13 - Black Sonic London: Making Space in the City - Joe Bobowicz
If Steve McQueen's BBC-televised series, Small Axe, made one thing resolutely clear, it's the ingenuity of black music – notably, black-British music. Shown in weekly instalments during November and December, it highlighted racism in a number of its systemic guises, as well as more vulgar manifestations. As can be gleaned from the first episode, London was – and no doubt, still is – mapped out differently dependent on your skin’s melanin count. In other words, borders are not just physical geographies but also our experiences: the tone of someone’s voice; the sting of a double glance; the assumption of criminality. None of this is to paint McQueen’s work as pessimistic; rather, each episode presented an inspiring counterpart to oppression. That is, sonic resistance.
Still from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe Episode Two: Lovers Rock - BBC
As a means of carving out space, black-British music has functioned not simply as an art-for-art’s-sake. It has thrived in spite of and as emancipation from hostility. To illustrate this, take the term shubs. Commonly used in London parlance, it describes a party held in a black household, typically centred around Afro-Caribbean music. Etymologically, ‘shubs’ can be traced back to the Irish word ‘shebeen’, which refers to an unlicensed venue. Adopted by Afro-Caribbean residents in inner-city London, ‘shebeen’ or ‘shubeen’ would be used to describe illicit parties held in alternative spaces. According to the cultural academic Caspar Melville, black residents deemed traditional working-class haunts like pubs no-go zones. Melville cites one of the few pubs that would cater to black residents in the sixties: The Apollo in Notting Hill. Serving black customers via the public bar only – not the saloon – it would later revoke this right following the Notting Hill riots. In virtue of this ostracisation, shubeens would pop up across the capital during the sixties and seventies, hosting a growing number of sound systems. Originating in Kingston, Jamaica, a sound system is a highly programmed and precise medium for playing music, traditionally dub reggae, manned by sound-system ‘operators’ and ‘technicians’.
One of the early sound systems, Coxsone Sound, founded by Lloyd Blackford, has been running since 1965. Significantly, its operator, Lloyd ‘Coxsone’ Blackford, is credited for helping to introduce the music genre, lovers rock. Unlike dub reggae, lovers rock was more romantically inclined and exclusive to the UK. The genre forms the context and title for one of McQueen’s films. Tenderly depicted, Lovers Rock constellates stories of whimsy and pain against the backdrop of a party. Held in a terraced house during the eighties, the party unfolds despite an unspoken threat of shutdown by authorities. Black London persists, sonically.
Lloyd Coxsone. Courtesy sirlloydcoxsone.com
Testament to its power, black-British music culture was not just influential in its own field but elsewhere, too. As cultural theorist Dick Hebdige observes in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, white working-class culture sits in a productive tension with black-British music. The skinheads, a subculture that emerged in the sixties (and underwent a resurgence in the eighties), coalesced around working-class pride and conservative family values. Confronted by austerity, the politically disenchanted skinheads were preyed upon by far-right groups such as the National Front. ‘Postcolonial melancholia’, coined by UCL academic Paul Gilroy, corrupted the skins, alluring them with a fiction of white working-class stability lost in the Empire’s ruins. In spite of fascist views and racist factions, many listened to soul as well as ska music – the former, a black-American import popular with black Britons in the sixties and seventies, and the latter, a precursor to reggae. They enjoyed artists such as the Jamaican-born Desmond Dekker and Derrick Morgan. Proximity, notwithstanding misguided hatred, meant that alienated white Londoners would find their solace through space-making methods inspired by their black neighbours. A bizarre cognitive dissonance, indeed.
A similar appropriation took place years later with the inauguration of acid house into the UK. As Caspar Melville notes, the myth of acid house, although not wholly untrue, misses a large tranche of the story. Rave mythology has it that the genre was spawned when a group of white deejays returned from an MDMA-soaked trip to Ibiza. Their take-home noise, which was characterised by a mix of Balearic music and Chicago house, was from thereon the UK’s entry point to acid. Romantic it may be, this one-sided tale misses the prevalence of Chicago house across London’s rare groove warehouse parties, not to mention its patronage by pioneering selectors like Colin Dale, Fabio and Grooverider. With a mixed crowd, drawing in black youth screened out by racially selective West End clubs, these warehouse parties and the aforementioned pirate radio deejays have been left behind in the UK’s acid house canon. Add to this that house is a gay and black import from the US, and one can see the importance of revising skewed archives.
Fabio (black bandana) and Grooverider (red bandana) outside the Trip, 1988, photo by Dave Swindells.
Less contested for its status as uniquely Black and British is jungle. Emerging from the whiter UK hardcore sound, which comprised breakbeats and infantile vocal sampling, jungle is darker, moodier and its samples more likely to come from ragga lyricists. For example, the Ragga Twins came to be jungle MCs, but they originally began their careers at London’s Unity sound system. Reflective of the spaces it grew in, jungle, according to music writer Simon Reynolds, ‘offers a drastically intensified aural allegory of the concrete jungle’ through its ‘synaesthetic textures and “audio-maze spatiality”’. In other words, jungle, its raves and the pirate radio stations it flourished on, such as Kool FM, could be seen as cathartic spaces where grim realities could be exorcised. Whilst the radios could transmit across London, they emanated from tower-block council housing, giving disenfranchised youths – often in competition with other stations for listeners – space. Unsurprisingly, cat-and-mouse conquests unfolded between the authorities, the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry) and those urban youths hijacking airwaves. Unquestionably black and unquestionably British, jungle was one of the first music genres that was not tarnished with black-American influence. Its originators include the likes of Grooverider and Fabio, whose careers had started at the pirate station Phase One, itself located above a Brixton shubeen, Mendozas. Its prioritisation of rhythm over melody is a characteristic that makes it distinctly black. As Tricia Rose argues, ‘Rhythm and polyrhythmic layering is to African and African-derived music what harmony and harmonic triad is to Western classical music.’
Roll Deep (Wiley with mic), photo by Simon Wheatley.
Characteristic of grime music, too, which offers aggressively ‘spat’ lyrics set atop pared-back instrumentals, this diasporic tendency to prioritise rhythm over melody continued well after jungle’s reign. Officially spawned in the early 2000s, notably in the east London boroughs of Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney, where, as writer Dan Hancox notes, over 42 per cent of London’s social housing was located, grime owes much of its style to the original sound system culture, of which jungle was an earlier offshoot. Originally thriving on pirate radio like its forefather genre, grime would soon become stifled. Section 696, introduced in 2005, meant that events playing grime music were disproportionately closed down by the Metropolitan Police. With implicitly racist effects, the policy was dropped only in 2017. So how did grime, a genre whose success stories include household names like Skepta, Wiley and Stormzy, stay afloat? The answer, according to writer Yemi Abiade, lies in its pioneering use of the internet. SBTV, Grime Daily and Link Up TV acted as the genre’s alternative dispersal method. In fact, grime’s cultural producers were already adept in harnessing technology for their own ends, using free digital audio workstations like FruityLoops or even the hallowed Playstation game, Music 2000.
Nonetheless, this is not to say that these tech-savvy methods are full proof. As we have seen in recent years, UK drill has been removed from YouTube by the Met when it includes violent lyrics. From a common-sense perspective, one might suggest this is necessary for young people’s safety. However, it is also arguably a rather coarse way of silencing the voices of impoverished, black Britons. If one’s life is plagued by deprivation – itself an effect of cuts to social provisions – it comes as no surprise that one’s art might express this. Whilst this drill crackdown is disheartening, it is hard to imagine London’s contribution of black music will falter. What has shown itself to be an endlessly adaptive source of creativity, characterised by the proliferation of genres and sounds, black-British music will continue to work around the borders it faces, even when these come into play online. Just as the Mangrove restaurant, cinematically rendered by McQueen, fought against subjugation, so too will UK drill and whatever follows. Understood in theorist Fred Moten’s terms, blackness is a ‘fugitivity’, a rejection to conform to imposed standards – hence shubeens, hence rhythm over melody, hence the interpolated pirate stations that spanned Hackney from the late eighties to the early noughties. All of these are ways of remapping the city one has been given. Such resistance, sonic in nature, creates new space from the streets up.
Photo by Mark Alesky, East London, 1994.