latest efforts by established artists such as Radiohead and Coldplay, it marked him as a genuine innovator. “Every producer sets out to make something different,” Rascal says. “The environment that I was coming from was dominated by garage and two-step, so I wanted to do something completely different. It was just a case of sitting there and doing it — choosing the most off-key sounds possible, screaming and shouting, using beats that people are more used to hearing in techno.”

Rascal certainly tapped into the right formula: The album is a revelation. Bullets whiz around. Sirens blare. Sadness and desperation abound. On “I Luv U,” a 15-year-old girl gets pregnant. In “Do It!” the rapper sends out a bitter message to the establishment: “I've seen a lot, maybe more than I can take / Under pressure every day, trying not to break.”

Yet Rascal knows when to pull back: With “Fix Up, Look Sharp,” he simply slams in a rocking performance over a threadbare sample of Billy Squier's arena-rock anthem “The Big Beat.” “At the time, I was in this predicament where everyone was calling me a garage MC, but I knew I was versatile, so I wanted to show that I could spit on a hip-hop beat without trying to sound American or emulate anyone else,” he says. “It worked.”

Most of the songs started out with Rascal messing around in Steinberg Cubase on his Mac G4/350MHz, which is equipped with Universal Audio UAD-1 and TC Works TC PowerCore soundcards. “I'm not too much of a technical person,” he says. “I could hear a bass line and make a tune out of that alone. I do it from an MC perspective. I like to leave space for the vocals. My rule is to never spend more than 20 minutes on a beat.”

He fleshed out the songs with a Korg Triton keyboard and performed his vocals through a Neumann TLM 103 microphone, which was filtered through a vintage Drawmer 1960 vacuum-tube compressor. His rudimentary studio setup ensured that the songs stayed as raw as the man behind them. “I don't think it was confidence that got me here,” Rascal says. “I've just got a lot of drive. When I set out to do something, I do it.”

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