Skepta
Chief Joseph "Skepta" Adenuga emerged from Tottenham's grime pirate-radio scene as a member of Meridian Crew and Roll Deep before co-founding Boy Better Know, becoming one of the genre's most influential MCs and producers. His Mercury Prize-winning 2016 album Konnichiwa, anchored by "That's Not Me" and "Shutdown," pulled grime back into the UK mainstream after a decade in the wilderness and set the stripped-down, bass-heavy, unapologetically London template that UK drill's generation grew up on. Central Cee has credited him as the reason he started rapping at all.
Skepta briefly joined Wiley's Roll Deep before the two co-founded Boy Better Know in 2005; Wiley's blueprint of hard, minimal eskibeat production paired with rapid-fire, taunting bars is the direct architecture Skepta built his own MCing on.
listen forPlay Wiley's "Wot Do U Call It?" then Skepta's "It Ain't Safe" — the same bare, clattering low end and confrontational, call-and-response bars, one generation apart.
Skepta has cited Dizzee Rascal, whose arrival in the early 2000s alongside Roll Deep is widely credited as grime's lyrical ground zero, as a direct influence; that stripped-down, rapid-cadence storytelling shows up in how bluntly and quickly Skepta gets to the point in his own verses.
listen forSet Dizzee's "I Luv U" against Skepta's "Man" — both strip the beat down to almost nothing and let a terse, plainspoken cadence carry the whole track.
As a schoolkid, Skepta started out listening to North London UK garage crew Heartless Crew before grime existed as its own genre; their sing-song MC hooks over 2-step garage rhythms are the pre-grime foundation his sound was built on top of.
listen forPlay Heartless Crew's "The Heartless Theme" then Skepta's "Rolex Sweep" — the same bouncing, bassline-adjacent groove and sung-rapped hook style, carried from garage sound systems into Skepta's own crossover single.