One British rap magazine has outlived all the US giants – even ‘The Source’. Ian Burrell asks its editor how ‘Hip-Hop Connection’ has survived 20 years, and what the future holds

It is fair to say that Skinnyman, a figurehead of British hip-hop, is unlikely to ever be mistaken for 50 Cent, the ripped and tattooed New York rap icon. Emaciated he is, as skinny as a doppio espresso, as well as white and born in Leeds – and, on this Monday night in a packed London club, he’s angry as well.

“Peace, unity, love and having fun,” he tersely lectures his young audience on the central tenets of hip-hop culture, drawing on the words of its founding father Afrika Bambaataa. Not graffiti, breakdancing, scratching or even rapping, and certainly not the gun-toting and drug-taking that much of the media now associates with this most controversial of music genres.

There is one especially notable exception to that media rule: an East Anglia-based magazine that has defied publishing economics to become the longest-running hip-hop title on the planet, outlasting even the so-called rap bible, New York’s The Source, which is currently attempting to get back on its feet after going bankrupt in 2006. Hip-Hop Connection, which is 20 years old this month, has a curiously English sound to it, the “connection” part somehow reflecting the distance between the British scene and the culture’s roots in the South Bronx.

But among the British rap aristocracy, who turned out in the magazine’s honour last week at a traditional breakdancing, beatboxing, battle rhyming and booty-shaking session known as The Jump Off, HHC is revered. They were all there. Normski, the television presenter and photographer of the hip-hop old skool, turned out in a black brimmed hat and a suit decorated with safety pins. The pioneering British rapper MC Duke showed his pedigree in a fetching Burberry house check suit and brown bowler. Shortee Blitz, the larger-than-life turntable king, with Maseo from the great New York rap crew De La Soul, stood at his shoulder. All came to pay their dues to a publication compiled in a house in Cambridge.

Earlier, in a quiet Soho bar, before the head-spinning and lyric-spitting had begun, the man behind Hip-Hop Connection, Andy Cowan, 41, explained how he has devoted his career to the project.

Let’s be blunt about this: hip-hop is in a bad place, under fire not just from appalled politicians and moral guardians but from large sections of the music-buying public who find it uninspiring. Cowan can’t disagree. “It’s fair to say that people are bored of the diet they’re being served of middling gangsterism mixed with lots of special guests and R&B artists. It’s got a bit staid.”

Worse, the people that still actually like the music are especially prone to downloading it for free. “Hip-hop kids were always quite savvy, technology adept and ahead of the pack,” says Cowan. “It’s a magpie form of music, and there’s a poetic justice that something that’s based on burglary is being burgled in reverse.”

The upside is that the difficulties of the American rap mainstream have provided a reality check that has allowed the British scene to flourish. “UK hip-hop is, oddly, in the healthiest state it has ever been,” says the HHC editor, explaining that British rappers have given up fantasies of becoming bling-laden global superstars and put their efforts into building their own homegrown sound. He cites cutting-edge labels such as Young ‘n’ Restless and Low Life Records, which represents Skinnyman, as well as the rappers Asaviour, Taskforce and Klashnekoff. “In the last few years we have upped the UK content quite a lot in the magazine, because it’s more reflective of the times,” says Cowan, so softly spoken that he is at times almost inaudible. Though he’d struggle to compete with Skinnyman in a freestyle rap battle, his love for rap music is not in doubt.

Hip-Hop Connection began life as a phone number, a hotline run by Dave Pearce (now a Radio 1 DJ) where rap fans could get information on upcoming events. The magazine it spawned was founded by Chris Hunt, beginning as a one-off publication with female rappers Salt-n-Pepa on the cover. Cowan joined 10 issues in.

The original publishers were Music Maker Publications, based in the unlikely location of Ely. The title was later sold, first to Future in Bath, and then to James Palumbo’s Ministry of Sound organisation, where it was encouraged to follow a more commercial musical tack. Cowan admits feeling discomfort that Mariah Carey once made it on to a cover (with the headline “Mariahhh!”), though a request that Mel B from The Spice Girls might merit the same treatment was deemed as a step too far, and led to Cowan and the team going their own way after buying the magazine back from Ministry.

For much of its history, Hip-Hop Connection has had to compete with both The Source (which sold 1m copies in the US at its height, and around 17,000 in Britain) and XXL, another slick American production. It did so with good journalism, scooping exclusive interviews with rap stars such as Slick Rick and Rakim from under the noses of the American magazines. Cowan says his title is also more critical in how it judges new releases. “The reviews in American magazines are generally quite poor because they’re actually afraid of offending the major record labels.”

Cowan’s task has not been made any easier by hip-hop’s frequent association with inspiring everything that is wrong with urban life. “Hip-hop, Hollywood and video games are always cited as the chief protagonists whenever there’s a moral panic,” he says. “It’s a cheap shot.” The magazine has tried to make a positive contribution, working on advertorials with the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Trident team and offering to collaborate with Scotland Yard on a CD of anti-knife crime tracks.

Despite everything, Hip-Hop Connection has survived to put out its 20th-anniversary issue, and as well as releasing its first-ever compilation album of 20 UK rap anthems, it is about to go on a fresher’s week tour of British universities next month. Skinnyman will be on the bill, teaching students from the class of 2011 about his Council Estate of Mind, as his acclaimed album is called, and demonstrating an originality of which Cowan greatly approves.

“The original message of hip-hop, I think, was to be yourself,” he says. “Anything, if you really feel it, can be hip-hop.”

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The sleep-inducing name of the Orange Warsaw Festival 2008 on 6 September on Plac Defilad is sure to be anything but. The festival is headlined by Kelly Rowland (solo R&B artist and 1/3 of the platinum-bestselling group Destiny’s Child) and Wyclef Jean (also a solo artist and 1/3 of the now-defunct hip-hop legends, The Fugees).

After your Friday night booze-fest and your 10-hour lie-in, 16:00 may seem early to start all over again. But, Place Defilad is the only place in Warsaw you will want to be on Saturday afternoon (hey, that’s why they invented Red Bull).

Two stages will rock your body and provide you with the music of both Polish and American artists. The Polish line-up includes Jan Bo from Cafe Fogg, Marysia Sadowska, Mika Urbaniak, and Paulina Przybysz. Additionally, Noc Teatrow (Night Theatre) is compiling, from various Warsaw alternative theatres, a show called ENTER that will debut that evening as part of the festivities.

Orange, France’s telecom giant and major shareholder in Telekomunikacja Polska S.A., is sponsoring the event.

If you don’t really know these artists, you should (myspace.com can introduce you). If you’re skeptical about the whole event, you shouldn’t be. Bumping to great beats under the Palace of Culture is the best way that I can think of to end the summer. And hey – it’s free! (mmj)

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The UK grime and MC scene is stronger than ever. Wiley’s electro-charged, hip-house/rave anthem “Wearing My Rolex” is still in the Top 30 three months after it shot into the Top 10, while Estelle, who cut her teeth as a rapper, is the toast of Britain’s and America’s urban-music scenes thanks to her chart topping single “American Boy” and her acclaimed LP Shine, which gained a place on the Mercury shortlist.

2003’s Mercury Prize winner, Dizzee Rascal, bagged the first No1 of his career this summer with “Dance Wiv Me”, a collaboration with fluoro-electro artist, Calvin Harris. And there’s more to come: Wiley’s new LP has been signed by Atlantic, and continues grime’s love-in with electro thanks to another certain hit (”Summer Time”) sampling Daft Punk’s “Aerodynamic”. Skepta’s “Rolex Sweep”, a riposte to “Wearing My Rolex”, has spawned a dance craze that has garnered high-profile fans including Coldplay’s Chris Martin and er, Timmy Mallet.

It’s a scene that’s been building and evolving in Britain for years. UK dancehall and reggae’s fusion with hip-hop forged a distinct voice and style for home-grown rap, but the music of Jamaica – via Britain’s Caribbean community – also filtered into acid house, spawning jungle, drum’n'bass, UK garage, dubstep, and grime. Although it’s not immediately obvious, contemporary British urban stars, such as Roots Manuva, who releases his sixth studio album Slime and Reason next month, Wiley, Dizzee Rascal, Estelle and Ms Dynamite owe a large debt to Jamaican Londoners’ dancehall and reggae soundsystems that mirror those “back home”.

So do late 1980s/early 1990s success stories such as Soul II Soul, led by Jazzie B (who now lives between London and Antigua), and Massive Attack, with their soundsystem, or loose collective, ethos. Roots Manuva (Rodney Hylton Smith)’s mix of cockney and patois rap – with references to cheese on toast and bitter – over rumbling dub encapsulates the hybrid of dancehall and reggae MC-ing, US rap with an English slant.

“I grew up seeing soundsystems at weddings, parties and local-government-funded festivals,” recalls Smith, “and my experience of dancehall came from ’soundtapes’; the recordings of reggae dances with MCs and deejays chatting over dub instrumentals were like golddust at school. People traded the Saxon Soundsystem soundtapes round the playground.”

These crackly audio cassettes were the catalyst for Smith, now 35, to begin rapping: “I started by rapping other people’s lyrics from the soundtapes. We would take their lyrics and put our own little twist on them. I did a few parties and tapes,” he says.

When “Rappers’ Delight”, featuring the Sugar Hill Gang rapping over Chic’s disco hit “Good Times”, catapulted hip-hop from the Bronx in 1979, for Smith it wasn’t so far removed from the soundtapes. “Between the ages of eight and 10, I was strictly into reggae, and the first time I heard rapping was ‘Rappers’ Delight’. That was a massive tune – people used to sing it round school but it totally went past me. To me, it was ’soul talking’ – a soul tune with people talking. It wasn’t until four years later, and the film Beat Street, that I got into rap and hip-hop.”

Gabriel Myddleton, who compiled An England Story – a 21-track, double CD (four vinyl record) compilation charting the evolution of the MC in Britain over the last 25 years – with Gervase De Wilde, believes that dancehall and reggae’s MC culture is part of hip-hop’s DNA.

“Viewing dancehall as separate from hip-hop or, as it’s often described, a Jamaican variant of hip-hop, is crazy as they all come from the same place in the long term, which is African music,” Myddleton says. “Reggae caused the birth of hip-hop, as Kool DJ Herc [hip-hop's alleged inventor] was Jamaican and brought the soundsystem to the Bronx.”

Smith concurs: “Kool Herc was Jamaican. He went to America with his sound, dressed down his patois and flipped it into hip-hop.”

What inspired Myddleton and De Wilde (dancehall DJs, producers and bloggers The Heatwave) to conceive An England Story?

“Unsung dancehall and reggae artists like the Ragga Twins and what they were doing with the Unity Soundsystem and Papa Levi and the Saxon Soundsystem in the 1980s were completely under the radar from London and the UK. We wanted to highlight their influence on the here and now, and try to understand English MCs in terms of their Englishness and Caribbean background,” says Myddleton.

South London’s Saxon Soundsystem proved commercially successful, with Smiley Culture’s No12 hit “Police Officer” securing the singer/MC two Top of the Pops appearances in 1984. In the same year, Saxon’s MC Papa Levi’s “My God My King”, incredibly, went to No1 in Jamaica. Unity hardly released any material.

By the late 1980s, acid house and rave had supplanted rare groove, soul and reggae as the soundtrack of inner-city Britain, and Unity’s leading MCs, Deman Rockers and his brother Flinty Badman, took their hosting, toasting, chatting and entertaining skills, honed over a decade on reggae soundsystem, to raves as the Ragga Twins. “We made more money in the first six months on the rave scene than in the 15 years doing reggae,” announces Rockers.

In 1989, Tottenham’s Rebel MC combined speeded-up breakbeat with patois chat and reggae effects to compelling effect on “Street Tuff” (No3 in the UK singles chart), laying the foundation for jungle. The Prodigy’s 1992 rave anthem “Out of Space”, sampling Max Romeo’s “I Chase the Devil” (produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry), continued the fusion of reggae/dancehall with rave, before General Levy broadcast jungle to the nation by performing “Incredible” on Top of the Pops in 1994.

Ever since the Ragga Twins, MCs have been omnipresent in the genres that followed jungle – drum’n'bass, UK garage and dubstep – fulfilling much the same role, acting as a link between audience and music and keeping the dancefloor “bubbling”. It was with So Solid Crew that MCs took centre stage, and this has continued with grime.

In 2008, grime has finally found mainstream success, by rediscovering its good-time dance-music roots. Soundsystem culture has reverberated through pop, too, whether in Basement Jaxx and Groove Armada’s dancehall-flecked house, or The Streets and Lily Allen’s “chat rap”. Smith is staggered by how far this English rap patter has travelled.

Warrior Queen’s 2008 single “Things Change”, charting how the Jamaican-born dancehall queen adapted to life in Britain, and Tippa Irie’s “Complain Neighbour”, about a neighbour griping about “reggy” music, might be separated by 25 years, but both feature social commentary.

“It’s always been topical. Smiley Culture’s ‘Cockney Translation’ translated cockney for Jamaicans, and ‘Police Officer’ was about being stopped and searched. It’s the tradition of the African griot, and the English town crier – it’s the same thing: storytelling, a combination of stand-up entertainment, telling a joke, telling a story, motivating the crowd, and getting a response,” Smith goes on to explain.

More than 25 years after Smith was mimicking soundtapes at school, Dizzee Rascal (18 years old when he won 2003’s Mercury Prize) and the next wave of grime MCs, such as teenagers Chipmunk and Griminal, are evidence that MC culture is alive and kicking in school playgrounds.

Smith sees grime as the next stage of British MC culture: “You get beautiful moments with grime MCs. Some of them don’t even know where the culture comes from, but it’s a beautiful thing how they’ve taken it on and the influence is reaching from different generations and age groups and to people from different backgrounds, not just Jamaican kids.”

‘An England Story’ is out now on Soul Jazz Records; Roots Manuva’s ‘Slime and Reason’ will be out on 1 September on Big Dada

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Estelle has compared herself to Jay-Z, saying she is the female equivalent of the rapper.

The UK star made the claims after Jay-Z has recently been sampling her hit single ‘American Boy’ during his live shows - including his headlining slot at Glastonbury Festival last month.

“I am the female version of Jay-Z. And I thought, ‘When Jay-Z knows who I am, when he wants to work with me, then I’ll have made it.’” Estelle tells UK newspaper the Mirror.

“Everyone else could go to hell,” the singer added.

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P. Diddy has revealed that he wants to collaborate with Leona Lewis on his next album…

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