hearing Ms Dynamite’s first release, ‘A Little Deeper’ afresh.
Music Prize judges and imagine you were
It’s hard to cast your mind back to 2002, to try and get into the heads of the Mercury
Te
musical landscape, at the time, was looking for an antidote to the
entrance of the Pop Idol formula – Will Young and Gareth Gates were carrying out the softest, wettest battle for the pop crown; Westlife were riding high on a continued Irish wave and the chart success for urban music was only being satisfied by the heavyweights of the scene, Eminem and various incarnations of the Destiny’s Child line-up.
Did the youth in the UK identify with any of that? Only as much as anyone can; on a purely superficial level. Meanwhile groups of people had been involved in evolving garage and UK hip hop into a sound that was establishing itself as UK grime. Enter Ms Dynamite…
Niomi MacLean-Daley cut a fine figure as a fresh faced 20-year old when she first started igniting her path towards notoriety in 2001. She had been fed regular meals of hip hop and reggae throughout her childhood and her contemporaries were making some noise as So Solid Crew, who Ni enjoyed a stint with before concentrating on her own endeavours. Being blessed with equal skills of MCing and having a beautiful singing voice, she could traverse the delicate line between UK garage and chart music, which welcomed her big melody lines.
Before long, Ms Dynamite had amassed a body of work, the aforementioned album that she gave the title, ‘A Little Deeper’. Te long player made its way into the charts and onto the desks of the Mercury judging committee, so what was it back then, that they heard a Mercury winner in?
Te win
bucked the Mercury trend; Niomi was the first
solo black
woman to receive the accolade and the panel praised ‘A Little Deeper’ “for transforming the face of urban music, and providing a British voice to counter too many "copycat American sounds".” Te win was
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