Introduction

Starting out When 18-year-old Dizzee Rascal won the 2003 Mercury Music Prize, he described his lived experience of growing up on the council estates of Tower Hamlets. In a subsequent BBC interview he was quoted as saying: ‘I come from nothing – I come from the underground, pirate radio stations, I come from the ground man’ (BBC News 2003). The erstwhile Dylan Mills was, by his own admission, regularly excluded from most lessons at Langdon Park Community School in Poplar (BBC News 2003; London Borough of Tower Hamlets 2005). At the time, the mainstream music industry struggled to categorise his creative expression, erroneously settling for ‘UK rapper’. I want to use this event as my starting point. By saying that he is ‘coming from nothing’, Dizzee Rascal articulates an east London that is home to some of the poorest wards in the UK. It suggests that underachieving at school and becoming categorised as NEET (not in employment, education or training) is a rite of passage into adulthood for many young people from poor areas and that the informal ‘underground’ economy – including pirate radio stations – are a repository for young people producing and consuming what at that time was a music genre without a name: grime. This book is concerned with the invisible entrepreneurs who participate in the urban music economy in east London. These entrepreneurs are invisible because, to borrow a concept from Loic Wacquant, they belong to a stigmatised community and, like the 18-year-old Dizzee Rascal, they are young, black and poor (Wacquant 2007). It is my claim that the NEET category disguises and obscures the real and continuing activities, achievements and accomplishments of those operating in the informal creative sector. Young people, who are or who have

been NEET, are creating their own employment opportunities and, in many instances, creating work for others through their participation in the urban music economy. These activities remain unseen on the whole to policymakers responsible for reducing youth unemployment, but highly discernible in a mediated world. The data relating to young people who are NEET tell part of the story, as do the statistics relating to educational underachievement of young people from marginalised communities (see, for example, LSN 2009; Ball et al. 2012; Department for Education 2013a; Office for National Statistics 2013), but there is another aspect, largely unwritten, and it is that which is the focus of this book.