Five Of The Best: Wiley

Image: Wiley

It could be said that Wiley's affinity with music is his greatest attribute, something that can be derived from a story about his early years rolling with the SS Crew.

At 14 years old, Wiley was making in roads on Hackney radio station Chillin FM when Jungle was ruling the airwaves.  

Born out of attending raves in the capital, Wiley's SS Crew scored a midnight slot after lying to station bosses about their youthful age. Aside from the presumable lack of facial hair, who can blame the bosses, how many 14 year olds do you know playing house parties and plugging the capital with white labels? 

Although a brief insight, it's a story substantial enough to grasp how the East London boy became the 'Godfather Of Grime'. Through his early involvement with music to his determination and defiance at restricting himself to genre conformity, Wiley has managed to carve himself a formidable urban legacy.  

After extensive digging, re-jigging and listening to an extensive stream of Wiley's war chest from as far back as his Pay As U Go days, we've whittled songs extracted from various albums, mixtapes, white labels and demos down to five.

To give you a greater sense of his career path, we've structured our picks to form a brief portrait of a man whose legend prompted a petition for a statue to be erected in his honour in East London.

We're not sure about you, but as long as it isn't commissioned to the man who sculpted Mohamed Al Fayed's Michael Jackson statue, we'd help build it ourselves if we could. 

Wiley 'Eskimo' (2002)

Wiley is to grime what Todd Edwards and DJ EZ are to UK garage, and this instrumental is a genre defining sound that set the blueprint for grime as we know it. 

Constructed with a low slung bass line, strings and raw electronic elements that would become known as eskibeat, 'Eskimo' is the most infamous of Wiley's early white labels. 

Wiley 'Wot Do You Call It?' (2004)

"Here in London there's a sound called garage/But this is my sound, it sure ain't garage" - a firm statement of intent from Wiley that arrived on debut LP Treddin' On Thin Ice.

At the time, his sound was still bandied around with names like sub low, grimey and eskibeat - grime was yet to be born. Arguably the driving force of the movement, Wiley made it clear this was his archetypal sound spitting verses like "The Eskimo sound is mine, recognise it's mine". 

Wiley 'Wearing My Rolex' (2008)

The catalyst to Wiley's commercial success, it'd be impossible to ignore the expectancy of this club banger making the list. Arriving on See Clear Now, the grime meets electro punch up gave the grime movement a steadfast platform beyond the peripheries of the underground.

When the DJ drops this in a club it's a certainty the dancefloor still loses their shit, and for many it was the first time they discovered Wiley.

Wiley 'Where's My Brother' (2009)

Infiltrate any grime forum and they're still trying to decipher what inspired this track. Widely speculated as a diss of Durty Goodz and his brother Titch, this cut is Wiley at his undisputed best - both sonically and lyrically. Communicated with inconceivable flow, the production and melody on this track sets it out as one of the greatest grime records of all the time. 

Wiley 'On A Level' (2014)

Lifted from last year's Snakes And Ladders, a record Wiley said "needs to be epic or there's no point", 'On A Level' is the cream of the crop on an album that largely returns to the eskibeat in its rawest form.

Produced by Skepta, Wiley's bars surpass the capabilities of the human respiratory system, slinging bars that could melt polar ice caps.

Featuring a number of prevalent MC's like Stormzy and Novelist, it's a given that many of the artists on the video (above) wouldn't be where they are today if it wasn't for the mercurial talents of Richard Kylea Cowie.

Catch Wiley at a slew of dates by checking out Inspire Me Artist Focus: Wiley