- 20 years after becoming grime's breakout anthem, Christian Adofo reflects on the impact of Lethal Bizzle's seismic call to arms.
- "Yo! What's this 'Pow!' song?!" One April morning in 2004, Maxwell Ansah woke up to dozens of missed calls and text messages all demanding the same answers. The East London grime MC, known as Lethal Bizzle, was puzzled. The song in question hadn't been released yet—he had just recorded "Pow! (Forward)" the night before at DJ Commander B's Walthamstow studio. How was word already out?
Soon enough, he received yet another phone call, this time from a friend who claimed to have heard "Pow!" on Commander B's weekly night flight show on Choice FM. Ansah, frustrated, confronted Commander B about premiering the song without his permission. Commander B apologised, but maintained that the public needed to hear it, and he wanted to be the first to drop it. "I can't let another man play that before me," he said. Little did Ansah know this premiere would not only change his life but launch several other grime MCs into UK music history.
The mood in the booth at Commander B's studio didn't hint at a future classic. As a who's who of grime innovators—namely Fumin, D Double E, Napper, Jamakabi, Neeko, Flowdan, MC Forcer, Demon and Ozzie B, Ansah's old school mate—recorded their verses, uncertainty clouded the air. Many of the MCs were unsure about the instrumental, with D Double E even claiming he didn't like the off-kilter beat provided by producer D'Explicit (also known as Dexplicit). The 8-bar instrumental swung a stark, bouncy synthline between claps and carried a militaristic fanfare. At a time when the cold futurism of Wiley's eskibeats ruled the roost, this was a lot stranger. No one seemed convinced—except, of course, for Ansah, who went around the room convincing his fellow MCs to see the light: "Trust me bro, this is the future!"
By the time "Pow!" was released, the UK scene had gone through a few years of rapid transition. Garage, a genre that typically drew from the sugary ends of pop and R&B, was morphing into something darker. So Solid Crew led the charge, topping the charts in summer of 2001, which kicked down the door for grime's eventual crossover. More Fire Crew, which consisted of Ansah, Neeko and Ozzie B, cracked the Top 10 in 2002 with sparring banger "Oi!", and the following year, Dizzee Rascal rocked the industry by bagging the Mercury Prize for Boy In Da Corner, making him Britain's first bona fide grime celebrity.
Yet this underground movement was soon put under significant pressure. Gun crime was on the rise in the early '00s, and the middle ground between dark garage and grime—populated largely by musicians from council estates, where weapons were often seen as necessary for protection—became an easy target. In 2003, Labour culture minister Kim Howells represented the rising backlash against a strain of British culture politicians callously bracketed as "urban." When two teenagers in Birmingham were shot outside of a New Year's Eve party, Howells drew racist conclusions: "The events in Birmingham are symptomatic of something very, very serious," he said. "For years I have been very worried about these hateful lyrics that these boasting macho idiot rappers come out with."
This period marked what seemed like the beginning of the end for grime. In a landscape where grime nights and club spaces were being heavily policed, record labels began to sweat and promotion faltered. When More Fire's debut failed to ignite, their label Go! Beat dropped them without a second thought. It looked like the entire grime scene was set to crash out when it had barely taken off.
Frustrated with career stagnation and major label posturing, Ansah decided to take matters into his own hands: he went back to basics. An infamous 2003 clash series with Wiley, made a freshly solo Lethal Bizzle a white-hot pirate radio draw and reignited his love for the movement. So by the time Ansah wrote "Pow!," he had the explicit intention of reviving a dying grime scene.
In LinkUp TV's documentary, #StoryOfPow, he explained the origins of the title, claiming the culture "needed a spark, needed attention; 'Pow!' We're here." Bursting out the speakers like a shot of adrenaline, the full force bass, synth stabs and rhythmic claps stirred up pure mayhem, while each of the guest MCs' snappy flexes felt like lightning in a bottle. Recapping this seismic moment to me on a warm mid-September afternoon, Ansah crackled with the same energy you hear on the record: "'Pow!' was pure anger, as in, you don't know who I am. I was like, 'This time, I'm gonna do things differently.'"
It proved a successful strategy. Within the wider context of popular mid-'00s crews like Roll Deep, N.A.S.T.Y and East Connection jostling for prominence, "Pow!" spread like wildfire. "I thought, if you're a member of a crew, your DJ is gonna play it on the radio," Ansah admitted. The song travelled not only through pirate stations like Deja Vu and Rinse, but also on the streets, as kids traded low-bitrate versions of riddim from phone to phone via Bluetooth.
Perhaps most importantly of all, it had a visual component to amplify hype: the rise of various documentary DVD series such as Lord of the Mics, Risky Roadz and Practice Hours had already been crucial to the visibility of grime in its infancy. By 2004, influential video outlet Channel U had cornered the market for aspiring stars on a shoestring budget. Channel U picked up "Pow!"'s music video, which filmed many of the MCs in their ends, standing ten toes down, backed by their own crews, and ran it relentlessly. Butterz label head Elijah, one of the teenagers hooked on "Pow!" at the time, says the impact of Channel U rotation went deeper than at first glance. Many youths "would've heard these voices before," he explained, "but unless you had been to a rave, you wouldn't know what D Double E looked like."
Uniting key members from grime crews across East London wasn't an easy task. Territorial beef was still commonplace, with various collective members regularly falling out and aiming diss tracks at each other. It was rare to see MCs from different areas gather round for the same track. "We weren't trying to go mainstream or chart," Ansah told me. "We wanted to link up as The Avengers and make a mad hype song for the people." As it shot to becoming a definitive anthem of the early '00s that transcended all expectations for grime in the mainstream, it was clear "Pow!" achieved that and more.
For D'Explicit, the essence of the "Pow!" beat was built on "excited music" like '90s dancehall, jungle and garage: "These were all jump-up styles and the drops were everything. You were designing a record for people to feel it." D'Explicit also noted the use of one instrument that gave the riddim its distinction. "The power of the 808 [kick] was a new energy for me, as we didn't hear it in grime before," he added. "That's the element which had a lot of power in the clubs. There's no intro, the bass starts instantly and it's a wake-up call."
When "Pow!" hit the DJ circuit, it was more than a wake-up call—it was chaos. At just three minutes long, the track whipped up such hype that it would be common to hear it played four or five songs in a row, like a never-ending MC relay race. The last verse on the airplay edit ends with Demon's almost cartoonishly amped-up bars: "You don't wanna bring armshouse / I'll bring armshouse to your mum's house." This led to what Elijah calls "the armshouse reload dilemma," where DJs would get so over-excited, they'd wheel up the song and reload from the start again.
Initially titled "Forward" to reflect the Jamaican term meaning to "pull up," Ansah wrote the tune with an expectation that each verse would get a reload. True to intent, pretty much every line earned classic status. Fumin's Cockney-coded verse ("You're barking up the wrong tree / The spotlight's on me") was an easy crowd favourite, but Napper one-ups it a few verses in, swerving in like an 18-wheeler with a drawn-out syllable that pretty much every Brit of a certain age can recite: "I'llllll / Crack your skull / Leave you fucked up in your wheelchair / If you try and clash this evil breh!"
If politicians like Howells were previously startled, "Pow!" churned up venues to a ludicrous degree. One scene in Southwest London clearly sticks out to Ansah: "I remember seeing this guy take his top off at Kingston Works. He's standing up, like he's ready for anybody, and the next thing I'm seeing is a punch. I see security running and I ain't even said 'Pow!' yet. Mics cut off, there are fights, security is saying get off the stage. That's when I'm thinking, 'OK, this song is doing something to you lot.'"
Formative grime documentarians like Muks Rabadia were on hand to capture the cresting wave. "Security couldn't distinguish between when to jump in and when not to," Rabadia told me. "So they started banning 'Pow!' You couldn't play 'Pow' instrumentals or acapellas, full stop." Before long, it wasn't uncommon to see signs on the DJ booths that read "All Lethal Bizzle tracks are banned from this venue (including instrumentals)."
"Pow!" was another chart hit for Ansah—this time hitting #11 in the final week of 2004, accompanied by a cheeky bid for the coveted Christmas #1 spot—but something had shifted. Mainstream media and local authorities saw the raw energy unleashed by the track as outright dangerous—they had found a scapegoat, and were set on proving a point.
In 2008, the Metropolitan Police announced Form 696. Described as a live music risk assessment, Form 696 was weaponised towards organisers of music events that hosted DJs or MCs performing Black music. With little forewarning, venues were required to provide real names, addresses and phone numbers of performers or risk having their licence revoked. Not content with questioning whether genres like "bashment, R&B, garage" would be aired, overtly racist questions on the form also demanded to know: "Is there a particular ethnic group attending?" 21 of London's 32 boroughs codified Form 696, formalising a climate of fear that echoed both New York's Harlem-directed Cabaret Laws and the criminalisation of UK drill to come.
In this tense political landscape, Ansah and other members of the grime scene were labelled as a catalyst for "glorifying gun culture" by then-Conservative Party leader David Cameron. This started a high-profile feud between Lethal Bizzle and the future Prime Minister. Ansah responded in one 2006 Guardian article famously titled, David Cameron is a donut. In the piece, Bizzle defended Black British music in an open letter to Cameron, saying "you don't experience the things that kids go through today." Cameron struck back in a 2006 Daily Mail article titled "You're Talking Rubbish, Lethal Bizzle," which included the line "young and impressionable people are given the message, in song after song, that guns, knives and other weapons are glamorous." Although Cameron misattributed Neeko's verse as Ansah's (who only technically raps on the record's chorus), the fact it confirms a G7 leader listened to "Pow!" was, in retrospect, probably worth it.
That wasn't the end, either: during the 2010 UK student protests, "Pow!" was adopted by the youthful masses as they marched to Parliament. Cameron's government was in the middle of tuition fee hikes and education cuts, and the defiant spirit of "Pow!" met the moment of frustration. In 2011, grime historian Dan Hancox showed Ansah a video of young protestors skanking and singing along to his song in Parliament Square, many shirtless despite the December chill. "Cameron is still a donut," Ansah said at the time. "He should really be scared. I've got more power than he has when it comes to those kids: they're singing my song in his front garden."
Political cachet or not, Ansah's career suffered in the mid-'00s as "Pow!" was shoved out of rotation. He attempted to salvage his image by dropping the Lethal, rebranding to a more affable-sounding Bizzle and broadening his middle class white fanbase with some rock and punk tracks. To his surprise, "Pow!" helped unlock a new audience that sought similar rowdiness and speaking truth to power—traditionally indie rock festivals like Glastonbury and Reading & Leeds embraced Ansah at a time when others backed away. Yet that didn't compare to a totally unplanned crossover moment when Jay-Z dropped "Pow!" out of nowhere during a show at Wembley Arena.
Ansah was in Amsterdam when he got a frantic call from Rio Ferdinand, one of the most successful football players of the era. "I'm just hearing bare noise," he recalled. "I don't know what's going on and he's screaming down the phone. Then he texted me saying, 'Bro I’m at Jay Z's show at Wembley and he just played 'Pow!'' I was like… what!'"
Ansah dashed back to London in order to catch Hov perform at the Royal Albert Hall, the first hip-hop act to grace the stately London venue in its 135-year history. Thinking back to watching Hov go in over "Pow!" in the flesh left Ansah "in awe. I'm just thinking, one of my idols is rapping on one of my songs. It was unreal." The madness then went up another gear when Jay-Z's DJ, Green Lantern, informed Bizzle that Jay-Z would love to record his own version. The final execution never panned out, but you only have to imagine what those intended bars—"Pow, it's that brudda JAY-Z / Pow, leader of the R.O.C. / Pow, if you don’t know about me"—could have done for a US-UK rap link-up that was still in its infancy.
The unending popularity of "Pow!" nudged Ansah to capitalise off the clamour with a sequel, "POW 2011." It featured an even mightier cast of grime Avengers, including JME, Wiley, Chip, P Money, Ghetts and Kano—some of the UK's biggest stars of the last 20 years. Even though it was less fierce than the 2004 version, and failed to connect with DJs to the same degree, the timing of this version was significant, as many artists were crossing over into the pop realm.
It came a few years too early to bank on grime's second-wave resurgence in the mid 2010s, where tunes like Skepta's "That's Not Me" and Meridian Dan's "German Whip" propelled the genre to even-higher heights (think Stormzy headlining Glastonbury, or Flowdan winning a Grammy). Yet by reissuing his largest hit only seven years after the original, "POW 2011" spoke volumes about the long tail of Ansah's influence.
Next month, Ansah is running it back with the track's original cast of MCs for a special anniversary show at London’s Roundhouse in celebration of his signature's legacy. The event undeniably signifies the endurance of "Pow!", as not just a banger but a crucial step forward for grime. Not only did it soundtrack the political awakening of a disenfranchised generation, but proved so mighty that it hurdled the industry's attempts to lock off access to the mainstream. Even the shackles of surveillance couldn't stop it. In the track's final 15 seconds, as the pacy instrumental starts to finally cool down, Bizzle signs off with confidence: "you need to know." But in 2004, it's fair to say not even he knew just how much of an impact those words would make on the face of 21st century British culture.
Uniting key members from grime crews across East London wasn't an easy task. Territorial beef was still commonplace, with various collective members regularly falling out and aiming diss tracks at each other. It was rare to see MCs from different areas gather round for the same track. "We weren't trying to go mainstream or chart," Ansah told me. "We wanted to link up as The Avengers and make a mad hype song for the people." As it shot to becoming a definitive anthem of the early '00s that transcended all expectations for grime in the mainstream, it was clear "Pow!" achieved that and more. For D'Explicit, the essence of the "Pow!" beat was built on "excited music" like '90s dancehall, jungle and garage: "These were all jump-up styles and the drops were everything. You were designing a record for people to feel it." D'Explicit also noted the use of one instrument that gave the riddim its distinction. "The power of the 808 [kick] was a new energy for me, as we didn't hear it in grime before," he added. "That's the element which had a lot of power in the clubs. There's no intro, the bass starts instantly and it's a wake-up call." When "Pow!" hit the DJ circuit, it was more than a wake-up call—it was chaos. At just three minutes long, the track whipped up such hype that it would be common to hear it played four or five songs in a row, like a never-ending MC relay race. The last verse on the airplay edit ends with Demon's almost cartoonishly amped-up bars: "You don't wanna bring armshouse / I'll bring armshouse to your mum's house." This led to what Elijah calls "the armshouse reload dilemma," where DJs would get so over-excited, they'd wheel up the song and reload from the start again. Initially titled "Forward" to reflect the Jamaican term meaning to "pull up," Ansah wrote the tune with an expectation that each verse would get a reload. True to intent, pretty much every line earned classic status. Fumin's Cockney-coded verse ("You're barking up the wrong tree / The spotlight's on me") was an easy crowd favourite, but Napper one-ups it a few verses in, swerving in like an 18-wheeler with a drawn-out syllable that pretty much every Brit of a certain age can recite: "I'llllll / Crack your skull / Leave you fucked up in your wheelchair / If you try and clash this evil breh!" If politicians like Howells were previously startled, "Pow!" churned up venues to a ludicrous degree. One scene in Southwest London clearly sticks out to Ansah: "I remember seeing this guy take his top off at Kingston Works. He's standing up, like he's ready for anybody, and the next thing I'm seeing is a punch. I see security running and I ain't even said 'Pow!' yet. Mics cut off, there are fights, security is saying get off the stage. That's when I'm thinking, 'OK, this song is doing something to you lot.'" Formative grime documentarians like Muks Rabadia were on hand to capture the cresting wave. "Security couldn't distinguish between when to jump in and when not to," Rabadia told me. "So they started banning 'Pow!' You couldn't play 'Pow' instrumentals or acapellas, full stop." Before long, it wasn't uncommon to see signs on the DJ booths that read "All Lethal Bizzle tracks are banned from this venue (including instrumentals)." "Pow!" was another chart hit for Ansah—this time hitting #11 in the final week of 2004, accompanied by a cheeky bid for the coveted Christmas #1 spot—but something had shifted. Mainstream media and local authorities saw the raw energy unleashed by the track as outright dangerous—they had found a scapegoat, and were set on proving a point. In 2008, the Metropolitan Police announced Form 696. Described as a live music risk assessment, Form 696 was weaponised towards organisers of music events that hosted DJs or MCs performing Black music. With little forewarning, venues were required to provide real names, addresses and phone numbers of performers or risk having their licence revoked. Not content with questioning whether genres like "bashment, R&B, garage" would be aired, overtly racist questions on the form also demanded to know: "Is there a particular ethnic group attending?" 21 of London's 32 boroughs codified Form 696, formalising a climate of fear that echoed both New York's Harlem-directed Cabaret Laws and the criminalisation of UK drill to come. In this tense political landscape, Ansah and other members of the grime scene were labelled as a catalyst for "glorifying gun culture" by then-Conservative Party leader David Cameron. This started a high-profile feud between Lethal Bizzle and the future Prime Minister. Ansah responded in one 2006 Guardian article famously titled, David Cameron is a donut. In the piece, Bizzle defended Black British music in an open letter to Cameron, saying "you don't experience the things that kids go through today." Cameron struck back in a 2006 Daily Mail article titled "You're Talking Rubbish, Lethal Bizzle," which included the line "young and impressionable people are given the message, in song after song, that guns, knives and other weapons are glamorous." Although Cameron misattributed Neeko's verse as Ansah's (who only technically raps on the record's chorus), the fact it confirms a G7 leader listened to "Pow!" was, in retrospect, probably worth it. That wasn't the end, either: during the 2010 UK student protests, "Pow!" was adopted by the youthful masses as they marched to Parliament. Cameron's government was in the middle of tuition fee hikes and education cuts, and the defiant spirit of "Pow!" met the moment of frustration. In 2011, grime historian Dan Hancox showed Ansah a video of young protestors skanking and singing along to his song in Parliament Square, many shirtless despite the December chill. "Cameron is still a donut," Ansah said at the time. "He should really be scared. I've got more power than he has when it comes to those kids: they're singing my song in his front garden."Political cachet or not, Ansah's career suffered in the mid-'00s as "Pow!" was shoved out of rotation. He attempted to salvage his image by dropping the Lethal, rebranding to a more affable-sounding Bizzle and broadening his middle class white fanbase with some rock and punk tracks. To his surprise, "Pow!" helped unlock a new audience that sought similar rowdiness and speaking truth to power—traditionally indie rock festivals like Glastonbury and Reading & Leeds embraced Ansah at a time when others backed away. Yet that didn't compare to a totally unplanned crossover moment when Jay-Z dropped "Pow!" out of nowhere during a show at Wembley Arena. Ansah was in Amsterdam when he got a frantic call from Rio Ferdinand, one of the most successful football players of the era. "I'm just hearing bare noise," he recalled. "I don't know what's going on and he's screaming down the phone. Then he texted me saying, 'Bro I’m at Jay Z's show at Wembley and he just played 'Pow!'' I was like… what!'" Ansah dashed back to London in order to catch Hov perform at the Royal Albert Hall, the first hip-hop act to grace the stately London venue in its 135-year history. Thinking back to watching Hov go in over "Pow!" in the flesh left Ansah "in awe. I'm just thinking, one of my idols is rapping on one of my songs. It was unreal." The madness then went up another gear when Jay-Z's DJ, Green Lantern, informed Bizzle that Jay-Z would love to record his own version. The final execution never panned out, but you only have to imagine what those intended bars—"Pow, it's that brudda JAY-Z / Pow, leader of the R.O.C. / Pow, if you don’t know about me"—could have done for a US-UK rap link-up that was still in its infancy. The unending popularity of "Pow!" nudged Ansah to capitalise off the clamour with a sequel, "POW 2011." It featured an even mightier cast of grime Avengers, including JME, Wiley, Chip, P Money, Ghetts and Kano—some of the UK's biggest stars of the last 20 years. Even though it was less fierce than the 2004 version, and failed to connect with DJs to the same degree, the timing of this version was significant, as many artists were crossing over into the pop realm.It came a few years too early to bank on grime's second-wave resurgence in the mid 2010s, where tunes like Skepta's "That's Not Me" and Meridian Dan's "German Whip" propelled the genre to even-higher heights (think Stormzy headlining Glastonbury, or Flowdan winning a Grammy). Yet by reissuing his largest hit only seven years after the original, "POW 2011" spoke volumes about the long tail of Ansah's influence. Next month, Ansah is running it back with the track's original cast of MCs for a special anniversary show at London’s Roundhouse in celebration of his signature's legacy. The event undeniably signifies the endurance of "Pow!", as not just a banger but a crucial step forward for grime. Not only did it soundtrack the political awakening of a disenfranchised generation, but proved so mighty that it hurdled the industry's attempts to lock off access to the mainstream. Even the shackles of surveillance couldn't stop it. In the track's final 15 seconds, as the pacy instrumental starts to finally cool down, Bizzle signs off with confidence: "you need to know." But in 2004, it's fair to say not even he knew just how much of an impact those words would make on the face of 21st century British culture.