Junior Spesh

Last summer Elijah from the Butterz blog/Rinse FM and I were talking about the lack of imagination in music blogging – oh look, here’s another grime blog which offers embedded YouTube videos and nothing else: great.

So while the whole of the grime scene was on its summer holidays in Napa, I jokingly suggested we use Red Hot Entertainment’s brilliant ‘Junior Spesh’ ode to budget fried chicken shops as a jumping off point to start a blog on the subject. Elijah called my bluff and registered the name , and the Junior Spesh Blog was born. After a flurry of initial activity and a bit of a break, the blog is now back with a vengeance, with a host of contributors from the grime and dubstep scenes – at least half of our writers are leading DJs.

Chicken and chip shops are the pirate radio stations of the culinary world. Their starting point is the mainstream corporate legitimacy of KFC, the chain that has exported a culinary staple of the American south to the whole world – indeed our blog features a review of KFC in Cancun, Mexico, and its peculiar ‘curry sauce’ option. But what we’re really interested in is not KFC but the pirates: HFC, SFC, Dollar Fried Chicken, Alabama Fried Chicken, Kennedy Fried Chicken.

Just like pirate DVD sleeves, mistakes are made in the plagiarism of the original model: so you end up with such abominations as New York Fried Chicken (the very thought would upset southerners a great deal), Chickpizz (which serves pizza too), and New Taxas Fried Chicken (which managed to make up a new American state and spell it wrong too).

The names are silly and the chips are greasy, but in an age of global fast food brands, this pirate fried chicken stands against brand homogeneity and for devious ingenuity – it’s dirty, creative local capitalism at its best.