mobile spit culture

Again from the pages of Wired (Cell-Phone Rappers Spit Grime ). This time a piece on mobile phone use in the grime scene. It starts out quite awkwardly, as it sets the stage and gets us all up to speed on "spitting," "hype" and the rest of the obligatory terminology. This lickle bit doesn't help things much:

Friends hang out outside, "spitting in groups around the streets," said music producer Joelle Reefer. "They wave their arm in front of themselves, like they are telling off a small child," Reefer wrote in an e-mail, describing the dance style currently in fashion on the U.K. garage scene. "Shaping and pointing their fingers to resemble guns, (they) start to spit/rap in synchronization one after the other, spitting a 16- or a 32-bar rhyme."

BUT, then it moves into the real story - the centrality of the cell phone in grime as a mobile office, lyrical sketch pad, pirate radio link, audio transporter, and portable beat provider. Even more interesting are the points about grime's misuse of the mobile; its users as active consumers remaking the tech to suit their own needs (EG: using to "missed calls" to ask for rewinds on the pirates) while, at the same time, being almost entirely disinterested in the add-on features the cell companies are pushing.