This weekend I’ll be settling down on the sofa to watch the debut of BBC Three’s coming-of-age drama Grime Kids, a beautiful adaptation of DJ Target’s book of the same name. It’s a celebration of the rise of grime music in the early noughties, and all the cultural shifts within the British Black music scene that happened as a result of the dance sub-genre. It also explores the subsequent influence it had on the British music scene as a whole.
Grime Kids follows a summer in the lives of Dane, Junior, Kai, Bishop and Bayo, a group of friends who live in Tower Hamlets, east London, and have just finished their GCSEs. They want more than what they currently have and see their future in music. This is their journey of growing up and finding their place in the world, with music as the driving force.
When announcing his book was being adapted for the screen a few years ago, Target posted on his Instagram page: “I wrote this book to celebrate and document the journey of UK music over the last 20 plus years. I’ve been lucky enough to be there first hand to witness the growth and evolution since I first heard jungle as a school kid, then garage, grime, all the way to the present day.”
The drama’s debut fell within days of the Victoria and Albert East Museum in Stratford announcing its first ever major exhibition to celebrate Black British Music. It’s a celebration of everything from Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Winifred Atwell and Janet Kay to Little Simz, Ezra Collective and Stormzy. It will be a physical space to celebrate the contribution Black music has made not only domestically, but also internationally, for well over a century – and the very clear impact it continues to have towards the betterment of the British music scene.
“The Music Is Black” will span 125 years, the past 43 of which can be used to map every twist and turn of my life and so many others who grew up immersed in the scene. And yet, only now, in 2023, has one of the pillars of British culture – the V&A – decided to take on the huge task of properly documenting Black British music and giving it the respect it deserves.
In my teens I was immersed in British and American pop and R&B on the legal stations, but it was standing in my room with the radio trying to get a good signal on the pirate stations when music really came alive. DJ Target and I are of a similar age (and we’ve worked together at BBC 1Xtra) so the street music he devoured was what I devoured too.
Switching to the pirate stations and hearing the bass land on a jungle track would make every hair on your body stand on edge. It took over you in the way that was almost otherworldly: your head would move to the bass and then your entire body.
Standing at the top of a dancefloor and watching the impact it had on clubbers was a joy to behold. At university, I could spend hours in my friend Tom’s tiny room as he would go through his jungle record collection playing track after track as we chatted and drank.
Then came garage, with its frenetic beats and wealth of lyrical genius from MCs on the mic; the DJs showing off their agile fingers as they mix and blend between tracks, under pressure from astute ravers who would very vocally display their displeasure if a mix was out of sync; the friends whose unparalleled ability to twist the English language could mesmerise the masses. Grime came towards the end of my hard raving career, but my goodness, when watching DJs and MCs in action, it was hard to take your eyes off them. It was, and still is, simply beautiful.
Yet the Black British music scene has never been afforded the respect given to other scenes in the pillars of British culture such as rock ‘n’ roll or pop. The “greats” like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are rarely spoken about in the same breath as incredible Black British music acts – it’s as if they didn’t exist. They have been forgotten and ignored throughout history.
Because the Black British music scene is full of genres that derive from the streets, it’s as though the assumption is that their use of the English language is somehow less-than. Nothing is further from the truth. Here’s the thing: the scene is the embodiment of just about every single cultural change this country has ever witnessed.
The history of modern Britain is woven into the tapestry of Black British music – it’s right there in the words, in the beats, in the melody. To not document that is to only view the history of Britain through one gaze and one perspective.
Aren’t we tired of pretending that British history is only one thing? If you want to understand music and its roots, you can’t just ignore whole swathes of culture because it suits you. We have a music scene that we should be proud of, but only if we tell the whole story.