The politics of Generation Grime

Introduction

The Labour Party did not win the 2017 general election, but it came close. It was a new generation of black working-class youths that would make sure the political establishment would never forget that Grime was the vanguard of social change that year.

YouGov, a polling agency, described ‘youth’ as the new key predictor of voting intention in British politics, citing that, among first-time voters (those aged 18 and 19), Labour was 47 percentage points ahead of the Conservatives, while among 20- to 24-year olds, Labour was 40 per cent ahead. ¹ However, Ipsos MORI cited ‘race’ as a key indicator of Labour’s success, with ballot turnout among BME voters 6 per cent higher than in the previous election of 2015, which crucially gave Labour a 54 per cent lead ahead of the Tories among these voters. ² Although there remains much speculation about whether ‘youth’ or ‘race’ was the main determinant in Labour’s success in the general election, yet another statistic tells us something fascinating. Fifty-eight per cent of Grime fans voted for the Labour Party. ³ These young, predominantly black working-class voters had a significant impact on the outcome of the election, which saw the Conservative Party lose its majority and resulted in a hung parliament. Monique Charles, who decisively called this new cohort ‘Generation Grime’, has argued that it is impossible to account for Labour’s success without acknowledging the role Grime played during the summer of 2017. ⁴

Grime’s progenitors mobilised Generation Grime into political action through social media campaigns, changing the political landscape forever. #Grime4Corbyn’s social media ascent started after Grime artist, and self-proclaimed first-time voter, JME interviewed Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. The interview was unexpected and JME was not shy about asking Corbyn why people should bother to register to vote, crucially asking him, ‘what differences would someone in Edmonton expect to see change if they voted for Labour in the election?’ ⁵ What JME was really asking was, what tangible changes could someone poor and black expect. He understood that many people would be sceptical and would need convincing of the leader’s intentions. The interview finished with JME emphasising, ‘this is real, and there is a chance to make a change now’.

If the election proved anything, it was that Grime was certainly more than music. Grime has come to encapsulate a generational identity. This article tries to understand how intersecting indices of age, race and class coalesced into a youth culture. How, it asks, is Grime interpreted among its practitioners and followers? What does it represent? How is Grime expressed or lived? What is the relationship between Grime and politics that led to the furore around #Grime4Corbyn? And why was Grime’s union with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn so successful in mobilising the youth?

Drawing on six semi-structured interviews with Grime experts, ⁶ literature analysis and content analysis of web pages and Instagram accounts allowed the exploration of complex connections between performance, digital music platforms, online activism and offline parliamentary politics. The first section examines themes of solidarity and community in black music, which I call ‘embedded ethics’. The second section provides a brief background on Grime, considering its transnational sonic heritage and its particular London ancestry, setting it in ‘youth culture’ debates including ‘moral panics’. The third section looks at the role of Grime artists as ‘organic intellectuals’ in their communities and shows how they helped to endorse Jeremy Corbyn’s political credibility.

Embedded ethics

According to Paul Gilroy, contemporary black music does

not seek to exclude problems of inequality or to make the achievement of racial justice an exclusively abstract matter. [Its] grounded ethics offers, among other things, a continuous commentary on the systematic and pervasive relations of domination that supply its conditions of existence. ⁷

That is to say, black music’s aesthetics is also its ethics. There is no partition between the sublime and the violent precisely because black music is often a reflection of society. Whether it is the mellifluous jazz sounds of Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, the reggae ‘riddims’ of Junior Marvin’s Police and Thieves or the cultural reflexivity of Grime, exhibited on Kano’s P’s and Q’s, the history of the black experience is politicised within its diverse sounds and lyrical content. Gilroy argues that black music possesses an inner philosophical doctrine and morality that confronts power with truth. Whether defensive or transformational, it helps to ‘develop black struggles by communicating information, organising consciousness’ and cultivates new forms of political agency. Similarly, Grime has its own inner philosophy and ethics encoded within its aggressive sound. It is both an art form and a culture, with a distinctive politics, all at the same time. However, this artistic-politico syncretism is quite different from how other artists incorporate politics within their practice.

The Precarious Workers Brigade (PWB) for instance, a collective of precarious workers in the arts, arose out of the need to protest against various forms of insecure employment affecting them in their relative professional sectors. The PWB discusses issues around ethics, solidarity and collective identities, and produced in 2014 an official ‘ethics code’ that, it says, ‘helps them orient, define and do their work as a group and network’. ⁸ The code stipulates, inter alia, that the PWB seek to practise solidarity by collaborating with different groups, raising consciousness and critically analysing and resisting neoliberalism.

The PWB’s policies on community, solidarity and ethics are interesting to compare with other forms of art, like black music. For, as Gilroy has argued, embedded within black music, there is often an ‘ethics’ and ‘commentary’ on issues of inequality and oppression that black people experience in society – an act of tacit solidarity, as musicians use their art (music) to unify individuals around particular issues. Black vernacular expressions like Grime, and its young working-class progenitors, are bound by an ethics and ‘solidarity, which is magically made audible in the music itself’, because the genre often reflects upon the common inferior status experienced by black men in British society. The PWB, on the other hand, makes an active effort to socially engage with politics, to create a code of ethics and to practise acts of solidarity, whereas black music is ‘rooted and routed’ in community, ethics and solidarity from the outset. ⁹

However, #Grime4Corbyn reveals just how important Grime’s embedded ethics were in actively raising the political consciousness of young black people in this movement. Grime artists demonstrated their solidarity by encouraging marginalised groups to think of themselves as a political collective or class, and less as individuals, something that the PWB does. #Grime4Corbyn was exceptional because it represented a visible realisation that the genre’s embedded ethics and commentary of young black working-class life in Britain needed to come to the fore in order to effect social change. What unfolded in the summer of 2017 was an unexpected unity between a predominantly underrepresented cohort of young racialised working-class youth and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Grime had succeeded in disrupting the political ruling class.

A brief history of Grime

Grime is a hybrid music genre, most commonly recognised for its historical roots in Jamaican sound-system culture, as well as African diaspora musical traditions and UK Jungle and Garage. Like many other black genres of music, Grime disrupts any antiquated notions of ethnic absolutism, and sits firmly within the Black Atlantic paradigm as a transnational and intercultural expression.

Monique Charles points out that while Grime is sonically black, it is at the same time, ‘authentically British’. ¹⁰ Its dialect, colloquial grammar and accent is characteristic of what Hancox has called, ‘London-English’, drawing on a wide range of influences from Caribbean English to cockney rhyming slang. ¹¹ Furthermore, sitting at the higher end of the musical spectrum, Grime has a tempo of 140 beats per minute (bpm), a uniquely fast pace, which Charles has argued reflects the hustle and bustle of the inner metropolis in which it originated: London.

Grime emerged in the early 2000s, in the council estates of the east London boroughs of Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney, where 42 per cent of London’s social housing was (i.e., where a large proportion of London’s working poor lived). ¹² Grime’s birth coincided with New Labour’s plans to regenerate the city, by developing new luxury residential apartments, intensifying London’s CCTV surveillance, and the criminalising of non-criminal behaviours (i.e., ‘hanging around’) through punitive measures like anti-social behavioural orders and police dispersal powers, in largely black working-class neighbourhoods.

Grime’s spatio-temporal background is important for understanding it both sonically and as a youth culture. Hattie Collins has described it as a ‘sound of disillusionment, resentment and despair’. ¹³ Its lyrics are inscribed with the harsh reality of young black working-class life in Britain, centred around intersecting forms of social exclusion in education, housing, employment opportunities and racist policing. For its main practitioners, marginalised young black men, the Grime scene was often a liminal space where the growing pains of impoverished adolescence, with very limited resources, could express frustration and create music that represented their surroundings – street corners, youth clubs and council estates. ¹⁴ This autobiographical genre uses anecdotal evidence to tell the stories of a generation on the margins of society. Grime is unadulterated ‘freedom of speech’, often, in its Punkish fashion, telling the state and media to ‘go and suck your mum’, and because of this, it has transcended sonic boundaries. ¹⁵ It is a way of life. Grime is a cultural movement. But how should we situate it in terms of race/class and cultural theorising?

Youth culture and moral panic

In an interview with Posty, the CEO of GRM Daily, he stated:

Grime is a culture. We were raised in it, whether you knew it or not, if that makes any sense? It’s the way we talk, the way we behave, the way we dress, it’s colloquial. So regardless of whether you was a fan of Grime or you wasn’t, it still would of had an affect on you in some way or another. ¹⁶

Cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall have defined ‘culture’ as the way in which ‘groups and classes give expressive form to their material life experience’, arguing that ‘youth’ is often a ‘metaphor for social change’, and creative expressions are a type of highly stylised youth resistance that could be used to develop a critique of society. ¹⁷ Grime’s most recognisable cultural expressions are its fashion (read: tracksuit and trainers), London-English language (read: Caribbean-Cockney), and walking-style (read: slow swagger). Grime is a youth culture, but it is also a part of a working-class parent culture and has a distinct relationship to the dominant conservative culture in Britain. In some respects, members of Grime youth culture share the same determining life experiences (vis-à-vis the dominant culture), as the parent culture from which they derive.

I asked Adam Elliott-Cooper of Grime4Corbyn, whether he thought Generation Grime could be considered a colour blind, class-based struggle. He emphatically echoed Hall’s well-known saying that:

Class never operates outside of race. Race is the medium through which class is experienced. Race is the modality through which class struggle is experienced. So these young black boys even though they are working-class, they experience class through race. When Stormzy is talking about austerity and NHS and his experiences growing up, the materiality of being poor, the materiality of struggling with education, training, employment and housing, all these material things they’re experienced through race, so therefore, we can never separate race and class. ¹⁸

The notion of Grime as a racialised genre and youth culture, became apparent when all four participants I interviewed at GRM Daily revealed that the word ‘Grime’ was used as a way of re-describing the now pejorative term, ‘urban’. For example, Lauren, the Chief Operating Officer of GRM Daily said:

The way [Grime] is used in the media is completely wrong. Grime has become the new word for urban. You’ll get to people in the media refer to all black UK artists as Grime artists, when they’re not. You know, Stormzy will be on the cover of some magazine being hailed as a king of Grime, but his album isn’t Grime. ¹⁹

The media’s use of the word ‘Grime’ to describe disparate genres of black UK music does not reflect the sonic creativity of these artists to produce different music. However, though Stormzy and many others like him, might not be considered traditional Grime MCs (i.e., ‘spitting’ bars at 140 bpm) by their peers, they are nevertheless members of Grime youth culture. As Posty explains, Grime is representative of how you are ‘raised’, it encapsulates the lived experience of young metropolitan black working-class life. But what is interesting is how the mainstream media are strategically using this marginalisation to their own ends.

Grime music is frequently associated in the media with rising knife crime and other gang-related behaviour (i.e., the informal drugs economy), within black inner-city boroughs of London. Racialised ‘moral panics’ are conjured up over the perceived immorality of young black men and their proclivity for crime, particularly ‘stabbings’. Seldom do the media adopt a more enquiring view of Grime youth culture, which has partly developed out of poverty and social exclusion, to explore a more nuanced analysis of this epiphenomenon. Rather, they criminalise its pre-eminent agents. Lauren of GRM Daily, who said the government should provide more opportunities for young (black) people, finds instead that they are:

pulled over more, searched more and locked up more. If those issues remain, then of course people will make music about [crime and] the environment that they are living in. Music is a creative outlet. Music is not the cause and effect of violence. ²⁰

The moral panic about ‘mugging’ and the socially immoral black male, which was identified by Hall et al. in the 1970s as a means for the state to both implement ideological control over its subjects, while shaping the national narrative on the inherent deviancy of blacks, is now regaining popularity. ²¹

Recently, rightwing political commentator Piers Morgan, of television programme Good Morning Britain, vehemently argued that the wave of knife crime in London was a ‘black problem’ and that wearing a tracksuit could indicate gang involvement, necessitating increased stop and search (read: harassment) by the police. Giggs – a UK rapper, publicly criticised Morgan on his Instagram, telling his 763,000 followers:

FUCK PUSSYOLES LIKE PIERS MORGAN … What the fuck do u know about looking like ‘your in a gang’… Have you yourself ever experienced the traumas or violations, and a lot of the time ABUSE OF POWER of ‘being stopped and search . . .’ ²²

Giggs’ response to Morgan captures the frustrated mood that many young working-class black men feel towards authority and institutions that have historically ignored and excluded their voices, while simultaneously conjuring up racialised mythologemes about them. That Grime artists could in fact be authentic social commentators could never enter the consciousness of the Piers Morgans.

New Labour, #Grime4Corbyn and Grenfell

In the 2017 general election, a trending hashtag, #Grime4Corbyn, was going viral. The progenitors of Grime and affiliates of the youth culture had pledged their support to Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and were encouraging young people to register to vote. The political establishment looked on in incredulity at the developing relationship between Corbyn’s Labour Party, Grime and leftwing activists in the Grime4Corbyn collective.

While the lyrical content of Grime and its associated genres like UK Rap are not always explicitly political, the lived experience of poverty and adversity is imbued within them, providing the artists with a unique position in their communities as social commentators. Monique Charles has called them the ‘organic intellectuals of Grime’, indicating the close relationship between those who are ‘rooted and routed’ in their communities and are able to discuss collective class oppression and solidarity in an authentic way. ²³ So Grime artist JME’s appearance on Jeremy Corbyn’s Snapchat in summer 2017 saying ‘I’m here right now to tell you to register to vote!’ was a call to political mobilisation that could not be ignored. MC Novelist had already pledged his support to Corbyn’s campaign back in 2016; when the MP was under pressure to resign from Labour, he directly tweeted the leader of the opposition: ‘Do not resign, the mandem need you!’ ²⁴

However, the memory of Tony Blair’s New Labour Party and its sustained attack on both the individual lives and communities of black people, particularly in inner-city areas of London (and elsewhere across the UK) is not easily forgotten. New Labour was the architect of ‘ASBO Britain’ (anti-social behaviour order), a nebulous crime legislation that allowed local authorities to criminalise various forms of ‘undesirable’ (read: working-class) activities, such as adolescent street loitering, which often resulted in the expulsion of ‘troublesome’ individuals for periods up to two years. ASBO Britain coincided with New Labour’s plans to ‘regenerate’ the city. Many of the social housing estates across London, where many Grime artists grew up and which provided a strong sense of community, were viewed by New Labour as opportunities for capital investment from private housing developers, which would lure the middle classes back from the suburbs. In retrospect, it seems so ironic that Tony Blair delivered his inaugural speech in 1997 on the Aylesbury Estate in south London, declaring in a serious tone that the poorest people in Britain had been ignored and forgotten by the government. Despite this proclamation, New Labour was instrumental in gentrifying many of London’s poor black neighbourhoods, and, in the process, fostering a profound sense of social exclusion and displacement among London’s working-class communities.

Knowing this history, it becomes rather confusing to understand why these young working-class black people supported Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the 2017 general election. However, it is important to differentiate between the support of Grime artists for Jeremy Corbyn and that for the Parliamentary Labour Party (which Tony Blair once led). It is conceivable that these young people only supported Corbyn’s leadership in a political party that also happened to be, Labour. If Corbyn decided to start his own political party, indeed I believe these Grime artists would likely follow him.

Lauren of GRM Daily has attributed Corbyn’s success with Grime to a ‘realness’ and ‘truth’ that other politicians are not able to authentically express:

He’s not polished, he’s relatable, and he’s not afraid to speak out about things. Grime fans will see Corbyn and it doesn’t matter what walk of life he’s come from, they just think: you’re being real we’re being real, you’re speaking the truth, we’re speaking the truth. ²⁵

Adam of Grime4Corbyn, also mentioned this idea of Corbyn being ‘relatable’, saying that he was not ‘polished’ like other politicians and spoke in ‘plain language’ which appealed to them. The recurring theme that other politicians were disconnected from people was also highlighted in a recent Channel 4 discussion between Grime artist Marci Phonix and Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng. Phonix called Kwarteng out over the Windrush scandal, ²⁶ asserting:

I speak for my people and where we come from. You wouldn’t know anyone that has been deported. You are not coming from the same place I am coming from. You don’t represent the same people I represent. You don’t care, it’s a job for you. This is reality for me. ²⁷

For Hancox, author of Inner City Pressure: the story of Grime, Corbyn’s successful relationship with Generation Grime was partly because ‘he knew inner-city London, he understood poverty and marginality, and listened when ordinary people told him their problems’. ²⁸ Scholar and rap artist Akala has commented that Corbyn’s history of supporting anti-racist campaigns abroad and his ‘politics of humanity’ were appealing qualities in a leader. ²⁹ Stormzy has also said, ‘I saw some sick picture of him from back in the day when he was campaigning about anti-apartheid and I thought: yeah, I like your energy’. ³⁰

Moreover, Grime is a working-class youth culture emanating from communities which austerity measures over the past fifteen years have left in destitution and despair. After New Labour and Tony Blair, the successive Conservative governments of David Cameron and, now, Theresa May have imposed devastating cuts on public services in housing, education and healthcare – services which directly impact the lives of Grime’s practitioners and listeners. Among this social and economic devastation, Corbyn has emerged from the backbenches as the political saviour of Britain, ready and willing to end the march of neoliberalism, a political project favoured by current rightwing sectors of the political establishment. Members of Grime youth culture identify with Corbyn’s socialist values, which is why Grime and UK Rap artist AJ Tracey filmed a promotion video for the Labour Party in the run-up to the election. He advised viewers that rising house prices and lack of social housing in the capital, as well as privatisation of the NHS and the prospect of abolishing tuition fees made it a ‘Corbyn ting. Not a Tory ting’.

Rap artist, Dave, in his sombre track ‘Question Time’, through personal anecdotes passionately describes life under a Tory regime. After narrating a harrowing story of his mother, an NHS worker ‘struggling to get by’, he firmly tells Prime Minister Theresa May that the privatisation of the NHS has ‘brought the heart of the nation to its knees’, workers are ‘underpaid, understaffed, overworked and overseen by people who can’t ever understand how it feels to live life like you and me’. Corbyn, however, is regarded as someone who does understand life on the margins, not necessarily because he has had the lived experience, but because he offers a politics of humanity, respect, kindness and social justice. At the end of the track, Dave turns his attention to Corbyn, admitting his cynicism about politicians that continually renege on their promises. And similar concerns were expressed by Skepta and Dizzee Rascal that Grime was being used by Corbyn’s Labour Party. ³¹

Notwithstanding such scepticism, the election showed Grime artists were able to use their position to mobilise the communities they were from, putting Labour’s catchphrase ‘for the many, not the few’ into political action by declaring in their social media campaign #Grime4Corbyn, that the whole scene was backing the Labour MP, not just they themselves.

The innovative use of social media by Grime artists in 2017 and beyond, was acknowledged by Lauren of GRM Daily who said:

People involved in the scene have been a suppressed group for a long time, although at the same time they are more outspoken. I think there has been a massive shift with the development of technology and social media that allows artists to speak out. They found a voice, so they utilise platforms [to express their opinions]. ³²

Lauren’s point is corroborated by Helen Margetts who writes that we should not underestimate how significant #Grime4Corbyn was, and that ‘an endorsement by a working-class young person’s hero as revered as Stormzy is worth a lot’. The effective use of sharing videos and images (e.g., Corbyn being arrested at an anti-apartheid demonstration), as well as the now infamous JME Corbyn interview that was viewed 2.5 million times on Facebook, all helped to ‘spread the idea of voting for Corbyn across huge social networks’. ³³

Furthermore, artist Stormzy used his live performance at the Brit Awards in February 2018 to raise awareness about the Grenfell disaster when, on June 14 2017, a huge fire engulfed the 24-storey tower block in west London and seventy-two people perished. The Grenfell Tower tragedy confirmed that government spending cuts and deregulation played a part in making the impact of the fire so devastating. Though Stormzy remained relatively quiet throughout the general election, he would not overlook the incident of Grenfell. During his performance at the ceremony he demanded answers:

Yo, Theresa May, where’s that money for Grenfell?

What you just thought we just forgot about Grenfell?

You’re Criminals. And you got the cheek calls us savages

You should do some jail time, you should pay some damages

We should burn your house down and see if you can manage it…

You tell us that we’re thugs, I try and bust that myth

but someone tell The Daily Mail they can suck my dick! ³⁴

Stormzy stands in solidarity with the victims of Grenfell who are still awaiting new housing and compensation, and, demonstrates a connectedness with young, black working-class men who are routinely criminalised in the media. Although the Labour Party did not win the election, Corbyn’s response to the Grenfell tragedy did not go unnoticed by the Grime community. AJ Tracey praised Corbyn for ‘coming down and chatting to the mandem’, saying ‘this is why everyone loves him, it seems like he genuinely cares [about us]’. ³⁵

Grime youth culture is shaped by these acts of solidarity, and this shared sense of hardship helps to cultivate community, providing a collective identity and culture to its members.

* * *

Over the past ten years, Generation Grime has been living through an economic crisis. It appears the summer of 2017 was filled with discontent towards the Tory government which had imposed devastating austerity measures. Though almost all conversations when investigating black youth cultures tend to focus on race, there appears still to be a need to understand the relationship between Generation Grime as a reaction to class injustice created through the crisis of neoliberalism. Discussions on class urgently need to make a reappearance within poststructuralist analyses on racialised groups if we are going to build-up a bigger picture of what is happening on the ground within working-class communities.