Dizzee Rascal

Dizzee Rascal

Dylan Kwabena Mills was born 18th of September 1984 in Bow, London. Unfortunately his father died when Dylan was at a young age. Dylan says that he was violent and disruptive when he was young and had many issues as he always got kicked out of schools and his mum would have to find him another school with a system that would fit him in. He started making music on the computer with encouraged by a Music teacher and Dylan attended music workshops during the summer holidays. Dylan was a childhood friend with Danny Shittu who was like a big brother and Dylan made his first mixtape and tracks at Danny's house. He read Kerrang! and enjoyed listening to Nirvana. At 14 he started his career at drum and bass DJ, also rapping over tracks as customary in sound system culture. Now he is a British rapper and record producer. He is a pioneer of Grime music but also incorporates elements of UK garage, baseline, British Hip-Hop and R&B. 

Dizzee Rascal music video Dream has a lot of messages hidden within that may have been accidental or on purpose. The obvious one is the title and the lyrics of the song telling us of Dizzee's dream of becoming an artist and being successful but what is shown in the video does alter the original meaning of the video creating new messages. For example, Dizzee uses a 1950's children television programme 'Muffin the Mule' for the set in Dizzee's video of an elderly woman next to a grand piano in a house, also Dizzee uses the puppet idea from the programme. The use of the children television programme is a binary opposite to what a grime artist would use in their video but Dizzee wanted to do something different to maybe show how his childhood started. However there are still some similarities in the music video to a normal stereotypical grime genre video like violence and the type of of clothes people wear. Dizzee is wearing a hoodie which is close to what most of the other puppets are wearing but this is another  binary opposite to what the woman is wearing, which is a blue dress with a 50's like haircut and speech, this could suggest how the woman is representing white British middle class people and Dizzee and his puppet friends represent black British working class, this link to hierarchy with the sizes as well showing how she has power to let Dizzee out and to put him back in, black working class are controlled by the white British middle class, another hint to this is how the puppets are on strings being controlled and most of the puppets are black and shown to be friends of Dizzee in puppet form to show Dizzee's life. Dizzee does make a few changes to using the idea from the children television programme like using the set of an urban building with graffiti all over it to show that it's in Britain as Britain in a stereotypical view is like that. With gangsta puppets and police fighting to bring in the grime stereotype idea but in a puppet way. There is also a scene where Dizzee is in a studio with a microphone and with a close up which is common in a grime video, this could link to what Dizzee started on in the music industry. Dizzee has a lot of representations but also uses a lot of intertextuality, an example would be how one of the puppets looks like Golliwog with the rest of the puppets, Golliwog is a message of Blackface which is that white actors painted there face black but with a hideous look during the 19th century, Dizzee uses this to send a message to the viewer that Dizzee believes that white British middle class people view black British working class people like Blackface but uses Golliwog instead to support the children television programme, Dizzee just puts the message out there showing some annoyance on how people could think that and he wants to change the stereotype of Black British people.