The Problem With The White Middle Class 'Roadman'.
Remember in 2006 after Kidulthood came out, and you couldn’t turn around for hearing someone bark “Oi, my size!”, and everybody wanted Trife’s Burberry cap, and white boys from Surrey claimed that they’d been listening to JME “for bare time, fam”? Well it’s 2017 now and grime culture is more widespread than ever. Go to any basement club in Leeds, Glasgow, or Bristol, and university kids will be repping their Adidas sweatshirts, screaming “Yassssss” and bouncing up and down in their ‘fresh creps’ (did I use that right?) as soon as the new track from Konichiwa comes on. Come August, at any town within a 70-mile radius of London, young people aged 16 to 30 will be asking each other “You going carnival this year?” Sounds harmless enough, right? But these young people (I’m talking about privileged, middle class, white youths) adopting a grime culture -- a culture built on blackness, on oppression and racial violence, on poverty and urban struggle -- adopting this without taking the time to appreciate and understand these foundations, are not simply participating in the culture, they are stealing it, and that’s something that we need to talk about.
A brief lesson on the origins of grime:
Grime originated in the early 00s in East London. Young black boys listening to 90s dance hall and UK garage in their bedrooms were rapping over their own rough mixes with guttural basslines. It was angry and fast, littered with violence. It reflected the lives these boys were living in high rise estates in Hackney, and, dismissed by mainstream media, they shared it with one another through pirate radio stations and shitty CDs burned at home. In 2003/2004 artists such as Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, and Skepta broke through into the popular music scene, and thus the white middle class Roadman was born.
In a talk at Oxford University, Akala (grime superstar and general woke human being) talked sensitively and frankly about the ‘enjoyment’ or even ‘appropriation’ of grime by the white middle class – a group of people who don’t have socio-economic ties to the genre. He recognised the old cliché, “music is universal”, and stated that he was delighted that grime was finally getting the recognition it deserved, by everyone, but, he asked, are they cherry-picking the parts of ‘blackness’ that they are comfortable with? Anyone can enjoy grime, he claimed, but they have to respect and understand its origins.
To add to this, I have to point out that the white middle class have to recognise that they are able to enjoy grime in the safety and comfort of their privilege. How many middle class white teens have an Instagram caption that reads “Yeah, I do grime, I’m a grime kid”? (excuse me whilst I cringe-vomit forever). The thing is, they can comfortably appropriate that label of ‘grime kid’, knowing that in the eyes of society this will not make them seem threatening or ‘delinquent’. Yet if a black teen identifies as a ‘grime kid’, they are instantly feared, perhaps even deemed criminal. Look at middle class white kids in snapbacks describing themselves as a ‘Roadman’, using traditionally black British slang (fam/yutes/bare/peng/ting). They claim to be obsessed with fried or jerk chicken, and maybe they are. But if a black young person uses the same language they are dismissed as ‘uneducated’, even a middle class black person. If they love chicken, they are mocked for being a ‘stereotype’. There is a clear disparity in how black people and white people get to enjoy grime and, more prevalently, grime culture, and I’d say that’s a problem.
You don’t have to be able to relate to the lyrics of a song to enjoy it. When I was 15 my favourite song was What Katie Did by The Libertines and I’d never done heroine. (I still haven’t, relax, Mum). But you do have to respect and be aware of the history of a culture before assigning yourself to whichever parts of it you choose. If you’re taking pictures in a dirty graffitied corner of some urban landscape and captioning it “#endz”, when in fact you grew up in one of the home counties/ live in a 4 bed detached/ have never actually been inside a council flat in your life, then you have to recognise the perversities of holidaying in a culture of poverty and struggle. If you’re white working class and you do hail from the grubby streets of Croydon, and feel that you do relate to the world Rapid is spitting bars about, you need to remember that the racial attacks on the black British community by the white (predominantly working class) community is a major part of grime’s history. You’re still the tourist in this world, pal, you’re not the native.
In the last couple of years, much of the media has hailed 2015 as the year of the ‘rise’ or the ‘revival’ of grime music. But, it never went away for those with whom it started. Grime only ‘rose’ or was ‘revived’ with young white people in 2015. And yet, these are the people who make things ‘matter’ when it comes to fashion. It’s an instant culture for the sake of seeming cool. Acquiring a lifestyle to which you have no historical ties, and a language which you have learned, is not your mother tongue, and then using them as your social identifiers, when those to whom the culture actually belongs are judged and vilified for it, is problematic.
I do believe that people should be able to listen to whatever music they want. I believe that cultures should be shared and universally celebrated. I don’t have all the answers to how to turn cultural appropriation into cultural appreciation, or how to exactly draw the line between the two. But I want to open up a discourse between people who most likely have not even considered the problems their newly acquired love for all-things-grime might have.
[Next in this series: a reflection on that white guy from Bristol with dreadlocks who MCs at your local reggae-dub night and talks in a borderline offensive faux-Jamaican accent.]