ABSTRACT

Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 provides the first broad scholarly discussion of this music since 1990. The book critically examines key moments in the history of black British popular music from 1940s jazz to 1970s soul and reggae, 1990s Jungle and the sounds of Dubstep and Grime that have echoed through the 2000s. While the book offers a history it also discusses the ways black musics in Britain have intersected with the politics of race and class, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, and debates about media and technology. Contributors examine the impact of the local, the ways that black music in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and London evolved differently and how black popular music in Britain has always developed in complex interaction with the dominant British popular music tradition. This tradition has its own histories located in folk music, music hall and a constant engagement, since the nineteenth century, with American popular music, itself a dynamic mixing of African-American, Latin American and other musics. The ideas that run through various chapters form connecting narratives that challenge dominant understandings of black popular music in Britain and will be essential reading for those interested in Popular Music Studies, Black British Studies and Cultural Studies.

chapter |10 pages

Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945

An Introduction

chapter Chapter 2|20 pages

Melting Pot

The Making of Black British Music in the 1950s and 1960s

chapter Chapter 3|20 pages

Revisiting Britain's ‘Afro Trend' of the 1960s and 1970s

Musical Journeys, Fusions, and African Stereotypes

chapter Chapter 4|18 pages

Britfunk

Black British Popular Music, Identity and the Recording Industry in the Early 1980s

chapter Chapter 5|16 pages

Black Music and Cultural Exchange in Bristol

chapter Chapter 6|14 pages

Bass Culture

An Alternative Soundtrack to Britishness

chapter Chapter 7|16 pages

‘Men Cry Too'

Black Masculinities and the Feminisation of Lovers Rock in the UK

chapter Chapter 8|22 pages

The Sounding of the Notting Hill Carnival

Music as Space, Place and Territory

chapter Chapter 9|16 pages

Voodoo Rage

Blacktronica from the North

chapter Chapter 10|16 pages

Break/Flow/Escape/Capture

The Energy and Impotence of the Hardcore Continuum

chapter Chapter 11|18 pages

‘New Throat Fe Chat'

The Voices and Media of MC Culture 1