British Black Music

Lovers Rock: Class and Romance Inna Di Dance

In a new century that’s seen Jamaican music receive worldwide popular acceptance, Lovers Rock -- music that legendarily caused it’s slow dancing participants to “scrub off the wallpaper” at packed house dances --deserves better understanding.

British Lovers Rock and Jamaican Romantic Reggae have historically acted in contradiction to both prevailing popular themes as well as gender and class identities within the reggae diaspora. Where reggae and dancehall emphasize traditional and historical cultural modes and hyper-masculine or feminine ideals, Lovers Rock explores a vulnerable personal sphere. These subgenres have also carved out new space for emotional and carnal expressions by both men and women, as well as provided a safe space for gay artists to participate in the otherwise rigidly homophobic reggae milieu. While Jamaican Romantic Reggae has had few breakout artists, its U.K. counterpart Lovers Rock has minted platinum hits.

Thanks to pop artists like Simply Red and Sade, British Lovers Rock reggae music has achieved mainstream acceptance while conversely seeing it’s grassroots adherents remain critically and commercially underappreciated. But over its 30-year span British Lovers Rock has deeply impacted UK music culture and delineated new modes of Afro-Caribbean social and artistic identity.

Our paper will discus the similarities and differences between British Lovers Rock and Jamaican Romantic Reggae as well as probe the class and gender consequences of both models. Additionally, we’ll discus and scrutinize thematic and artistic representations within the songs, fashion, clubs and music industry attached to both forms.

A critical review of how key texts since the 1960s have shaped journalistic and also academic representations of The Beatles. The chapter also includes discussion of a little-known area in The Beatles' history: their various affiliations with and possible debt to local black musicians working in Liverpool c.195801962.

While Lennon and McCartney's class affiliations are ambiguous to degrees that should remain debatable, the depth and the detail in which working-class life defines their work have been overlooked, thus misrepresenting The Beatles' cultural significance. As Collins (2012) critiques, initial New Left criticisms of The Beatles -almost exclusively in response to one composition, 'Revolution' (1968) -have recently been adapted by commentators eager to portray The Beatles as a culturally and politically conservative force. I argue that early Left-wing and recent Right-wing criticisms of The Beatles' legacy are misleading, because both overlook Lennon and McCartney's different relationships to working-class culture.

In Gilroy's black Atlantic trope, black identities are part of an ongoing process of travel and exchange. Here, in the United Kingdom, the discourse regarding urban music is one that centres on ethnicity and underachievement. Less consideration is given to the role of music in shaping and creating identities.

Linton Kwesi Johnson, the Jamaican-born British poet and reggae artist memorialized black power and immigrant rights movements in the UK of the 1970s and 1980s on records such as " Forces of Victory, " " Dread, Beat and Blood, " and " Bass Culture. " LKJ was deeply involved in those struggles not only as an artist but as an activist and intellectual. Entering politics through the youth section of the British Black Panther Party in Brixton, he went on to join the Race Today newspaper collective. There, along with Darcus Howe, who passed away last month, and other black British radicals he helped reflect, amplify, and organize black and Asian community resistance to police abuse, National Front skinhead attacks, and systemic racial exclusion in British society. In this interview, LKJ talks the role of music and poetry in politics; the character of antiracist and class struggle in the UK; and the influence of a wide range of figures from CLR James, Amilcar Cabril, E.P. Thompson, and WEB DuBois to Ken Boothe, the Last Poets, and Amiri Baraka.

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The categorisation of young people as NEET (not in employment, education or training) obscures the significant impact of the accomplishments of those who operate in the urban music economy. Grime music, a black Atlantic creative expression, is used as a lens through which to explore and analyse the nature of entrepreneurship within this sector. East London, a site of poverty, movement and migration is the geographical starting point for the study. This article draws on the findings of a fiveyear (2007-2012) ethnographic field research project in London, England and Ayia Napa, Cyprus.

Grime is a genre of Black British music originating from London at the turn of the twenty-first century. In this article, I explore responses to moments of Grime music making and engagement in live performance settings. I make connections between Grime, Black music streams (Lena), Black Atlantic (Gilroy) practices, the Black Public Sphere (Baker) AND how engagements at these intersections are connected to spiritual practice in the context of live performance. The power in Grime live performance settings; where the spiritual is found, connects to the sonic characteristics deployed, embodied and emotive responses and cultural practice. Spirituality, through cultural practice, is an Africanised religious/spiritual outlook that remains with the African diaspora over time and space (Mbiti). Smith's work shows how African derived religious and spiritual practice continues in diasporic religious practice contemporarily. Through live performance (raving/club culture), I explore and theorise how power is a) generated, b) operates, and outline the roles people play in the cultural-spiritual practice. Building on the work of Smith, Kennett, Sylvan, Mbiti and Baker, I introduce theories: 1) Liminal Energy Power Spirals (LEPS) and 2) AmunRave Theory, to show how the spirit enters live performance space.

Discussion of PhD, detailing The Beatles' various yet rarely-mentioned links with local black musicians in Liverpool c1958-62, particularly Vinnie Ismail and Lord Woodbine. This is a transcript of an interview for BBC Radio Merseyside (2009), published as an article in Soundscapes: Journal on Media Culture (2010). Some of my further research on the topic is also available on my academia.edu page.

Using Grime as a case study, I employ the analytical framework I created, that is, Musicological Discourse Analysis (MDA) as a holistic mode of analysis to contextualize Grime sociologically and musicologically. This method retheorizes genre, providing a more specific, useful, and detailed musical classification system; the sonic footprint timestamp (SFT). The MDA framework provides a generic mode of musical analysis for research projects in sociology, cultural studies, and the social sciences fields. This article evaluates key musical influences in the evolution of Grime as both (i) a musical form and (ii) an analysis of influences in relation to its social context. It evaluates the global, local, historical, technological, political, lyrical themes, and sonic properties (sounds) found in Grime. Significantly, this framework is very much concerned with the voices in the Grime scene, and therefore respondent experiences are central to this analytical method—incorporating in-depth interviews, observation (physical and online), and immersive listening.

Drawing on empirical evidence gathered from a five-year ethnographic research project undertaken in London and Cyprus, this paper explores and examines digital media use specifically as it relates to the urban music industry, with a particular focus on Grime music.

Grime music is a predominantly male, black Atlantic creative expression that has broken free of its east London origins to have a global socio-economic significance.

The traditional recorded music industry, based on a centralised model and heavily reliant on tight control of distribution, has evolved from a local and personal activity, shared with co-present others, to a space where immediate audiences can be established for artistic output without the need for an intermediary. It is within this context that Grime music artists create and market online personas in exchange for sales, recognition and feedback. Grime music came of age in the YouTube era, quickly adopting Web 2.0 technologies, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to enable the formation of new identities as recording artists and entrepreneurs.

This paper explores how, in this sector, accessible and affordable digital technologies have been utilised by urban music practitioners to construct public, performing identities with a local, national and international reach.

Key words: grime music, digital technologies, identity, YouTube

Using Grime as a case study, I employ the analytical framework I created, that is, Musicological Discourse Analysis (MDA) as a holistic mode of analysis to contextualize Grime sociologically and musicologically. This method retheorizes genre, providing a more specific, useful, and detailed musical classification system; the sonic footprint timestamp (SFT). The MDA framework provides a generic mode of musical analysis for research projects in sociology, cultural studies, and the social sciences fields. This article evaluates key musical influences in the evolution of Grime as both (i) a musical form and (ii) an analysis of influences in relation to its social context. It evaluates the global, local, historical, technological, political, lyrical themes, and sonic properties (sounds) found in Grime. Significantly, this framework is very much concerned with the voices in the Grime scene, and therefore respondent experiences are central to this analytical method—incorporating in-depth in...

Grime is a genre of Black British music originating from London at the turn of the twenty-first century. In this article, I explore responses to moments of Grime music making and engagement in live performance settings. I make connections between Grime, Black music streams (Lena), Black Atlantic (Gilroy) practices, the Black Public Sphere (Baker) AND how engagements at these intersections are connected to spiritual practice in the context of live performance. The power in Grime live performance settings; where the spiritual is found, connects to the sonic characteristics deployed, embodied and emotive responses and cultural practice. Spirituality, through cultural practice, is an Africanised religious/spiritual outlook that remains with the African diaspora over time and space (Mbiti). Smith’s work shows how African derived religious and spiritual practice continues in diasporic religious practice contemporarily. Through live performance (raving/club culture), I explore and theorise...

New Postcolonial Concerns Conference, Cambridge, June 15th 2019:

Reparations to the descendants of slaves have recently spurred debates in mainstream politics: it indeed appeared against the backdrop of the wealth gap existing between black communities and white households, and when historians were able to provide significant evidence of financial compensations received by British slave owners in the Caribbean after the 1834 Slavery Abolition Act was passed. While politicians such as Tony Blair’s refused to apologize for slavery in his 2006 infamous speech, organizations such as CARICOM (Caribbean Committee) sought to reactivate reparations campaigns along the lines of Britain’s agreement of sending 19.9 million pounds to the surviving Kenyans whom the British colonial government tortured during the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 until 1960. In the face of liberal narratives which seek to domesticate radical histories of activism and resistance to buttress white supremacy, reparative history seeks to dismantle such narrative by restoring historical agency. The primary value of such a writing of history lies in the excavation of a memory bolstered by black radicalism, anti-colonial struggles and solidarity. While exploring of the continuities between Euro-American racism, capitalism’s late-style, neo-colonialism and the legacies of imperialism and the slave trade, British –Kittian novelist Caryl Phillips’s work ‘against the undertow of historical ignorance’ (Phillips) foregrounds these politics of resistance in an intertextual dialogue between historical archives and the literary text. By examining how the ethnological orientation of his work responds to the enduring institutional racism and structural violence, this paper will highlight the way in which literary modes of expression such as polyphony or even the use of the Joycean stream of consciousness would rehabilitate the voices of those who were silenced and call for the reader to become what Barthes calls a ‘generator of (new) texts’.

Analysis of the closure of two local commercial radio stations in South London and their origins as a black music pirate station and a community cable station in the 1980's, written by Grant Goddard in April 2009 for Grant Goddard: Radio Blog.

Three stories in a single book. The first book to document the long struggle of London pirate radio for a legal black music station, started by Radio Invicta in 1970. The first book to document the transformation of KISS FM from a tiny London pirate radio station in 1985 into the UK’s leading homegrown youth brand of the 1990’s. The first book to reveal the inside story behind the most successful UK radio station launch of its era. 500+ pages. 1,000+ research sources.

Author Grant Goddard paints a detailed and critical account of the contemporary UK radio industry. His career in radio started in 1972 on London pirate stations, he worked in local commercial radio before co-ordinating KISS FM’s winning licence application and re-launching a large team of mostly club DJ’s who had little radio experience as a new legal London station that attracted more than one million listeners within six months. Readers interested in the history of black music in Britain, music radio, media start-ups and the UK government’s persistent determination to stamp out pirate radio will find it informative and interesting.