ABSTRACT
In the UK, social mobility is at its lowest for decades. An individualised, market approach to inequality informs policies aiming to raise aspirations and improve the social mobility of young people from impoverished backgrounds. Yet for some, rendered almost invisible by a discourse about aspiration that is both classed and racialised, the urban music economy operates as a transformative realm. For young people from multicultural areas, participation in this sector allows for a metamorphosis into new identities. Within its remit, grime music embodies a cultural intermezzo where young people of Caribbean, African and English heritage work together; crossing borders and drawing on global and local influences to produce music that has an international reach (Back 1996, p. 4). It is evident that the creative and cultural industries are of growing economic significance. However, the urban music economy is an under-recognised constituent of this sector. As an occupational area, the creative and cultural industries are a desirable destination for large numbers of young people, yet they remain overwhelmingly white and middle class (CBI 2013; Neelands et al. 2015). An exploration of the workings of the grime music scene yields a partial but important view of the cultural dynamics of everyday life in a contemporary urban environment as young people find their own routes into a sector – the creative and cultural industries – that is effectively closed off to them. Social policy development since the 1980s has been informed by a desire to reduce public expenditure, increase reliance on market forces and enhance consumer choice. Furthermore, the multicultural urban environment is being pushed towards an assimilation model where ‘British values’ tie us all together. This neo-liberal agenda makes it more difficult to talk about structural inequalities that are racialised, classed and gendered. In this climate, poverty is somehow the fault of the poor, created by a perceived cultural deficit in individuals from working-class and minority communities. At the intersection of class, ethnicity and poverty, it is ethnicity that continues to be a key signifier. For while there is
a large diversity of fluid subject positions and cultural identities that constitute ‘black’, ‘black youth’ is posited generally as a problem category. The dominant representation of young black men as deviant, threatening and criminal is crisply demonstrated by the media response to the appointment, by the then Education Secretary Ed Balls, of MC Kano to promote the introduction of the new 14-18 diploma. Kano, a successful recording artist, was dismissed as ‘a rapper famous for his violent and obscenity strewn lyrics’ (Grimston 2010). Kano, a long-time member of the grime music scene, is a young man who came of age in a multicultural urban environment: East Ham in the London borough of Newham. His scholastic journey makes him ideally placed to comment on the usefulness of vocational qualifications, yet this is ignored (Kano 2010). Although much has changed in the last thirty years in terms of how racialised practices are manifest and articulated, black cultural production still has little value. The sentiments in the recently released memo drafted by Oliver Letwin and Hartley Booth in 1985, in which they assert that riots were not caused by inequality and injustice but by individual characters with bad moral attitudes, gives a flavour of commonly held views at that time. In the same document, their insistence that any resources put in to these inner-city areas would only encourage ‘new entrepreneurs [to] set up in the disco and drug trade’ (Travis 2015) completely bypassed the crisis of unemployment in young black lives. Fast-forward three decades, and the lived experience of black youth, particularly of those in urban settings, continues to involve the careful negotiation of the banal violence of quotidian microaggressions such as fewer job opportunities, heightened surveillance and increased levels of stop and search.
