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Readers, I have just flown home from a whirlwind week with my cuz Mariah, who let myself and my TV crew follow her around for an exclusive fly on the wall documentary. The programme will be shown on Channel 4 in the next fortnight. We went from Vegas to Toronto to New York in truly faboulous style, as you’d imagine. More on the adventures with Mimi next week!

The other side of the pond has been on fire recently with New York fashion week, Toronto Film Festival and the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs). But this side has been pretty busy too.

With south Londoner Speech Debelle winning the Mercury Music Prize, Jade

Ewen stepping up with new music, and Alexandra Burke and Leona Lewis about to take over the charts, I can see it’s time for the ladies to come on down! And that’s before we get into what Estelle has cooking up for her new album. I’ve heard snippets of it and I’m telling you – the world is not ready for this takeover!

Next, we went to see my MTV Base staff producer Yemi Bamiro’s short film at the Portobello Film Festival. It’s called My War is Yours and it’s really good. I smiled as another future British director was recognised.

Straight afterwards, I legged it down to Camden’s Jazz Café where five-time Grammy nominee Jazmine Sullivan was tearing up the place with her pipes.

Supporting her was Mclean, an up and coming artist who is releasing his debut single, Broken in November. Jazmine came out and watched his set from the side of the stage, and by the look on her face, I think he really impressed her. Mclean is also on the BRRRAP tour – a tour that’s been causing controversy this week within my circles. Let me break it down for you...

A while ago, you may remember, Sean Paul came into MTV Base to host a BBQ. I invited lots of UK acts as guests and many breakthrough names like Chipmunk, Tinchy Stryder, Master Shortie, Ironik, Bashy, Mz Bratt and others attended. Post-BBQ, my friend and artist manager Kwame Kwaten took a photo of Tinchy, Shortie, Chipmunk and Ironik. It was a great, happy, unified, picture of success and good times. Kwame later looked at the picture and said “They look like the British version of the Hollywood Rat Pack.” Then, we laughed and said, “Yeah, the brrrap pack – bright rappers.” And so, a concept was born.

The next week, I had them in at MTV Base to record an old skool hip-hop countdown and we called it The Brrrap Pack. Next thing you know, a national tabloid newspaper picked up the concept and claimed it as their own. Honestly, we were quite happy about it. After all, how many opportunities do we get to feature our young brothers in a national tabloid with positive angled stories?

When talking about The Brrrap Pack, the newspaper mentioned that here were young men to look out for; young men on the rise, doing great things. It talked about Tinchy, Chipmunk’s A-level qualifications and Master Shortie’s album release date. We were impressed. A tabloid journalist was bigging us up!

Next thing we know, the newspaper announced that alongside Live Nation, they were putting on the Brrrap Pack tour all around the country, that would include Chipmunk, Ironik MPHO, Tinie Tempah, Mz Bratt, Egypt Aggro Santos, Kid British and the aforementioned mentioned Mclean. We didn’t know what to make of it. Half of us are positive about the equal platform to champion our own. The other half are negative cynics who sleep with one eye open, and are waiting for violence to kick off at the event so the other national papers can say “we told you so”.

I then got a couple of my Twitter followers saying that the term ‘brrrap pack’ demeaned the artists with ghetto gun slang. Now readers, I totally understand this feedback. However, most music fans use “brap” as a term of jubilation/cheering/positive acknowledgement of something they like. Do we get heated up when American acts tour the UK with violent drug-based tour titles?

Or did we scream when American movies like Scarface, Boyz in the Hood and Friday hit our screens? No, we didn’t. So if young British artists want to coin their own phrases, why must some folks only see the negative?

I’d really welcome your feedback on this. After all, debate is healthy and I always want to reflect public opinion – that’s you. So get writing! See you next week, by which time I may have recovered from my adventures with Mimi!

Jasmine Dotiwala is the head of MTV Base. Email her at jasmine@hiphop.com

Published: 21 September 2009
Issue: 1390

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