Today Rinse FM, London's leading pirate radio station, announced it has been granted a legal broadcast licence after 16 years of illicit transmissions. It's almost impossible to overstate how potentially momentous this event is for the UK's most vibrant and promising music scenes, and what opportunities it presents for artists, personalities and record labels ranging from the deep and experimental to the most flagrantly commercial. From the rumbustuous, teen-friendly fun of Scratcha's breakfast show to the experimental electronic jazz and funk of Alex Nut at Saturday lunchtime to various hard and dark grime and dubstep shows - as often as not playing exclusive music fresh from the hard drives of its creators that may never even become commercially available - it is a brilliant representation of London's cultural vitality in the 21st century.
Inevitably, Rinse's move to respectability will be seen in the context of the recent unprecedented success of black British artists such as Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder, Wiley and Tinie Tempah – all of whom unquestionably owe much of their success to the apprenticeship they had on pirate stations and especially on Rinse. But it is telling to note that when I spoke to the station's co-founder and figurehead DJ Geeneus last year, he refused the label of “black music” which the BBC's 1Xtra station uses, or the euphemistic “urban”, preferring instead to say that Rinse plays “LOCAL music” – that is, the music of London's estates. If the majority of young people in many areas of London are black then so be it, but their music is not defined by genes or appearance, but by a genuinely local, grass-roots cross-class culture, and it is this which Rinse represents, even as its listenership becomes increasingly international via the internet.
The station was created in 1994 in the heat of the explosion of jungle – the wild, exploratory, disorienting offspring of rave – and has been a vital part of each stage of UK underground music since. Drum & bass, UK garage, 2-step, grime, dubstep and the new sounds of UK funky all count Rinse as a vital tool for their dissemination, a social hub and a stabilising influence. With stars from the grime scene (Dizzee, Tinchy and co) dominating the UK charts, and Rinse's dubstep stars now reaching global audiences, its work in cementing these scenes seems to be bearing fruit.
But the challenges have only just begun: Kiss FM made a similar transition from vital cultural force in the days of acid house to legitimate commercial station, but it all but lost its soul in the process. Geeneus and his cohorts at Rinse are astute businesspeople when working in the grey economy, and have given Rinse a strong character an incredibly powerful brand that is recognised worldwide; according to Plastician, one of the station's keystone DJs, "the station is going to be exactly the same sound-wise. That was part of the deal." Here's to them, and here's hoping that they can maintain that with all the commercial and regulatory pressures of the wider marketplace operating on them.
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