ABSTRACT
Rap music plays a distinctive role in the everyday lives of London’s youths. This oral-poetic form provides a means through which young inhabitants of the city come together to practice and develop their creative and expressive abilities. It also enables a politically significant group of working-class Londoners to resist economic exploitation and develop a greater degree of control over their lives, through their organisation of London’s rap music scenes. I have aimed to highlight the depth of black culture in this city, using rap as a point of entry into the ordinary lives of young people. For over 35 years this oral tradition has enabled black and white working-class youths to affirm their common interests and identities. One of the important ways in which they adapt this tradition is through the process of combining orality with the technological resources available to them in London. The use of the Internet, DVDs, podcasts, mobile phones, and music plays an important part in the production of an alternative public sphere in which the interests and identities of young Londoners may be shared, negotiated, and promoted. The playing of black music on the city’s public buses is indicative of the mainstream position that this culture now occupies, and of how rap has enabled urban youths to claim public space as their own.
