UKDrill

Quora Answer : Is UK hip hop and drill a second rate version of American hip hop or is it any good?

Jun 23, 2020

UK grime is a genuinely original and innovative type of rap music. As different from American rap as, say, West Coast, East Coast, and Houston rap were from each other.

Related, but noticeably different. And, yes, grime was very good.

To my ears, UK drill is much closer to Chicago drill than grime was to its contemporaries from America. The beat is a bit different. And obviously the accents are different. And flows, the vocabulary, some of the style owes much to grime.

So there are differences. But I'm not sure it's so different that I could get really excited about it as a music genre.

Grime was derived from hip-hop by a very circuitous route ... via breakbeat rave, jungle and 2-step garage. MCs were always as much influenced by Jamaican ragga as US hop-hop.

Drill seems to me to be much more directly influenced by the US music. (Although, of course, grime is also still an influence)

Yesterday I was watching a Noisey documentary about Irish drill. And, say, J.B2 seems to have an interesting flow :

There are good artists in the UK and (increasingly) Ireland. And I'm sure the good ones are as as worth listening to as the American ones. But I think the UK scene needs to add something else of its own to the mix to really shine again.