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Even as the 19-year-old Dizzee Rascal collected the Mercury Prize in 2003, formally announcing his entrance into the mainstream, many people were still confused.

The award was for his debut album, Boy In Da Corner — but what was it, exactly? The Guardian called it “the future of both British garage and British hip hop”, while the BBC referred to Dizzee, real name Dylan Mills, as “an underground urban artist”.

The scrambling around for terminology was understandable. 'Grime' was not yet a thing — at least, the word wasn’t part of the mainstream lexicon — so we were left trying to dissect the sounds in order to work out their DNA.

Boy In Da Corner was the Southern hip hop of Memphis rap group Three 6 Mafia viewed through a murky, distinctly British lens. It was a writhing Frankenstein’s monster of old, disparate garage beats. It was glitching, computerised rap, enlivened by a punk rock energy. It was all these things, but really, it was different to anything at all that had come before it.

It was grime’s first and, arguably, best ever album. It announced grime to the masses — even if barely anyone knew what to call it back then — arriving as a startling, fully-formed introduction to the genre. It was a vivid snapshot of east London strife in the New Labour era, a portrait of a boy thrust into adulthood, assured yet vulnerable, all backed by this thrilling mutant noise. It was the album upon which one of London’s most exciting, vital music scenes was built.

Grime had been cultivating for some time before, as the dying embers of UK garage were reignited on pirate radio. Dizzee started out as an amateur drum ‘n’ bass DJ at age 14, spinning tracks in his bedroom on the decks his mum had bought him. Taken under the wings of two fellow Bow residents, Wiley and DJ Target, both of whom would go on to become gatekeepers of grime, Dizzee joined the Roll Deep garage collective. His prodigious talent as an MC was plainly obvious — his flow was blisteringly rapid, his delivery was brutally precise and his elastic voice, or rather yelp, pierced through the din of every garage rave he stepped into.

In the summer of 2003, Dizzee was one of a number of MCs who crammed like sardines into a Stratford flat to perform on the pirate radio station Deja Vu 92.3 FM. It was a febrile evening, with bars dropped by Wiley and D Double E, among many others, and culminated in an aggressive spat between Dizzee and Crazy Titch (a young MC whose potential was as exciting as anyone’s at the time, but who is currently serving life for murder in HMP Long Lartin). The confrontation at the end, coupled with the fact that the whole thing was filmed, means that it is now the stuff of legend, but more than anything it captured exactly what was happening at the time. No longer were DJs the main event, as they often were within garage. MCs, and their machine-gun lyricism, were the future.

Boy In Da Corner set that all into concrete. The lyrics were placed front and centre from the off with album opener Sittin’ Here, a gloomy, apathetic reflection of the turbulent, cyclical environment he saw around him while growing up on an estate (“It’s the same old story, benefit claims in false names/ It’s the same old story, students truant learn the streets fluent”). The song also set a tone of bare-faced emotion on the album: “I’m sittin’ here depressed and I don’t know why/ I try to pull myself together, tell myself ‘fix up’/ And keep myself from bawlin’ but my eyes, they erupt.”

Even so, the boastfulness was never far away, whether he was threatening to “flush MCs down the loo” on Fix Up, Look Sharp, or warning love rivals he “might just take your girl and make your girl my girl” on I Luv U. The parallels to Tupac, a hero of Dizzee’s, are easily and fairly drawn, especially when you consider American rapper’s debut single, Brenda’s Got A Baby, touched upon many of the same themes that flow throughout Boy In Da Corner — poverty, teenage pregnancy and crime.

The beats, the majority of which were produced solely by Dizzee, bristled with all the hyperactive tension and creativity of the teenager crafting them. They were defiantly experimental — Dizzee would spend hours trying to find the most disgusting noises to put on his tracks and punctuate them with dissonant bleeps and crashes. Stop Dat is incendiary madness, all thumping basslines and electronic screeches, while I Luv U is a splintered assault on the ears, with harsh percussion and a bass backing that sounds like a malfunctioning motorcycle engine.

It wasn’t all like that, though. Tracks like Fix Up, Look Sharp, a stripped back ode to old school hip hop, and Jezebel, with its catchy, staccato instrumentation were far more accessible, and showed that Dizzee, purposely or otherwise, had half an eye on the pop music stylings that he would embrace later in his career.

Boy In Da Corner is influential and inimitable. It was a new way of doing things, a break from the faltering garage scene, replaced by a sound that was brimming with potential. It gave future grime MCs and producers a standard of excellence to aspire to, even if nothing else has ever sounded quite like it. There are a handful of albums and mixtapes that can be argued to have impacted grime to a similar extent — Kano’s Home Sweet Home, Ruff Sqwad’s Guns ‘N’ Roses Vol. 1, Wiley’s Playtime Is Over and Skepta’s Konnichiwa spring immediately to mind — but Boy In Da Corner stands alone. It was, as DJ Semtex once put it, grime’s “ground zero”. If people were confused about it 15 years ago, they can be in no doubt now.