Black Music in Britain in the 21st Century
Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada)
Following her work on grime, cultural sociologist Monique Charles edits a collective volume that brings together researchers and practitioners to explore, from multiple approaches, Black music in Britain in the twenty-first century. With the editorial collaboration of Mary W. Gani (a lawyer specialising in the music industry), the book offers a panorama that combines academic papers, interviews, and visual essays. Published in the series “Liverpool Studies in the Politics of Popular Culture”, the volume seeks to analyse musical scenes in relation to the regimes of power that shape their emergence, circulation and reception.
The book is clearly situated within the lineage of Black Atlantic studies. This characterises the transmission, unfolding and interconnections of Black cultures around the Atlantic, as well as the cultural hybridisations resulting from the long history of forced removal of Black populations from their territories and cultural milieus (Gilroy 1993). It is therefore a welcome contribution that deepens and extends analysis of this continuum from the vantage point of contemporary Black British musics. Notably, it expands the classic roots/routes dichotomy (Gilroy 1993) by emphasising the role of digital infrastructures and networks—what the editors term “routers”—in the contemporary formation of genres and publics. The book’s richness—and, potentially, its limitation—lies in the multiplicity of genres examined and the diversity of problematisations, contexts and methods mobilised.
The centrality of sound system culture, dub and reggae is nonetheless clear, as many of the forms under study partly emerge from these matrices. In this respect, the book already helps to capture the resonances and contemporary traces of sound system culture within new musical assemblages. The entire first section is devoted to these contemporary articulations. Whether in Hyacinth’s study on Roots Manuva’s album “Dub Come Save Me”, Charles’s attempt to systematise a “sound system sensibility”, Gani’s interview with Lawrence “L.J.” Johnson, or Télémaque’s photo-essay “Trap Atlantic”, each contribution shows the extent to which the musical objects under scrutiny are marked by the circulation and hybridisation of techniques, technologies, sounds and melodies. Each case also demonstrates how these cultural productions—actualising the Black Atlantic continuum—braid together the global and the local, and past with present and future.
The second section, which examines genres that emerged or persisted into the twenty-first century, likewise includes an interview with a music industry professional and a photo essay. These two formats depart from conventional research articles and allow readers to inhabit different standpoints and perspectives. Charles’s interview with Ugwu traces the personal trajectory of an industry professional within the circulatory contexts already outlined, particularly between Nigeria and London. Charles and Facey’s photo essay likewise offers a direct view of the places and the spatial organisation of steel pan practice in East London. More broadly, these chapters press further on the role of cultural industries in the recuperation, transformation and marginalisation of Black musics and musicians. In particular, the chapters by Palmer and Toppin on the Lovers Rock scene and the jungle genre, respectively show how racism and patriarchy have jointly contributed to the invisibilisation and reshaping of scenes and musics in favour of certain audiences, industries and male and/or white musicians. The other two chapters in this section trace two very different pathways through which artists and musical forms (re-)emerge. Muir examines Black Majority Churches as sites that—through their locations, relational networks and Pentecostal habitus—enable the development of musical competences convertible into the field of popular music and thus into economic capital. Melville, by contrast, shows how contemporary information and communication technologies facilitate the circulation of techniques and recent tracks and contribute significantly to the revival of jazz in England among a new generation representative of contemporary urban British life.
Finally, the third and last section, “Socio-political and economic issues”, interrogates contemporary Black British musics critically through their contexts of emergence and diffusion. The opening chapters—by “Hussla D” Johnson and Wallace, on the one hand, and by Lambros Fatsis, on the other—are particularly illuminating for understanding the processes of invisibilisation, criminalisation and thus marginalisation that unfold across Black music scenes. The former provides an exemplary analysis of how cultural industries select and profit from particular cultural trajectories over others. Sketching the contours of a political economy of reggae authenticity that marginalises British artists in favour of Jamaican artists or labels, even though these musics are disseminated and consumed in England. Fatsis, for his part, shows how ambient Western racism materialises around Black sound and forms of gathering, further criminalising and stigmatising these populations and their cultural productions. These two chapters are especially productive for night studies, as they help to grasp how the neoliberal capture of festive and musical forms that once placed society “in crisis” proceeds both through their whitewashing and through the criminalisation and marginalisation of their Blackness. The final three chapters by Scott, Bushay and Madar consider, from distinct perspectives, the role of music and its representations for artists and audiences: grime as a practice of refusal vis-à-vis expected social and racial positions; hip-hop as pedagogical practice by and for Black women; and the ways Black men receive the dominant images and aesthetics associated with them and negotiate them.
Overall, this collection edited by Monique Charles offers a rich and nuanced panorama of a field too seldom examined in its complexity, given the tendency to treat Black musics monolithically under the rubric of the “urban”. Although the approaches vary, the shared emphasis on sound system culture as a constitutive matrix, the Black Atlantic continuum and a critical race approach provides the book with strong internal coherence. That said, greater parity between conceptual labour and empirical precision would have been welcome. Moreover, while some chapters—especially in the third section—foreground the cultural industries, several analyses would benefit from engaging more directly with industry-specific processes of appropriation and whitewashing. Doing so would sharpen a highly fertile line of critique that reads the marginalisation of Black cultures and their re-undergrounding (a promising avenue) as among the conditions of possibility for contemporary “nightlife cities”. Finally, the near-exclusive focus on London invites the question of how Black musics are configured elsewhere in Britain.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic, modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.