walking upstream…
Skepta
Before he was Skepta, Joseph Adenuga was the kid dreading the moment a Tottenham teacher tried to pronounce his Nigerian surname — until, he says, his mother told him, "Junior, your name means something," and it started to power him up. He grew up on the Meridian Estate DJing pirate radio, paying £20 a set to keep a station called Heat FM running, before grime godfather Wiley told him to try writing bars instead. Skepta took the note and spent a decade hustling white-label vinyl from the back of a car and building the independent label Boy Better Know with his brother Jme, before 2014's stripped-down "That's Not Me" reset grime's whole aesthetic and 2016's Konnichiwa won the Mercury Prize. He calls the sound "from the beats, not just the vocals" — proudly, insistently London.
the sound in question
2014
That's Not MeSkepta
walk the tributaries ↓
Wiley2000s · Grime / UK garage
Wiley is the reason Skepta ever picked up a microphone: after a studio session together, the older MC told the 21-year-old to go home and write bars, and Skepta did, later passing through Wiley's crew Roll Deep before he and his brother Jme split off to found the label Boy Better Know. Skepta describes the whole era as Wiley's invention — "'Eskimo' was called 'Eskimo' before an MC spat on it," he told the FADER, of how Wiley's instrumentals carried their own names before anyone rapped over them. The brothers still call Wiley a mentor.
listen: upstream & heresource: The FADER — Skepta's Mission (cover story ↗
2005
MorgueWiley
2015
NastySkepta
listen forWiley's 2005 instrumental "Morgue" — a beat one critic described as sounding "like sudden-death on a masochist game show" — sat unused for a decade until Skepta rapped his 2015 Devilman diss track "Nasty" straight over it, drips and kicks untouched. It's grime's war-dub tradition made literal: instead of answering with a new beat, Skepta reaches back into Wiley's own catalog and claims the riddim itself, stacking a decade-old instrumental under a very current beef.
Dizzee Rascal2000s–10s · Grime / UK garage / Hip hop
Skepta names Dizzee Rascal in the same breath as Wiley as his formative measuring stick: "In my head, Dizzee and Wiley were the people that I was looking up to," he told the FADER — the pioneer whose 2003 Mercury Prize-winning debut, Boy in Da Corner, set the bar Skepta spent a decade chasing before he "stopped looking to Wiley and Dizzee as the blueprint" and struck his own path with 2014's "That's Not Me."
listen: upstream & here
2004
Stand Up TallDizzee Rascal
2015
ShutdownSkepta
listen forDizzee's 2004 "Stand Up Tall" was his own commercial reset after the abrasive Boy in Da Corner — a leaner, radio-ready beat riding the same blunt, declarative cadence. Play it against Skepta's 2015 "Shutdown," the single that announced his return to form after years of chasing chart-pop dance singles: both strip back to a hard, minimal low end and let a plainspoken hook carry the record, the same "back to basics" move each artist made at his commercial turning point.
Prince Nico Mbarga1970s · Highlife
The Adenuga house in Tottenham was, in Skepta's telling, a Nigerian household transplanted into 90s Britain, his father DJing house parties into the early hours. In 2007, on his debut album Greatest Hits, Skepta covered "Sweet Mother," the 1976 highlife standard by Prince Nico Mbarga and his band Rocafil Jazz — one of Africa's best-selling singles — reworking its guitar-and-percussion groove with jittery grime production, years before he'd rap about Nigerian delicacies on 2019's "Greaze Mode."
listen: upstream & here
1976
Sweet MotherPrince Nico Mbarga
2007
Sweet MotherSkepta
listen forMbarga's 1976 "Sweet Mother" rides a loping highlife guitar line and a call-and-response chorus built for a room of dancing relatives. Skepta's 2007 cover keeps that same melody and gentle percussion intact but drops a harder, clattering grime pulse underneath it — one tune shared across three decades and two very different dancefloors, the clearest audible proof of the Nigerian sound running under his London bars.